We Must Be Fully Aware of Our Limitations…!
This will seem like an odd title for a paper, but in fact the paper is ultimately about something other than limitations.
One of the things I have noticed in the faith walks of people I have encountered is that quite often God is put in some kind of a box. What does that mean? Well, it means that we create certain types of human ideas and thinking that describe God so we can understand Him. I will say more on this shortly.
However, God Himself in the Bible makes clear that we can’t understand Him.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa 55:8-9).
See also how God addresses Job (Chapter 38) about what Job knows, in response to the views expressed by Job – who was considered God’s servant, saying there is “noone on earth like him; he is blameless and upright” (Job 1:8).
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?
8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:1-18)
God is saying very clearly to Job, your knowledge is actually extremely limited. You don’t know anything. Job ultimately endures over 60 of these questions in this and the subsequent chapters (I suspect he was done at around 4 questions) and then repents quickly.
Are we any different now? I doubt it. Perhaps a better question is this – did it help Job to think he could reason through God’s motives for putting him in distress? Or would he have been better to trust that God still had his interests at heart, and to pray to God to rescue him?
I believe this is a microcosm of a bigger problem, which is that as humans we believe and are taught about the importance of reason, and as a result we use it to contain God. But God will not be contained, nor are His abilities limited to whatever we can understand.
Do we behave like we believe that God can do anything? Assuming you believe He is sovereign, we should. But often we don’t, and to our detriment.
Personal stories about the greatness of God
I’d like to share a couple of personal stories that have influenced me in this regard. My background is in mathematics and science so I know something about reason and how it is taught. But two experiences have influenced my perspective in the other direction.
Some years ago, I had an experience where the “Big” God turned up in my room. Many people describe what it was like to meet Jesus. For me, the room filled with light and without thinking, I got down below my knees with my face to the ground. It was involuntary. I won’t share what He said to me, but what was interesting is throughout the experience I felt His light shine through me and it made me aware of my uncleanness. Much of that experience I will never be able to explain. And someone that has the power to get me involuntarily on my face just by turning up is probably worth listening to.
The second experience was some years later, and I was trying to work out if I should get baptised again. I’d got stuck on this question of whether it was right or wrong – I hadn’t been baptised in full immersion, but I had undertaken my first baptism in full knowledge of what I was doing. This wrestling went on for months. Then one Sunday, I was in church praying with my eyes closed. I saw in my mind’s eye something that looked like sea waves coming towards me. The water then somehow dropped though me and I was baptised by the Holy Spirit from within. In doing so, the Lord freed me from being stuck – I’ve never worried about it again. But perhaps more importantly, that experience gave me the unshakable perspective that the Lord will do whatever He wants to do to help His people, whether it’s in the Bible or not. He will not be contained by my thinking or anyone else’s. Prior to the experience I was containing Him based on my views of what baptism is and isn’t. Apparently He didn’t agree…
How often do we overcomplicate things with reason? There is much debate around the question of how we are saved. While some of this is very interesting intellectually, in reality there’s a much simpler answer. You’re saved if Jesus says you are. The Bible tells us useful revelation about how He might approach this. But to suggest that He will be contained by this in all circumstances makes no sense to me. That’s just human reason trying to contain our God, which is a fruitless endeavour.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I believe that the single biggest reason we don’t appreciate the awe and majesty of what our God is capable of doing is we overstate our ability to reason. If we understood how little we know, and let God be as great as He is, we would see more of His majesty and His abilities (and I would say that has been my experience since thinking this way – “greater things than these you will see…”).
I think most people can be forgiven for elevating reason – we are constantly taught to elevate it and lots of news and political discussion involves “experts”. What I therefore intend to do in this paper is to set out the very significant limitations in science and reasoning. I am almost certain that, unless you are a scientist or a mathematician, you will have been taught none of it. That in itself is a discussion for later on.
Limitations of science
There are numerous well-known areas of limitation in science. I’m going to touch on a few and then go after a big one.
A famous one is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in particle physics. It places a limit on how well you can measure the position and momentum of a particle, primarily because the act of measuring one affects the other. So as much as we may “wish” to measure more accurately, we can’t. Most physicists know this.
Why can’t we predict the weather out more than a week? We’ve actually known the equations for the weather for a long time (the Lorenz equations). But the problem is these equations are so sensitive that unless you can measure the weather conditions to a very high degree of accuracy in many, many places, the error in your measurements gets bigger and bigger as time goes on and the equations don’t help you. The equations are an example of “chaos” or in mathematics “complexity theory”. In the case of the weather, that sensitivity to measurement (known as initial conditions) is sometimes referred to as a the butterfly effect and is a big limitation on our ability to know or predict the weather, even though we understand it…!
Where in the case of the weather we understand the equations, there are other systems where we don’t and probably never will, because the systems themselves adapt. Financial markets are a case in point. We sort of understand a few things, but markets have a habit of confounding academics and professionals alike. They evolve in frustrating ways, and because of that our ability to understand them will likely always be limited.
