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Furthermore, it is impossible, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, to speak of things beyond our immediate senses without using metaphor.
c s lewis on metaphor
They talk about light particles and wave packets of energy; but they don’t intend you to imagine light as literal tiny balls, or energy as literal waves on the sea.
science metaphor
Thus, reading the phrase “the car was flying down the road” in a literalistic way would mean understanding the car to be actually flying.
litrality
John Calvin wrote in his commentary on Genesis, “Nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.”7
bible is not a science text book. go elsewhere for astronomy
Rather than scientific language, the Bible often uses what is called phenomenological language — the language of appearance. It describes what anyone can see.
bible language
“When God created …” In fact, the word “when” is used to translate the Hebrew for “in the day.” Clearly the author has no more got a twenty-four-hour day in mind here than an elderly man would if he said, “In my day there were very few aircraft in the sky.”
back in the day
However, even though the Hebrew language does have a definite article (ha), it is not used in the original to qualify days one to five.
no definite article at the beginning of day
although the Hebrew definite article is not used with the first five days, it is used for days six and seven. A better translation, therefore, would be “day one, day two, …, day five, the sixth day, the seventh day”; or, “a first day, a second day, …, the sixth day, the seventh day.”
day six and seven
that in each of the ten trillion cells of our body we humans possess a “word” of mind-boggling length, the human genome. This “word” is 3–5 billion “letters” long, written in the
As I argue in detail elsewhere,11 the nonmateriality of information points to a nonmaterial source — a mind, the mind of God.
Does this capacity not point unmistakeably to the vastly greater Word, who has endowed us with his image and imprint?
C. S. Lewis pointed out: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
We did not put the universe there. We did not create the objects of scientific study. We study something given. This simple idea has consequences. It means, for instance, that it is for the universe to shape our ideas about how it works, rather than for us to decide in our heads how it ought to work
Universe should shape our ideas
British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes of the Sabbath, “It is a day that sets a limit to our intervention in nature and to our economic activity. We become conscious of being creations, not creators. The earth is not ours, but God’s … The Sabbath is a weekly reminder of the integrity of nature and the boundaries of human striving.”19
Sabath
