My busy two weeks of meetings and deadlines is now past, and I can devote myself to important stuff like lying on the hammock, watching the garden grow, and blogging.

I recently started using Twitter to expand my social network life. I generally tweet a link whenever I put up a new post here or publish something. But more recently I have begun just tweeting stuff that I think of. Doing this in 140 characters is a challenge for me (as my regular readers can imagine), but I have managed a few times.

I don’t have many followers as yet (still learning the system), but a couple of recent tweets did get some attention. This was one.

1. What would you say if science learned how life began, what caused the Big Bang, and why all constants are fine-tuned? A: Praise God.

If we knew ALL that happened through purely natural means, wouldn’t God be “redundant” (Dawkins)?

Nope, because “purely natural means” are the methods by which God creates. Without God there is no nature. This idea removes any force from the well-worn atheist argument that science can explain the world better than religion can. Of course its true that science explains how things work What many atheists cannot seem to fathom is that religion’s purpose is not to explain the world, but to understand the divine in human beings, and God’s purposes for us.

Atheists keep telling us that our “claim” that God exists requires extraordinary evidence. Why? We are not claiming to prove that God exists. Instead we witness to our belief in God. To the question, “what evidence do you have for the existence of God?”, there are several equally valid answers, among which is “none”. Other answers can range from purely subjective emotional experience (which are generally dismissed as psychological ephemera) to metaphysical views about the universe, which are generally dismissed as God of the Gaps, soon to be overturned by science.

The truth is that science “explains” nothing, it isn’t supposed to. What it does do is illuminate the laws and mechanisms by which things work, and events happen. It doesn’t tell us why things happen that way, or how they should happen, or what’s behind it all. Likewise, religion isn’t supposed to elucidate physical or natural mechanisms. When it used to do that, it was only because religion was the only organized thought system around at the time, so people turned to it for explanations.

The other tweet that garnered some interest in the form of retweets and likes is related to the same discussion on my views of how science and faith are related.

Science discovers and describes natural laws. Natural laws come from God. So how could science displace God? Science is distilled doxology.

I like that last 4 word sentence, and I thought it was worth reposting here.