Its often been stated by atheists that you cannot be a good scientist if you’re a Christian because your belief in the Bible will supercede your belief in science.
“All thinking men are atheists” – Ernest Hemingway, American author & not a scientist (1899-1961)
“Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror” – Voltaire, French author & playwright and not a scientist.
“For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain” – Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek & not a scientist (1921-1991)
How accurate are these statements? Not very, according to a Pew Research Center poll that says 33% of scientists believe in God. That’s not an insignificant number. That number has decreased only slightly in the last 100 years (42% to 33%). What is interesting is that the younger the scientist, the more they believe in a personal God. Given the near complete dominance of evolutionary teaching in public schools in the last 100 years, it’s amazing it’s not much lower than 33%.
Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project, said “I think there’s a common assumption that you cannot both be a rigorous, show-me-the-data scientist and a person who believes in a personal God. I would like to say that from my perspective that assumption is incorrect…The notion that you have to sort of choose one or the other is a terrible myth that has been put forward, and which many people have bought into without really having a chance to examine the evidence. I came to my faith not, actually, in a circumstance where it was drummed into me as a child, which people tend to assume of any scientist who still has a personal faith in God; but actually by a series of compelling, logical arguments, many of them put forward by C. S. Lewis…”
Dr. Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian Benedictine priest and Distinguished Professor of Physics at Seton Hall University, said “… far from being an atmosphere stifling to science, the Christian world view of the West was the fertile cultural and philosophical soil in which science grew and flourished.” He argues that it was precisely the theology of Christianity which created that fertile intellectual environment.”
Dr. Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), a Professor of anthropology, a science history writer and evolutionist, concluded that the birth of modern science was mainly due to the creationist convictions of its founders. “…it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a Creator who did not act upon whim nor inference with the forces He had set in operation. The experimental method succeeded beyond man’s wildest dreams but the faith that brought it into being owes something to the Christian conception of the nature of God.”
You see, to the ancients, the gods were capricious. They didn’t always respond rationally. In most cases, the gods were just humans with great powers in terms of their emotions. So it made no sense to investigate the laws of the natural world. While the ancients were good at deductive reasoning, they didn’t know about inductive reasoning, which became the basis for modern science. Modern science uses both inductive and deductive reasoning. Ancient science used only deductive reasoning.
In other words, a rational God created a rational universe that runs on rational laws.
Presented with such evidence, what do you think of these earlier atheists statements?
Reference: tectonics.org/scim/sciencemony.htm…for an article on this subject and a listing of scientists who were and are Christians.
With you on the journey,
Dave Maynard
