Asher's Blog

Some time ago, I asked a strange but interesting question: what if we had lived on Earth before, forgotten everything we once were, and God kept recycling us? What if some of the dreams we have while asleep are memories from previous lives, or perhaps glimpses of lives we will live in the future?

I was simply imagining – allowing my mind to explore an idea, because I enjoy questions that force me to examine what I believe, what can be demonstrated, and where the limits of our knowledge actually lie. The answer was useful because it separated three things that people often mix together: what is imaginable, what is supported by scientific evidence, and what my Christian faith teaches.

It is possible to imagine reincarnation, just as it is possible to imagine that dreams give us access to another life. Imagination, however, is not evidence. Dreams can feel extraordinarily real because the sleeping brain draws from memory, emotion, fear, desire and spontaneous neural activity to produce people, places and events that may never have existed. That feeling of familiarity is fascinating, but it does not establish that we have lived before. There is no reliable scientific evidence demonstrating that ordinary dreams are records of previous lives, while the Christian account I believe is different from reincarnation: “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27, KJV). Christianity teaches one earthly life, death, judgment and resurrection, not an endless recycling of identities.

That answer did not make me love science less. It made me love science more, because good science helps us distinguish possibility from evidence, while mature faith helps us distinguish speculation from revelation. I do not experience those disciplines as enemies. In my opinion, my faith does not contradict science, and science does not threaten my faith. When each is treated honestly, science can help me understand the mechanisms and order of the world, while faith addresses realities that a laboratory instrument was never designed to measure: meaning, moral responsibility, worship, purpose, forgiveness and our relationship with God.

Science is not the same as atheism

I have had interesting conversations with atheists and agnostics who say they believe only in science, by which they usually mean that they accept only what can be observed, tested or proved. I respect the desire for evidence. Christians should not be afraid of it, and we should never treat honest investigation as rebellion against God. If something is true, careful examination should not destroy it.

The problem begins when people present atheism as if it were simply another name for science. It is not. Science is a disciplined method for investigating the natural world. Atheism is a conclusion about whether God exists. A person may use scientific findings as part of an argument for atheism, just as another person may see the intelligibility and order of nature as consistent with belief in a Creator, but neither worldview is identical to the scientific method itself.

Science can examine the expansion of the universe, measure radiation, date rocks, observe brain activity and test the effect of a drug. It cannot place “God” in a test tube, because the God described by Christianity is not a physical object inside the universe. The statement “there is no God” is therefore not a result that can simply be read from a microscope. It is a philosophical claim about the total nature of reality, and philosophical claims also involve assumptions, reasoning and interpretation.

That does not mean atheists are dishonest or that every Christian argument is sound. There are thoughtful atheists and careless Christians, just as there are thoughtful Christians and careless atheists. My point is that nobody enters the largest questions with no assumptions at all. We all interpret evidence through some account of what reality is and what kinds of explanations we are willing to consider.

The honest question is not, “Who has faith and who has none?” It is, “What does each of us trust, why do we trust it, and what evidence could correct us?”

A belief that cannot be corrected is not scientific

I once heard John Lennox in a debate or public conversation with an atheist whose name I cannot now remember with certainty. What stayed with me was a final exchange about what evidence could cause each person to reconsider his position. As I remember it, Lennox identified the truth of the central claims about Jesus, especially His resurrection, as decisive for his Christianity. The other speaker appeared unwilling to name any conceivable evidence that could alter his disbelief.

The principle, however, remains important: if I claim to follow evidence, I should be able to explain what would count against my conclusion. If no possible evidence can ever cause me to reconsider, then I am no longer describing an open scientific position. I am describing a commitment that has been protected from correction. I am now behaving like careless Christians who just believe anything without questioning them. God loves questions. He said we should come to Him so that we can reason together (Isa 1:18, Jer. 33:3, James 1:5). He only wants us to believe Him at the end of the day (Heb. 11:6)

Christians should accept a good standard of intellectual honesty. Paul did not treat the resurrection as an optional decoration attached to an otherwise complete religion. In 1 Corinthians 15, he wrote that if Christ had not been raised, Christian preaching and faith would be vain. The resurrection is not a claim we can quietly remove without changing Christianity into something else.

