In this episode, we go Beyond the Forum with theoretical physicist Dr. Ard Louis (Oxford). He’s on the cutting edge of research about symmetry, and directs a research lab at Oxford. Yet for all of his scientific expertise, he doesn’t think science alone can answer questions of meaning and purpose. For those questions, he turns to his Christian faith — a faith rooted in a loving Creator.
Listen as we discuss Ard’s documentary with filmmaker David Malone, “Why Are We Here?” and explore whether believing that there’s meaning in our lives requires a belief in God.
I think science is really important and beautiful. But, I think there's no advance of science that you can think of that will ever be able to answer a whole series of truly important questions like: What is the meaning of life? What is a good life? How should I live? What is good? What is bad? What's the value of human being?
When I was a student at Cornell, one of my housemates loved tropical saltwater fish. Caring for them used a big chunk of his disposable income. But, in spite of all this care and money and love for the fish, every time we went to the tank to feed them, they would just cower in terror. So, one day I was looking at this and thinking, "How would I communicate to the fish my love for them and my desire for them to flourish?" Well, one way might be for me to become a fish and speak to them in whatever a fish language is. And so the idea that God might come to Earth in human form is very similar to the idea that I had about my fish. Although the distance between me and the fish is much smaller than the distance between God and us humans, the idea that God would come to Earth in human form, as we believe happens in the life of Jesus Christ, is a very natural and not surprising thing.
If there is a God and it's the case that God would like to communicate with us, how would that God communicate with us? It's not at all straightforward. God is not just some kind of being out there in the sky that we can look at and he'll say something to us. God is the reason why the universe exists. If God stopped sustaining the universe, it wouldn't slowly grind to a halt. It would simply stop existing. So God is far, far, far beyond our understanding, beyond our imagination and just so far beyond reach; we have no idea how to even grasp it. So then, how would such a God communicate with us? One way he could communicate with us would be through some kind of written word. The Holy Scriptures are not surprising. You might want to look for something of that nature and ask yourself, do those Holy Scriptures have the kind of properties that you might expect from something like Scripture? That's a perfectly rational, reasonable search.
