What Difference Does God’s Law Make?
Loren Seibold
(This article is an excerpt from the May – June 2008 edition of the Sabbath Sentinel)
“During a few weeks of each year, my back patio becomes a demonstration lab for one of the most famous laws of science: the law of gravity. Above the deck stand several large black walnut trees that produce thousands of hard, heavy walnuts. For a few weeks in the autumn, you relax on the patio at your peril, unless you’re wearing a hard hat! Only the squirrels are delighted. Walnuts fell from trees for centuries before Isaac Newton formulated the law of gravitation (he used apples). Newton’s law doesn’t make the walnuts fall; it only explains why they fall. There are, in fact, hundreds of laws of science. You may have learned some of them in school: for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. You can know either the location of a particle or its momentum, but not both. The laws of science differ from laws made by governments.
A friend was driving above the speed limit when she saw the red and blue flashing lights of a patrol car in the car’s rearview mirror. She was so startled (it was her first encounter with the law) that by the time the patrolman asked her to roll down the window, she was weeping. He took mercy on her and gave her a warning instead of a ticket. A person can sometimes get away with breaking the laws of a government. The laws of science, though, aren’t negotiable. They are invariable facts of the physical world. You would be very foolish to say, “I’ve decided not to follow the law of gravity today,” and then step off the edge of the Grand Canyon. God’s Invariable Laws God is the Originator of the laws of science, in that He created all that we describe by them. Because the laws of science never fail, they help us understand how the physical world works; we make use of them in order to fly an airplane, heat a house, or even hammer in a nail.”
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