This is one reason the Christian faith has always interested me intellectually. It makes claims about events in history. Jesus lived in a particular region, interacted with identifiable people, was executed under Roman authority and was proclaimed alive by His followers. Those claims invite historical investigation.

Historical investigation, however, is not the same as a repeatable laboratory experiment. We cannot rerun the crucifixion under controlled conditions, just as we cannot rerun the assassination of Julius Caesar or the coronation of an ancient king. Historians examine documents, dates, testimony, hostile and friendly sources, transmission, context, explanatory power and competing accounts. Science and history both value evidence, but they do not always use the same methods because they do not always study the same kinds of events.

For me, the historical case for Jesus—His life, death, the early proclamation of the resurrection, the transformation of His followers and the rapid emergence of the Christian movement—deserves serious engagement. The conclusion that God raised Him from the dead also involves a judgment about whether divine action is possible. Evidence does not interpret itself; our prior account of reality affects which explanations we are prepared to consider.

This is why I would rather say there is historical evidence relevant to the resurrection than claim that science has proved the resurrection in the way chemistry proves the composition of water. Precision matters, especially when we are defending what we believe.

The Bible does not say that Earth is 6,000 years old

One recurring claim in conversations about science and Christianity is that the Bible says Earth was created about 6,000 years ago, while science says Earth is billions of years old. The scientific estimate is well established: the United States Geological Survey explains that radiometric dating of meteorites, Moon rocks and ancient terrestrial materials supports an age of approximately 4.54 billion years, with an uncertainty of less than one per cent. The oldest known minerals on Earth are themselves more than four billion years old. (USGS)

Some Christians arrive at a date of several thousand years by adding ages in biblical genealogies and adopting a particular interpretation of the creation days. They are entitled to argue for that reading, but it is important to say accurately that Genesis itself never contains the sentence, “The Earth is 6,000 years old.” Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” It does not attach a human calendar date to “the beginning.”

Christians disagree about how Genesis 1 should be interpreted in relation to cosmic and geological time. Some hold to a young Earth, some understand the days as long periods or literary structures, and others see an interval or distinctions between the creation of the universe and the ordering described in the chapter. Those disagreements are real, and I am not pretending that every interpretation is equally persuasive. I am saying that we should not attribute to the biblical text a numerical claim it does not explicitly make.

If God created the universe, then discovering a physical process is not discovering an alternative to God. When someone explains how a car engine works, that explanation does not eliminate the engineers who designed it. The mechanism and the agency are different kinds of explanation. Of course, the universe is not merely a larger car, and analogies have limits, but the logical point remains: an account of how a process unfolds does not automatically answer why there is a law-governed reality capable of producing that process at all.

Why early scientists searched for laws

It is historically undeniable that many foundational figures in modern science were religious believers. Their theology was not always identical to mine, and some held views that would be considered unorthodox, but many believed nature was orderly and intelligible because it came from an intelligent source.

Johannes Kepler understood his astronomical work as thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Robert Boyle wrote extensively about both natural philosophy and Christianity. Isaac Newton’s theology was complicated, but he devoted enormous attention to God and Scripture while transforming mathematics and physics. Michael Faraday’s Christian convictions were central to his life, even though his experimental work had to stand on reproducible evidence rather than religious authority.

Their belief in a rational Creator did not give them permission to invent results. On the contrary, nature had to be observed because they believed it possessed an order that human preference could not change. The scientist did not create the laws; the scientist discovered patterns, expressed them mathematically and tested whether the account matched reality.

The phrase “laws of nature” is itself interesting. A scientific law describes a regularity; it does not, by itself, explain why reality is regular, why mathematics maps onto the physical world so effectively, or why human minds are capable of understanding it. Science can deepen its account of these things, but ultimate questions remain philosophical as well as scientific.

John Lennox often makes a version of this distinction: knowing how something works does not exhaust the question of why it exists. We understand gravity far more deeply than earlier generations did. General relativity describes gravity not simply as an invisible pulling force but in terms of the relationship between mass-energy and the geometry of spacetime. Yet even a powerful theory can generate further questions: Why does the universe have these laws? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe intelligible? Why should rational consciousness emerge within it?

Saying “God” should never become a lazy substitute for scientific research. “God did it” does not tell an engineer how to build a bridge or a doctor how to treat an infection. At the same time, a complete description of a mechanism does not necessarily abolish questions of agency, meaning or purpose. We need the humility to know which question we are answering.

