The Kingdom Within

Truth as a unity

A fundamental reason why Christians would want to recognize both religious belief and scientific knowledge is found in the first verse of Genesis ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. If science can show that the universe is governed by the laws of science, and Christians believe that God created the heaven and the earth, then Christians must believe that it is God who has created the laws of science. This implies that, whenever possible, it is preferable to speak of truth as a unity, simply regarding religion and science as working in different areas of human experience. Similarly, where the Church’s Nicene Creed asserts “I believe in God ...maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible” the term ‘all things’ must obviously include the sciences. These, then, are scriptural and creedal reasons why Christians will want to believe that truth (as discovered in the sciences) and spiritual insights or truths (as revealed in the teaching of the Scriptures) are in the end complementary and compatible. In this sense truth must be seen to be one and unitary.

To move in the opposite direction and attempt to deny the importance of the scientific ‘laws of nature’ is an even greater mistake than opposing science to religion. The existence of mental powers is no reason to deny the parallel existence of inanimate ‘scientific’ causation. We will consider the spiritual power of love in healing in the next chapter: but the existence of spiritual powers alongside ‘scientific’ causation is not an ‘either/or’ situation: rather it is a ‘both and’ situation. There is no spiritual or rational justification for ignoring the ‘laws of nature’ which have been clearly established by the secular sciences, so it makes sense for believers to correlate their belief in mental or spiritual powers with the findings of the secular sciences. Dante is quoted as saying ‘God's love is the love that moves the sun and other stars’:

Seeking a consistent God

The vast majority of people would consider that Christians who teach that this is not a universe governed by scientific law, are inferring that God is undisciplined or does not follow the laws which he himself made. This would project the image of a God who is capricious and untrustworthy. To believe that God acts outside the rule of law, is to believe that God is unpredictable, even capricious or fickle, unreliable or inconsistent - quite unlike the God that St Paul spoke of as “faithful” – that is, trustworthy and consistent, ‘the same yesterday, today and for ever.’ If the fixed laws of science are God’s creation, they show God to be reliable and consistent.  God must be orderly, trustworthy and consistent if God is good, and if God is a God of love! An inconsistent parent, who does one thing today, but another thing tomorrow, would never be said to be a loving parent. How, then, could a God of love one day create the laws of science and yet, another day, want to overthrow them?

God ‘The Great Scientist’

As the freedom of human action is compatible with a scientific explanation of the world, so there is every reason to think that God’s ‘personal qualities’ are