The work of science should lift our minds to the praise of God.

…the Astronomer, on whom God hath bestowed this Gift, that though he seeth more clearly with the Eye of his Understanding, yet whatever he hath attained to, he is both able and willing to extoll his God above it.

  - Johann Kepler (1571-1630), Introduction to Mars

“Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’…”

  - Acts 17:27, 28

The Biblical teaching about God insists that He is both transcendent and immanent – a God far off and beyond our reach, and yet a God immediately at hand, with us always. Paul’s quoting Epimenides suggests that even Greek philosophers understood both these aspects of the divine Being. He can be “not far” from us, even though He so transcends everything as, in a sense, to contain it all.

The early Christian astronomers, such as Kepler, did not lose sight of God as they explored the emerging vastness of the cosmos. They were impressed with the immensity and majesty of the heavens (Kepler considered those who were not interested in astronomy to be “stupid”), but they did not permit that vastness to diminish their sense of God’s greatness. Instead, their growing view of the heavens only enlarged their sense of God and enhanced their ability to extol Him above all that they were observing.

Contemporary secular astronomers – such as the late Carl Sagan – cannot imagine anything bigger than the cosmos. The immensity of the cosmos, in their minds, precludes the existence of anything beyond it, except, perhaps, parallel universes similar in order, if not in kind, to our own. Thus, they have no place for God in their cosmology or their lives.

But Christians who, like Kepler, truly know their God, will not fear to study any aspect of the cosmos – whether to the limits of its vastness or the minuteness of its particles. All the cosmos speaks to us of the God Who is near at hand and over all that He has made. Every new discovery points to yet another reason for believers to extol their God above all.

We need not fear scientific discovery. What we should fear is that our faith might not be strong enough to believe in a God Who is infinitely greater, more perfect and holy, more powerful and wise, than anything we’ve ever thought or imagined before.

If we allow our study of science to “box in” our understanding of God, we will have missed the very point of science.

If, on the other hand, we receive each new discovery with wonder, and look, with the eye of faith, for what it reveals to us about God and His glory, not only will our ability to know and enjoy God be enhanced, but our use of His creation will be protected against any tendency to make material reality the absolute, final, and defining template for our experience.

For that is equally as stupid a course as scorning the work of science.

T. M. Moore