What science can tell me about a dream

Consider my question about dreams and previous lives. Neuroscience can investigate sleep cycles, memory consolidation, emotion, brain regions and the circumstances in which vivid dreams occur. Researchers can compare reports, identify patterns and test hypotheses about how dreams are produced. That work is valuable because it reduces our temptation to treat every emotionally powerful experience as supernatural evidence.

What science has not established is that dreams normally retrieve memories from a previous incarnation. A dream in which I seem to be another person may feel meaningful, but feeling is not verification. To establish a past-life claim, we would need reliable information that could not reasonably have been acquired through ordinary means, careful controls against suggestion and fraud, reproducible methods and explanations that outperform alternatives. Extraordinary confidence requires proportionate evidence.

My faith also gives me a framework for caution. The Bible includes dreams through which God communicated, but it does not teach that every dream is a divine message, and it does not teach that dreams are archives of our reincarnated identities. Hebrews 9:27 is incompatible with the idea that God repeatedly recycles the same person through earthly lives. The Christian hope is resurrection: God raises the person. Reincarnation, by contrast, ordinarily imagines a succession of lives in which identity is transformed, forgotten or reassigned. These are not two names for the same belief.

It is therefore possible for me to enjoy the question without adopting the conclusion. Curiosity does not require gullibility. A fascinating possibility should lead to investigation, not immediate belief.

Science becomes weaker when it pretends to answer everything

The great strength of science is also the reason it has limits: it restricts itself to questions that can be investigated through evidence about the natural world. That methodological discipline has given humanity medicine, electricity, computing, aviation, telecommunications and an extraordinary understanding of the cosmos. We should celebrate it, invest in it and teach our children to reason scientifically.

Problems arise when the method is expanded into the philosophy that science is the only path to every kind of truth. The claim “only scientifically testable statements are meaningful” is not itself a finding produced by a scientific experiment. It is a philosophical statement. If applied rigidly, it would exclude moral truths, logical rules, mathematical axioms, aesthetic judgments and much of ordinary human knowledge.

Science can show what happens in the brain when a person forgives, measure associations between forgiveness and health, or study interventions that reduce resentment. It cannot, using a scanner alone, tell us why we ought to forgive an enemy or whether mercy is morally good. Science can tell us how nuclear reactions release energy. It cannot decide whether a city should be destroyed with a nuclear weapon. It can improve surveillance technology. It cannot establish the moral boundary between public safety and human dignity without drawing on ethical reasoning.

These are not failures of science. A ruler has not failed because it cannot measure love. It was designed to measure length. Confusion begins when we demand that one instrument answer every category of question.

John Lennox’s Can Science Explain Everything? is useful precisely because it challenges the expansion of science into scientism—the belief that science is the only valid route to knowledge—without asking Christians to become hostile to scientific discovery. His work invites readers to examine the evidence, the philosophical assumptions and the distinct claims of Christianity.

Faith should not become an excuse for intellectual laziness

Christians also have responsibilities in this conversation. We damage our witness when we repeat claims that are scientifically false, quote sources we have not checked, or treat every gap in current knowledge as proof of God. If tomorrow’s research fills a gap that we used as the foundation of faith, an unnecessary spiritual crisis follows.

God is not merely the name we give to whatever science has not yet explained. In Christian belief, God is the reason there is a universe to investigate at all, the sustainer of every process we understand and every process we do not. Scientific progress therefore need not keep pushing God into a smaller corner. It can keep enlarging our understanding of the creation.

We should also stop being frightened by questions from our children, colleagues or friends. If someone asks about evolution, the age of Earth, suffering, miracles or the reliability of the Gospels, panic will not strengthen their faith. Telling them never to ask may only teach them that Christianity cannot survive scrutiny. We should listen carefully, admit what we do not know, study serious sources and distinguish a difficult question from a hostile heart.

The books that helped me arose from that kind of search. Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, The Case for a Creator and The Case for Grace present interviews and arguments for readers exploring Christianity. J. Warner Wallace approaches Christian claims through his experience as a cold-case detective in Cold-Case Christianity, God’s Crime Scene and Forensic Faith. His books are apologetic works rather than neutral scientific consensus, but the investigative framework can help readers think about evidence, inference and competing explanations.