One of the things people often don’t appreciate is the whole system of science and reasoning is based on logic, and we have known for nearly 100 years that logic has a hole in it. In the early 1930s, Kurt Godel was trying to prove that the system of reason – which is based on assumptions called axioms – is complete, in that those axioms could essentially explain everything. He ended up proving the opposite – that whatever axioms you choose, there is always a hole you can’t cover. The problem is you don’t know where the hole is or whether the hole is a problem or not. I’ve always found this quite funny because it seems a bit like a joke the Lord has played on us. He’s given us a system of logic that has a gap in it we don’t particularly understand, and therefore those that choose to operate only in reason are still operating on faith. The difference is, they don’t know what their faith is in. All of science has this problem – we accept a foundational limitation. We accept it because we don’t have a viable alternative yet, and broadly speaking it appears to work well enough for our purposes most of the time. Until it doesn’t.
Let’s attack the big one now – the theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution
In schools and through the media we are taught relentlessly that all life came through a process of evolution, as if this is settled science. This is a good example because it addresses the issue with reasoning that often affects us negatively.
What standards does science need to meet? Well, there are two things it would certainly have to satisfy, Firstly, you need a falsifiable theory – meaning that it can be proven wrong. Secondly, you need repeatable experimental verification of that theory. Einstein’s 1915 theory of General Relativity was verified by Rutherford 1919 as an example of this.
But on this basis the theory of evolution is not science, because it fails on the second. I can’t see how it ever could be verified. You would need millions of years to run the experiment, and some way to run another experiment in controlled conditions that neutralise the effect of evolution only. It’s also worse than this, because the system of life is a form of “chaos” – known as a nonlinear dynamical system – and these are especially difficult to describe mathematically in a way where you can be confident you have experimentally proven what you intend to.
Now, I believe this is where the confusion comes in. We do have scientific evidence for evolution happening (mainly from bacteria into different bacteria). What we do not have is any scientific evidence that life emerged from a primordial soup. Darwin himself identified some major problems with his theory.
We are now seeing a number of scientists come forward and poking some fairly big holes in the theory of evolution. No-one appears able to describe the mechanism by which polypeptides, polynucleotides and polysaccharides come together to create life. The best answer is that given enough time it will happen. But it does appear that this is also problematic, given time is not something the theorists have – the long chain molecules break down quickly (as in four hours). So this seems like a pretty big problem. Time doesn’t have enough time.
But for me, perhaps the biggest problem is no-one has reconciled the theory’s breach of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that entropy always rises. Entropy is a measure of disorder, so the point being is that as time goes on, the universe tends to break down (become more disordered) – assuming it is a closed system. Now obviously we as humans build things (the opposite) but we break down things to achieve that, include food and other energy sources. At a global level, the disorder increases, or so the theory suggests.
Now, the primordial soup model of evolution is in clear violation of this, because order emerges from disorder, and yet there is no argument I can see to reconcile this problem. So why do we continue to teach and represent evolution as “settled science” when it is very far from the truth?
Incidentally, this applies to other things too. We will regularly hear that something has been “dated” to 2,500 years ago, for example. This employs something called carbon dating. The idea is you can measure the extent to which Carbon 14 degrades and extrapolate a date from that. Carbon 14 has a half life of around 5,700 years. This means if a piece of matter starts with 100 Carbon 14 atoms, in 5,700 years it will have 50.
Now, practically, the science behind carbon dating has never been experimentally verified over its half life. Therefore the science assumes something tested over shorter periods extrapolates to a much longer horizon. While there is good reason to believe this is true, we don’t actually know it’s true. And this is part of the problem – we are taught that something is now settled and we “know” it, but in fact that is often not really true. Certainly we are never presented with the clarification of what the science actually shows and doesn’t show.
Unfortunately, this problem attaches to a very wide range of things we are taught are “true” or obvious, and there is massive pushback if anyone dares to challenge it. Think about the pushback on Covid vaccine challenge. Or what happens if anyone dares to challenge the climate agenda. Something is going on.
So why are we not taught these limitations?
Many years ago (I believe it was in the 1950s) the physicist Fred Hoyle said that, if the steady state model of the universe was proved wrong, and there actually was a singularity (a Big Bang), the atheists would have a problem. He was an atheist. The prevailing thinking was that the Bible was wrong about a creation “date”, because the universe had always existed in a “steady state”.
Ultimately the steady state model was proven wrong and physics in cosmology terms moved towards the Biblical view of the world. Did science then admit “we’ve found evidence to support the Bible and now we’re going to abandon atheism?” Er, no. Why? Surely that would have been more intellectually honest? Instead, it moved on to the next apparent proof that God doesn’t exist.
