Author: Glen

One of the most pop­u­lar arti­cles on our web­site is Sci­en­tists Who Believe, a list­ing of influ­en­tial liv­ing sci­en­tists who are Chris­tians. Obvi­ous­ly, this is of inter­est to col­lege stu­dents!

That’s why I was so excit­ed when I ran across an arti­cle in the British paper The Guardian titled Sci­ence Can­not Pro­vide All The Answers.

Here’s an inter­est­ing excerpt from the mid­dle of the arti­cle: mod­ern sci­ence did not emerge 400 years ago to chal­lenge reli­gion, the ortho­doxy of the past 2,000 years. Gen­er­a­tions of thinkers and exper­i­menters and observers — often them­selves church­men — want­ed to explain how God worked his won­ders. Mod­ern physics began with a desire to explain the clock­work of God’s cre­ation. Mod­ern geol­o­gy grew at least part­ly out of search­es for evi­dence of Noah’s flood. Mod­ern biol­o­gy owes much to the urge to mar­vel at the intri­ca­cy of Divine prov­i­dence.

But the sci­en­tists — a word coined only in 1833 — who hoped to find God some­how paint­ed Him out of the pic­ture. By the late 20th cen­tu­ry, physi­cists were con­fi­dent of the his­to­ry of the uni­verse back to the first thou­sandth of a sec­ond, and geneti­cists and bio­chemists were cer­tain that all liv­ing things could be traced back to some last uni­ver­sal com­mon ances­tor that lived per­haps 3.5bn years ago. A few things — what actu­al­ly hap­pened in the Big Bang; how liv­ing, repli­cat­ing things emerged from a mud­dle of organ­ic com­pounds — remain rid­dles. But few now con­sid­er these rid­dles to be inca­pable of solu­tions. So although the debate did not start out as sci­ence ver­sus reli­gion, that is how many peo­ple now see it.

Para­dox­i­cal­ly, this is not how many sci­en­tists see it. In the US, accord­ing to a sur­vey pub­lished in Nature in 1997, four out of 10 sci­en­tists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and 14.5% described them­selves as doubters or agnos­tics. This ratio of believ­ers to non-believ­ers had not changed in 80 years. Should any­body be sur­prised?

And a great para­graph from fur­ther on: Doubt, expressed most potent­ly 3,000 years ago in the bib­li­cal book of Job, is the great­est sci­en­tif­ic tool ever invent­ed, he says. To do good sci­ence, you have to doubt every­thing, includ­ing your ideas, your exper­i­ments and your con­clu­sions. “Peo­ple like Richard Dawkins char­ac­terise reli­gion as doubt­less, tub-thump­ing, blind cer­tain­ty. But it isn’t like that; he knows it is not like that. There is Job, on his ash-heap, doubt­ing every­thing, but won­der­ing where the light comes from, and how the hail forms.”

You prob­a­bly won’t know most of the sci­en­tists quot­ed in the arti­cle as they’re all British. It’s still a good read, though. read the full arti­cle

The impor­tance of Chris­tian­i­ty to the his­to­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion is being increas­ing­ly over­looked, which is why I was so delight­ed to come across a rather lengthy sum­ma­ry of a new book: For the Glo­ry of God: How Monothe­ism Led to Refor­ma­tions, Sci­ence, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slav­ery by Rod­ney Stark (Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press) [see the Ama­zon page].

Dr. Stark is a sol­id aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing with­in his field, so this book is extreme­ly cred­i­ble.

Here’s an excerpt from the sum­ma­ry: Stark does­n’t argue so much the virtues of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion as the fact (yes, fact, not the­o­ry) that you can­not under­stand West­ern civ with­out ref­er­ence to Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy and the way that it fer­til­ized the soil in which those “extra­or­di­nary episodes” grew. The book focus­es on four episodes: (1) the efforts at church reform that cul­mi­nat­ed in the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion and the Catholic Counter-Ref­or­ma­tion, (2) the rise of mod­ern sci­ence, (3) the fabled witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th cen­turies, and (4) the abo­li­tion of slav­ery and the slave trade.

In each case, Stark shows that a belief in a great God who makes moral demands and who rewards and pun­ish­es in the after­life is an essen­tial com­po­nent of what hap­pened.

This is infor­ma­tion Chris­tians on cam­pus des­per­ate­ly need! Read the whole sum­ma­ry (or read a slight­ly less char­i­ta­ble review, although if you read that you should also read this unre­lat­ed review with the last para­graph of the Post review in mind).