C. S. Lewis remains valuable because he understood that the conflict is not only about isolated facts; it is also about reason, morality, suffering, love and the kind of universe we inhabit. Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, The Abolition of Man, The Four Loves and The Screwtape Letters approach different dimensions of those questions. John Lennox’s Can Science Explain Everything? and Determined to Believe address science, freedom and faith more directly, while Josh and Sean McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict assembles a broad apologetic case concerning the Bible and Jesus.

These authors should be read thoughtfully, not treated as substitutes for Scripture or as the final word on every scientific and historical question. You should examine their sources, read critics, distinguish evidence from rhetoric and remain willing to refine an argument. A faith worth defending deserves careful defence.

The evidence for Christ is cumulative

When I say that I see evidence leading toward God and Christ, I do not mean that one equation contains the name of Jesus or that a telescope can photograph the Trinity. I mean the case is cumulative.

There is the existence of a universe that appears to have a finite cosmic history. There is the remarkable intelligibility of nature and the effectiveness of mathematics. There is consciousness: our capacity not merely to react, but to reason about truth, duty, beauty and meaning. There is the moral experience through which human beings recognise that some actions are not simply unpopular but genuinely wrong. There is the historical figure of Jesus, the nature of His claims, His crucifixion, the resurrection proclamation and the birth of the early church. There is also lived experience—not as public proof that compels everyone, but as personal evidence within a wider case—of transformation, conviction, answered prayer and fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

Each part must be handled according to its kind. Cosmology is not history. History is not neuroscience. Personal experience is not a controlled experiment. Philosophy is not chemistry. Yet rational judgment often works by bringing different streams of evidence together rather than pretending that only one discipline is allowed to speak.

I believe in miracles, but I do not believe God is a magician performing tricks to entertain us. In the biblical understanding, a miracle is not nonsense; it is purposeful divine action. If God is the Creator of nature, then He is not imprisoned by the regularities He ordinarily sustains. The resurrection would be extraordinary precisely because dead people do not naturally rise. Christianity does not deny that regularity; it claims that God acted uniquely in history.

That claim should not be believed merely because it is dramatic. It should be examined. But neither should it be ruled out before examination simply because it involves God. To do so would be to hide a philosophical assumption inside what appears to be a scientific conclusion.

Science organises my thought; the Holy Spirit directs my life

I love science because it disciplines my mind. It teaches me to ask what the evidence is, distinguish correlation from cause, define terms carefully, test an explanation and remain open to correction. Those habits help me in business, leadership and faith. They protect me from superstition, manipulation and the confidence of people who make enormous claims without proportionate evidence.

My relationship with God addresses another dimension of life. Science can help me understand the psychological and physiological effects of forgiveness, but the Holy Spirit gives me the conviction and strength to forgive when my emotions resist it. Science can help us understand behaviour, incentives and human development, but it cannot tell me my specific assignment before God. It cannot answer, by experiment alone, “Why am I here? What does faithfulness require of me? How should I use my life for the good of others?”

I do not consult the Bible to calculate the load a bridge can carry, and I do not consult a physics textbook to determine whether I should love my neighbour. Wisdom recognises the contribution and proper limits of each source of knowledge.

There is still so much we do not understand. That ignorance should make both scientists and believers humble. A scientist can say, “The evidence is not yet sufficient,” without abandoning science. A Christian can say, “I do not yet understand this passage or mechanism,” without abandoning faith. Certainty about everything is not a requirement for trusting what we have good reason to believe.

So I will continue to ask unusual questions. I will wonder about dreams, consciousness, time, creation and the future of humanity. I will read scientists, theologians, philosophers, historians and thoughtful critics of my faith. I will reject claims that have no reliable support, even when they sound spiritual, and I will correct my language when I have described the science inaccurately.

But I will not accept the idea that loving science requires me to stop believing in God. The more I learn about the order, depth and intelligibility of the universe, the more reason I find to remain curious. Science helps me explore the creation with discipline; Scripture reveals the Creator I worship; and the Holy Spirit helps me live with purpose inside the world that science so beautifully investigates.

Science does not frighten my faith. It makes me ask better questions—and honest faith gives me the courage to keep searching for truthful answers.