The Lord Jesus Christ, God's incarnate Son, is fully God; he was born of a virgin; his humanity is real and sinless; he died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth.
The incarnation of the Son of God is a game-changer for science.
In the first article in this series, we saw that God is ultimate reality. Father, Son and Spirit are more fundamental to reality than matter itself.
But where does that leave the physical stuff of our universe?
Matter matters
Down the centuries, many have concluded that if ultimate reality is non-material, then the material world must be in some way inferior. In Buddhism, the physical world is a realm of temporary illusions that distract from eternal spiritual truths. Gnosticism teaches that the physical universe was created by a malevolent, lesser deity separate from the supreme, inaccessible God of the spiritual realm.
Even within the church, material creation is sometimes viewed with suspicion. Christians are known for being weird about sex - and not just because of the Bible's counter-cultural sexual ethic. In conservative churches (especially in the US), concern about the environment is often equated with being too attached to the world and 'unspiritual'.
In contrast, the incarnation is a definitive word from God about the value of material reality. The divine Son of God chooses to take on flesh, becoming fully human in every way. He dwells in a body made of connective tissues and neurons; muscle and epithelium. Christ does not just appear human, nor temporarily inhabit human form only to shed it again after his death. Rather, he has permanently joined himself to his physical creation by taking on a human body, rising again in the body, and ascending to heaven where, somehow, that same body is reigning over heaven and earth.
The incarnation shows that far from treating it as lesser, God is committed to the physical stuff of the universe. The things we study using science, be they subatomic particles, cell signalling pathways, or plate tectonics, matter to God. They, along with us, will find their place in the physical new creation of which the resurrected body of Jesus gives us the first glimpse.
This makes science worth doing. Christian scientists are not just tinkering with trivialities that are going to burn anyway. We are engaging each day with things that matter to God.
Miracles and science
If we take another look at fifth article of the Doctrinal Basis, the next obvious issue raised for scientists is what we make of miracles. The virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Jesus are central to how we believe God has acted in the world, but seem to be at odds with the laws of science.
C.S. Lewis, in his book 'Miracles', puts the laws of science into context when it come to miracles:
'Every prediction of what will happen in a given instance is made under the proviso "other things being equal" or "if there are no interferences". Whether things are equal in a given case and whether interferences may occur is another matter.... The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law's proviso, "If A, then B": it says, "But this time instead of A, A2," and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies "Then B2".' (Miracles, C.S. Lewis, chapter 8)
That is, the laws of science tells us that if there has been no divine intervention, there will be no virgin births or resurrections. But where God has introduced a 'miraculous spermatozoon', or breathed life into a body that was dead - the laws tells us that new life will result.
Miracles are only a problem for science if we believe in a closed-system universe, where nothing new can ever be introduced. But if we believe that ultimate reality is the God who created matter and wrote the laws of the universe, we can stand by the truth of the Bible's miracles while also honouring the laws that make science possible.