Are you aware of how much science there is on the validity of NDEs (Near Death Experiences)? There’s a lot and it’s compelling. So the idea that we are simply a biological bag of chemicals has been scientifically disproved for a while now, to the point that this should be settled science for anyone without bias. I certainly haven’t seen this reported in a fanfare of “scientists proves that there is something more than just biology…”.
To add some insight into all of this, I want to turn to a passage in the Bible, from Romans. The passage is in Chapter 1 and runs from verses 20 to the end.
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them
The passage is doing something very interesting that can easily be missed. It says this:
- God’s existence should be obvious to everyone through natural revelation
- But people did not give God appropriate credit or glory and rather turned to other “gods”
- So God gave them over to sexual immorality
- Then God gave them over to shameful lusts
- Then God gave them over to a depraved mind.
So while the physical environment should have made God’s existence obvious, people refuse to worship and glorify Him. And then it charts a progression of deterioration, which starts with sexual immorality, moves through worse sexual desires, and interestingly ends with wrong thinking. After which the deterioration is complete.
This progression is presented as increasingly worse – meaning that wrong thinking is particularly bad. So let me ask a direct but relevant question – is it conceivable that one of the most important areas of the enemy’s attack is through ideas and reason? Is it conceivable that the reason people are not taught the actual limitations of science – and therefore are taught instead to glorify reason – is precisely because of this?
There are definitely things that are being taught that seems to suggest this. There is clearly an effort to persuade young people to believe that communism is a good idea, even though:
- State control of resources has rarely been shown to be beneficial
- It has generally led to significant number of state murders
- It is not associated with economic success
- It engenders a culture of mistrust and encourages people to lie to protect themselves
- It is atheist as a point of principle.
Yet it is being pushed in universities, even though the facts argue strongly to the contrary. What is perhaps worse, is people don’t realise that the problems in 1849 that led Marx and Engels to produce the Communist Manifesto largely don’t exist anymore. So while their ideas were arguably a laudable response (albeit clearly wrong) to a genuine set of problems – particularly capital abusing labour – those issues are not present now. Even though there is a school of thought running that capital currently abuses labour, in fact for the majority of the last 120 years, for every $100 of revenue capital received $5 and labour received most of the rest (other than taxes).
My point isn’t to argue politics – it’s that ideas that are clearly either wrong or challengeable are being presented as absolute truth based on “scientific evidence” when in fact the conditions for these ideas to be science are not even close to being met. Yet the quality of education to give people the tools to interrogate what they are being told is not there. I believe the source of this is spiritual, not political.
As a result, we have attacks on our economic environment, marriage, children, family unit etc, primarily through ideologies that present themselves as being supported by science. I read a good example of this recently, where a headline reported that “scientists proves that being a parent is bad for your health”. Really? But marriage is apparently scientifically proven for a longer life (for men anyway). So does that mean parenting is worse only for unmarried people? Or is the science changing? Or is it (more likely) rubbish that is driven by something else?
Most people would find it odd for someone to be calling science rubbish, but as a mathematician I can tell you there are many tricks for taking data and getting it to prove anything you want. Cast your minds back to 2020 – remember when President Trump came out talking about the potential benefits of HydroxyChloroquine? Shortly afterwards, the Lancet, a very well regarded scientific medical journal, published a study showing the medicine had no benefit. It was reported everywhere. But subsequently the Lancet discovered that the study was fraudulent. The Lancet as a reputable publication, published a retraction. Was this reported anywhere? Science has corruption and fraud in it like most other pursuits.
The Bible tells us that the pinnacle in deterioration is through wrong or foolish thinking. The enemy knows this too. So if our struggle is not against flesh and blood, as Ephesians 6 tells us, is it possible that the enemy’s strategy is to feed us ideas as scientifically valid, and attempt to deny us the tools to interrogate those ideas? And at the same time elevate the importance of human reason above everything?
If that’s true it explains a lot. But perhaps the worst impact of the elevation of human reason is it limits our ability to appreciate the supernatural qualities and abilities of the Lord. If we don’t accept something as possible unless it is proven through human reason and science, we are denying an appreciation of what God could do in our lives that no-one else could. Perhaps that is the greatest foolishness.
Summary
I have covered a fair bit of ground in this paper. But the essence of what I am saying is this. The Bible is clear that God is capable of much more than we can imagine, and he certainly won’t be contained by human thinking.
Yet we have progressively elevated human reason to a point where many people deny anything that human reason can’t prove. Which is ironic because human reason also makes clear the significant limitations human reason has!
Even more, the system of human reason as well as the process for educating us on this reason exhibits at the very least strong bias against those things of God – and God predicts this in Romans 1. Which along with Ephesians 6 argues that it’s a spiritual problem.
I believe it is a more fulfilling way to live in the faith to accept all of these limitations as real, and rather than trusting in our own abilities, to trust rather in the Lord’s ability to work all things for our good. If we do that, He will show us things that we never imagined possible. That in itself is worth putting down the reason for.