Who is determining our path II? ...

Tuesday, July 19, 2011. We are talking about the question of influence, leadership, guidance and what controls the path of our life. We have been discussing our job situation yesterday. But what about other types of influence?

Natural Law and Stochastic Influence …

Every day we use natural laws. Our mind is built for using them efficiently. We make plans, then we carry them out. Planning is only possible due to the natural laws which govern our world.

Last weekend we met friends in some nice town on the countryside to have a walk and take joint lunch together, to spend some nice time together, exchange news and enjoy. We had to go there, we took our car and drove along the motorway. All this of course needs all our technology, it needs the laws of nature built into the vehicle as well as our ability to plan the travel time, to call each other via mobile phone, to find the right place by electronic navigator …

However, when we arrived there, it was raining. The whole afternoon was full of rain. We were walking through the pedestrian road with our umbrellas … while the heavy rain was flooding the roads. The weather is partly predictable, partly stochastic in nature. This sunday, the rain was predictable at least a day ahead, but we had made our plans much longer ago.

God is in control?! …

The bible claims that whatever happens to us, God is in control. It claims that God has created this world, with all its laws and regular behaviour, but also with the stochastic type of influence. It claims that he knows everything, that whatever happens, it has to pass him.

As a natural scientist, I do not have a scientific explanation how God could do all this. I am working with these laws every day. I am modelling them. I am using them within an operational center for numerical weather prediction. But of course we do not understand the Lord, who is behind and in all of this in a quite wonderful and miraculous way. We live in our creation, he is beyond the creation.

So it is quite an interesting step to start to put faith into the Lord, based on what we know about him from within this world. Jesus was a part of it. The words spoken by his people are in the middle of it. The bible is available to us. We can go single steps, first, to believe him and trust him. We can listen to what he says and follow. We can pray and wait for him, pray again, listen to what he says and see what he does … and observe that he really is in control, even if we do not understand how he does it! ... more texts