Glen Davis

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).