God and the Unknown

By trade, I am a science teacher. As a human, I am constantly curious. It’s one of the reasons I do what I do. Telling me something simply isn’t enough; I need to understand. I think that’s true for many of us, and I think this drive to understand could be one of the attributes of being created in the image of God.

Let me start at the beginning.

As a science teacher, most of my career has been based on Article 2 of the Belgic Confession, ”The Means by Which We Know God.”

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book

in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:

God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,

for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

This tells us that the first way we can know God is through creation. I often tell my students that the greatest part of my job is teaching about the God we see in creation—and creation is fascinating. There are lots of things we can explain and understand. However, despite our advanced knowledge, there are also a lot of things we do not understand, things we cannot figure out.

Take, for example, the mechanics of flight. Something many of us have probably experienced continues to be debated among physicists. There are two leading arguments for what causes flight. One is Bernoulli’s principle, which essentially states that faster-moving air has less pressure than slower-moving air. Airplane wings are shaped to make the air flowing over the top of the wing move faster than the air flowing under it, causing lift.

The second leading theory on flight is based on Newton’s third law of motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, the angle of the wing causes the wind to push against the bottom of the wing, and the shape of the wing causes the air to flow off the back at a downward angle, creating motion in the opposite direction—lift.

Either theory can be used to explain flight, and scientists still debate which one actually does it. Maybe it’s a combination of the two!

Another example of something we don’t fully understand yet is gravity, even though we experience it every day and can very accurately measure it. Even on their way to the moon, astronauts were still affected by gravity from the earth and from the moon.

There is significant debate over how gravity actually works. There is debate over what causes it. It’s one of the most observed and experienced phenomena in all of creation, yet there’s no definitive explanation for it.

Questions and Answers

When we read the Bible, though, we sometimes get unique insight into what's actually going on behind the scenes. The book of Job is one example. This ancient tale starts with a conversation between God and “the accuser” (Job 1:6) about Job’s faithfulness, and God allows the accuser to cause great suffering in Job’s life to see how Job will respond. The kicker of that story is that Job never finds out why all those bad things happened to him. I wonder if he even found out after his life ended. That’s a question the Bible doesn’t answer.

This is true in our own lives too. We wonder why bad things happen. We ask why God would allow the mobility of a young man to be taken away in a car crash that was no fault of his own. We wonder why a father, whose presence is still needed on Earth, is taken away unexpectedly. We all have questions and issues that we struggle with throughout our lives.

We can trust that God has it figured out and that God’s view is very different from our view. But that doesn’t mean we don’t question and ache and wonder why.

I’ve always told my students that I have a big list of questions to ask God, either when I get to heaven or Jesus returns to Earth. My hope has always been to sit down with God (or God’s representative), share a beverage, and discuss some of the scientific and theological questions I have had all my life.

However, the older I get and the more I reflect on the nature of God that I see in creation, including our own human curiosity, I begin to wonder if that will ever happen. Maybe I will automatically know the answers, or maybe the answers won’t matter. But I’m not sure that will be the case, especially in a renewed creation.

Throughout history, humans have been driven to explore and had a desire to understand. The Bible tells us that “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” (Gen. 1:28). I believe one of the things God calls us to do is explore and ask questions, and I wonder if this God-given drive to explore and to question rather than simply understanding and knowing will persist in the perfect new creation.

And that makes me reflect on my theology. The older I get, the more questions I tend to have, and I think that’s OK. The older I get, the more I tend to think that when somebody has all the answers, the reality is they just might not understand all the questions very well.

That gives me great comfort in my discomfort. It makes me believe it’s OK to be uncomfortable, to not know all the answers. It’s OK to be in the “I’m not sure” camp.

But what is important, even in the face of the unknown, even amidst the questioning, is being Christ to other people—letting them know that they matter and that they are loved, sharing in the suffering they might be facing, and offering comfort and empathy in their questioning or pain even when we don’t have all the answers. The term “Christian” should be an action verb, not an adjective, and I will try to err on that side of the equation every time, even when I don’t have the answers.

Scientific and theological debates and discussions can be fascinating, but they should never distract us from nor get in the way of the life Christ modeled for us.

The older I get, the more I try to get comfortable with not knowing, and the more importance I place on being Jesus to the people around me.

Maybe someday I’ll even find out the “why.”