Making the World Better & More Complete

In my message on Sunday, Feb 22, I mentioned that part of a biblical theology of work is recognizing and embracing humanity’s God-given dominion over the earth, which includes a calling to bring creation to fruition, to make the world better and more complete.

By way of illustration, I mentioned that finding solutions to our present day energy crisis would be a good example of ways to make the world better and more complete. One intriguing possibility on this front is using recent and impending advances in the field genomics to synthesize alternative fuels. Here are a couple of short presentations (approx. 20 min each) introducing this idea: (1) Genomics 101 by Barry Schuler, and (2) Craig Venter (known for his work in sequencing the human genome) shares his company’s recent and impending advances in the field of genomics. In sum, there are a lot of exciting things going on in the scientific world.

Here are a couple of other science-related talks from the same website that I really enjoyed: (1) Brian Greene on string theory, and (2) Brian Cox on his work at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Obviously, some (possibility even all) of the scientists mentioned above are not approaching their work from a Christian worldview. Does this make their work unfruitful for us? Or is there something we can and should still take away from it? How should we, as Christians, interact with those whose approach to life and to their work differs so much from our own? Can we affirm work that makes the world better and more complete without affirming the worldview informing it? How can we better use the Christian story as a catalyst for scientific inquiry? What do you think?