“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”
–Genesis 1:27-28

Scriptures begin with a picture of our God as the Creator; and, throughout both Testaments, we are called back to this aspect of His Nature. It gives us comfort in times of uncertainty. It strengthens our faith to trust Him. It corrects us when we idolize our own wisdom or our own perception of right and wrong. Understanding that the One who conducts the spheres of heaven breathed Himself into each of us inspires us, changes us, compels us to see ourselves and each other in a unique way that the world perhaps finds curious. When the people of God internalize this aspect of God’s nature, it inevitably draws others to Him. To study physics is to study God as Creator. The ordered, elegant, yet simultaneously confounding laws of nature resonate with the Lord of all creation revealed to us in the Scriptures.

“The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed…Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.”
–Genesis 2:8,15

One of the ways I have grown to integrate faith in learning as an engineering and physics teacher is striving to fulfill God’s charge to humankind to rule over creation. God’s charge is both to subdue and to cultivate. In essence, our rule is to model His. We can only rule creation as He wants when we understand creation. We can only subdue creation as He wants when we understand how to redirect the chaos toward an ordered blessing. With this in mind, in each course I teach, try to challenge my students to approach their learning not as a self-serving enterprise but as a part of their being a child of God. As I have grown in my career, I have begun to see this as an urgent need. While I may find the harmony of faith and physics quite natural, my discipline does not have a reputation for integrating well with faith. In this respect, I believe ACU is the ideal place to reach students early, to instill in them a different perspective than what the world would proclaim, and to help them build their careers on a foundation of faith in Jesus Christ.

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