Does the Bible Encourage Knowledge?

It’s a famous tactic of the “science against religion” lobby to assert that the Bible encourages people to be narrow-minded, against research, and against progress in knowledge. Fortunately for science, that has never been true.

We have seen that the Bible presents us with a view of the world that is organized and ready for us to inhabit. As part of that, we would expect to be able to understand how the world works. Not surprisingly, then, the Bible encourages people to go ahead and investigate the world in order to understand and take care of it. As we have seen, this is part of what comes under the category “wisdom”: investigating the world and coming to understand it.

A lot of the knowledge thus gained is of practical use for everyday living. The Bible does not just talk about religious knowledge; it encourages the sort of observation and learning through experience that anyone with sense can gain and from which anyone would benefit. Indeed, some of it is directly parallel with quite non-religious writings from ancient Egypt.

Nor is the knowledge just for the sake of human advancement. King Solomon, renowned as the wisest of all Israelites, indeed internationally famous for his wisdom, undertook the study of the natural world as part of gaining of knowledge. He studied “trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish” (1 Kings 4:33–34). This is a small point within a much wider story, but one worth noting.

A Marred World?

Of course, on another level it seems ridiculous to talk of the world as not being chaotic. For a lot of people, it seems very chaotic most of the time. Droughts come and destroy the harvest. Crops fail. Diseases turn up out of nowhere. The stronger the antibiotics get, the stronger the bugs get. Wars happen. Families fall apart. For most people chaos and suffering seem to be what life is about, at least some of the time.

That is true, and that is a different part of the story that is extremely important to the Bible and that naturalism does not explain. This world is fundamentally good, inhabitable, understandable, and rational. It has also been marred. “Cursed” is the way the Bible puts it (Genesis 3:17), as a result of the wrong-headedness of people who refuse to acknowledge God as the creator and life-giver that he is. God could have, of course, destroyed the entire world at the first sign of rebellion. He’s not that kind of God, so he didn’t. Humanity’s rebellion, nonetheless, had consequences for the natural world, and the harmony in which humans originally lived with the rest of creation was disrupted.

The refusal of humanity to acknowledge God as he deserves is the problem of sin, and its solution is what most of the Bible is concerned with. It is not what this essay is meant to be about, so we will not be going further into the issue here. However, it is far more important than any philosophy, so do investigate further.³⁸

That also brings us to our next point. There are limits to our knowledge. Some knowledge in particular lies beyond what we can work out for ourselves.

The Limits of Natural Knowledge

There are some things that we will never discover or be able to explain simply by studying the world. God created the universe for Christ, not for us, for our pleasure in investigation, nor for itself. God created us, humanity itself, for Christ, and he intends humanity to be like Christ. We will never understand what it is to be human and will never be fully human until we take seriously our purpose in being created for Christ.

This is where naturalism fails us entirely. Yes, one can live without belief in God and even enjoy the many good things of this world, including natural knowledge, for a time. But there will still be something absolutely crucial missing: what it is all for. Denying that there is any such thing is no answer. Naturalism, by its very nature, cannot tell us what life is about because life is about something beyond this universe. It is real, and it is essential. Without this crucial knowledge, we will never be truly human because that knowledge is central to why we were made.

Knowing that we and the world were made for Christ also makes sense of any other knowledge we have. It puts everything in context. It now makes sense that we are people who are capable of and seek knowledge. It is not a meaningless aberration of evolution. It is part of who God created us to be. That we have the ability to research, invent, and discover as well as the crippling tendency to destroy and argue makes sense when we see who we were meant to be and how we have fought against it. Knowing what we were made for is the only thing that can give meaning to all our other knowledge. It is the only thing that can actually turn knowledge into wisdom.

So what do we make of this? What does the Bible tell us about a realistic attitude towards the natural world and the ways in which we study it?

Putting It All Together

Discovering how the natural world works is a God-given ability and a worthy task. We could not do it if God had not created the world as it is and us as we are. As God’s creatures with the responsibility to live in God’s world and look after it (although God entirely controls it), we are in a position to understand a great deal about it.

What we discover about the world—whatever true knowledge the scientific enterprise comes up with—cannot possibly do away with the need for God. There is no such thing as a natural cause that is an alternative to God as cause. God is behind every causal process. The Theory of Everything in its absolute, most complete form, even if absolutely and accurately true, would be only a complement to understanding God as cause. It could never give reason to say God does not exist. God is not in competition with his world. He makes it happen.

God was never an explanatory theory put there to make sense of a world that was otherwise inexplicable. The Bible never presents the complexity of the world as an argument for believing in God. It is entirely the other way around. The fact of the existence of the creator God is why people should accept the complexity of the world and tackle it with confidence, knowing that knowledge is possible. God as explanation can never be replaced by scientific explanation. He is the reason for scientific explanation.

Moreover, he is infinitely creative, so we can never sit back, content that we have understood everything. God’s very creativity is a basis for the empirical method in investigation. We cannot second-guess God. We need to go out there and discover what he has done. This was very important in the early days of science. Part of the impetus to begin experimental science was the argument that we cannot deduce from first principles what God must do in the world. We can only go and discover what he has done. This is what makes science so exciting.³⁹

Contrast this with what the alternative would be if there were no God. If we had no reason whatsoever to expect the world to be consistent and investigable, if we had no confidence that underneath the changeable surface there are deep regularities and patterns to reality, why would we persist with the hard work of science? What motivation could we have in the face of repeated failed experiments to press on to knowledge? It is only the reality of the creator God that makes science possible. Naturalism, the idea that science dismisses the need for God, is a weak, and very flawed, imitation.

It is to naturalism itself, and its poor record of explaining our universe, that we now turn. For indeed its record is poor on many levels.