Christians believe that God is revealed to the world in two ways; “general revelation” and “special revelation.” General revelation is where God reveals himself to all people through aspects of the world around us and some in-built predispositions and longings for a relationship with Him. Christians often say that we have a “God-shaped hole” in our hearts that we seek to fill.

Special revelation of course is the specific and special information and exhortations we receive directly from God through his prophets and, more recently, his Son. Those of us who believe the Bible to be the infallible word of God see this “book of books” as special revelation. It details specifically God’s actions, purpose, and will for all His people.

Have you ever heard someone ask the question, “what about the long-lost tribesman deep in the heart of some unknown jungle who never heard of God, will they go to hell even though they never had a chance to believe?” Even if you have not and are just reading this for the first time, the answer to the question is that, without special revelation, God’s people can, and will, respond to him via general revelation.

But the main point of my post is this. The scientific method was established and has generally flourished in Christian societies because of general revelation. Just because we have Bible does not mean we do not want to discover more of the character of God through a better knowledge and understanding of his creation.

Just as a company might “reverse engineer” a competitor’s high tech product in order to discern how it works, so Christians believe that through science we can know more about the creator of it all. So, in looking at a single cell of the human body, seeing the vast complexity of that cell, and the fact that our bodies are composed of trillions of such cells, all knowing their function, we see the incredible engineering of God.

So, in a real way, complexity reveals God. And thus, many Christians like me have become supporters of the new movement called “Intelligent Design.” This approach to understanding our origins is one which relies solely on science’s ability to reveal complexity on such a scale that it is either “irreducible,” or impossible to explain from the standpoint of Darwinian evolution. So, the presence of vast numbers of hugely complex systems which could never have evolved in a progressive step-by-step manner proscribed by evolution, or could not have developed in the brief period that Earth has been habitable, shows evidence of design.

So, if you picked a watch up off the beach, you would immediately assume it to be man-made and that its owner had lost it. But walking past something vastly more complex, such as another human being, we have been trained to think that is just an accident, the result of mindless forces over vast periods of time. You can argue this point, but it seems to me that, as science gets more sophisticated, Evolution seems less and less certain.

So those of us who are Christians will continue to embrace science wholeheartedly and will employ science to learn more about the natural world around us so as to better understand the power, wisdom, and awesome majesty of the world’s creator. We know God in a personal way through His special revelation, and we learn about His awesome power and majesty through the use of science, which gives us an additional window into the heart and mind of the creator of all things.