Novels Show Science and God Can Co-Exist

CVB: It’s interesting because you have one foot on each side of your brain. In addition to being a writer, you are also a scientist.

Randy Dockens: It’s called a pharmacokineticist, which I know most people don’t know what that is.

CVB: But it sounds so cool.

Randy: So it’s really the mathematical interpretation of what happens when you take a drug. So it describes how it’s absorbed, how it’s distributed throughout the body, how it’s metabolized, and how it’s excluded. So it’s been a very interesting career. After graduate school, I worked for the food and drug administration for a few years and then went to a pharmaceutical company and have been working there in different types of jobs there.

CVB: So while you are still doing that, you are also writing. Tell me about your two different series of novels.

Randy: The first series is called ‘The Coded Message Trilogy.’ Just seeing the way that our world is going, it seems like God is less and less involved in our culture. So this book went to sort of a dystopian society where God was totally out of the picture. This astrophysicist is working on a Mars mission. He’s very happy with this job, but then he noticed that certain odd things seemed to be happening. He would find a discrepancy, he would report it, and the next day the discrepancy would be gone. So he was wondering what’s going on. Soon he begins to understand that the government and society is really trying to control people with mind manipulation. He finds out that he’s actually immune to that. So he becomes very dangerous to society.

CVB: And to the government, right?

Randy: And to the government.

CVB: That’s not a good place to be.

Randy: Right. So he and his friends get involved into this espionage type thing to understand what’s going on. Through all this, he first has to discover that God even exists. He had to first admit that. I wanted people to sort of understand that if you don’t believe in God, that God can still reach you. If you’re a seeking, He’s going to let you find him.

CVB: For someone who’s been in a dystopian society, that’s a big hurdle.

Randy: That was a big hurdle. There, there were people that were brought into his life that helped him sort of overcome that hurdle. That’s where the science and faith intertwined there. The question was how do you get a protein, because the protein comes from a protein. So where did the first protein come from?

Proteins have to be in a three dimensional structure before they’re active. You can make all kinds of 3-d structures with something, but it almost always has to be the active form. So it’s not just chance. It has to be programmed somehow for it to work that way.

CVB: And yet this is an observable issue. It’s not theory. This is observable.

Randy: Right. And it’s actually another protein that makes the unviable protein into a viable protein. That’s why you have to have the protein to make a protein.

CVB: Wow.

Randy: The principles of the components of an Atom really have the principles of trinity. So in the second book he has to decide what to do with this information. And then in the third book he realizes, “I can’t just keep this information to myself. I need to let other people know about it.” So, how do they do that? They eventually get caught and they get sent to Mars.

CVB: So what was it that caused you to write a series like this?

Randy: In my early days in high school, I was much more creative. I always wrote different poems and stories and things like that. But I also loved science, so I went into a scientific career. Then the creative side sort of went dormant for awhile. And so it’s just sort of resurrected itself. I have a PhD in pharmaceutics. After a while I went back to school and got a PhD in biblical prophecy. So I needed to know how do I put those together? And so I thought I could write a series of nonfiction books. But then I thought, that makes people have to want that specific thing in order to read it. So I decided to make it more speculative fiction in the sense that even if the reader doesn’t believe in the religious part of it, you could at least enjoy the story. And then as they are enjoying the story, we get people to think.

That’s what I really want people to do. I want them to really think about what is society telling them and what is the real truth? I am of the opinion that science points to truth, but science is not true because science is always evolving. What we knew a hundred years ago is not what we know now. It’s just because the technology and everything always changes, but everything always points to truth. That’s why I think we can really stand upon what the Bible tells us because it really is THE truth and everything points to that.

CVB: Recently there was big news about a scientist from Yale who was an atheist and suddenly he came to the realization through scientific endeavor that Darwinism is outdated. Is that a trend?

Randy: I saw a series where it was several scientists that believed in evolution and everything that it taught. They became Christians, but then they had to struggle with, well, how do I be a Christian and be an evolutionist at the same time? Over time they basically came to the conclusion that the two just didn’t make sense together.

I think what many people will see is that if you take all the things that evolution teaches, when you just restrict it to one part you can sort of make it make sense. But when you take it all-encompassing, it doesn’t quite jive. It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to just believe in creation.

CVB: That’s one of the things that they brought forward that I’m paraphrasing, but basically they said Darwinism has become a religion instead of science. This man said, “I’m a scientist. And when it starts to become a religion, I’m not interested in that. I’m looking for the observable truth.”

Randy: What several of these scientists had said was that whenever they went to debate other evolutionists, that they would just shut them down. They would say, “this is a fact and you can’t argue with a fact,” and they would just not even discuss it. So if you can’t discuss it, then there’s something wrong because if it really is a fact…

CVB: …then why are you emotional?

Randy: Right. Yeah, exactly.

CVB: This isn’t like something you made up. Why be so emotional about it, unless it’s a religion.

Randy: Right. If it’s a fact, then you can support a fact. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a fact.

CVB: By definition, exactly.

Randy: That was one of the things I wanted to do is to sort of bridge the gap where you can have a relationship with God and still be a scientist. It’s not like you have to choose one or the other. If God is the creator of everything, he created science.

CVB: And like Milton said, let all the ideas grapple because truth is going to rise to the top.

Randy: Right. Yes.

CVB: Because whatever truth is, you don’t have to be emotional about it. It will be observable.

Randy: Right. So that was the reason for The Coded Message Trilogy, to really help people understand that science and God can exist together. And then this next series, The Stele Prophecy Pentalogy, was more for Christians to understand what does their future really look like?

There are certain things in the Bible about heaven and what we can know, but I know. I’ve talked to, to many Christians and ask them, “Do you believe you’re going to heaven?” They say, “Well, of course.” I then ask, “What does that look like?” Many answer, “Well, I don’t really know, but I guess I’ll find out when I get there.” Well, that’s not a very good motivator.

Paul also tells us that it’s going to be more than we can even imagine. Well, if we can’t even imagine anything, more of nothing is still nothing. So I want people to sort of get at least a glimpse of what is possible and knowing that it can be so much better.

I like prophecy. So hopefully this will help people understand more about prophecy and what the Bible tells us about what our future can be.

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Order copies of The Coded Message Trilogy and The Stele Prophecy Pentalogy by Dr. Randy Dockens.