Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. In a recent article in The Spectator, a French engineer, investor, and author argued, and I quote, it's getting harder for scientists not to believe in God, according to Michel Yves Bolaré, and I quote the article, more and more convincingly. And perhaps in spite of itself, science today is pointing to the fact that to be explained, our universe needs a creator. Bolaray then goes on to quote Robert Wilson, a Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the echo and the Big Bang in 1978 and an agnostic who said, if all of this is true, he was speaking there of the Big Bang theory, we cannot avoid the question of creation, end quote.
Well, for centuries now this inherent conflict between faith and reason, between science and religion, has just been widely assumed. For example, in their 2003 book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, Two scientists, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, argued that, contrary to science fiction, there's little chance of complex life existing anywhere but on Earth. But just because our world is kind of special, they went on to carefully point out multiple times in the book. That does not imply that it came from a creator.
Now Bolaré thinks that this whole philosophical Cold War that's been going on for so long is beginning to thaw and not because scientists are abandoning facts and reason. Instead, it's facts that's convincing them of the truth. Again, I quote the article. With sets of converging evidence from different scientific disciplines, cosmology to physics, biology to chemistry. it's increasingly difficult for materialists to hold their position.
Indeed, if they deny a Creator they have to accept and uphold that the universe had no beginning. that some of the greatest laws of physics, like the principle of conservation of mass energy, for example, have been violated. and that the laws of nature have no particular reason to favor the emergence of life. End quote.
Now this long-running conflict between science and religion was entirely unnecessary in the first place. It's certainly unnecessary from the perspective of religion. The Bible affirms the goodness of God's creation in multiple passages. Genesis 1 describes the cosmos as a glorious temple built for the fellowship of God and man. Psalm 19 argues that the beauty and order in creation points us to the divine artist that's behind it.
Job 28 encourages human curiosity and the exploration of the material world. By studying his world, humans are led to worship God. But even without getting into all the intricacies of Scripture and theology, the stereotype that science is rooted in the neutral investigation of facts, and religion rooted in imagination and feelings, That's just historically idiosyncratic. That claim is more reflective of scientism than it is. than actual science or of scientists, as is the claim by Richard Dawkins and the God delusion that free-thinking scientists would inevitably lean toward atheism.
The history of science is instead the history of hundreds of scientists, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, and hundreds of others who believed in God and played foundational roles in establishing the direction and the practice of the scientific disciplines.
Now the change Bolaray has described in the Spectator article is primarily among an emerging generation of scientists. which prompts the author then to ask, and I quote, Could they be the ones showing older generations a new way forward? one in which religion and science can coexist. And more to the point, we now have the scientific evidence that would support a big shift in perspective. In the words of ninety one year old Carlo Rubia, professor of physics at Harvard and a Nobel laureate, We come to God by the path of reason.
others follow the irrational path.
Now, of course, the false dichotomy between science and religion is still very deeply embedded in many universities and in many scientific institutions, but that can be changed. Granting that a designer exists can only make all of the attempts to uncover and understand design in the world that much easier. Plus, it gives meaning to scientific work. What if a whole new generation of scientists come to see their work like Kepler did? as thinking God's thoughts after him.
In his book God and the Astronomers, Robert Jastrobe predicted, and I quote, For the scientist who's lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He scaled the mountain of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak. And as he pulls himself over the final rock, he's greeted there by a band of theologians. Who have been sitting there for centuries.
Well, maybe, but to put it mildly, theology has certainly had its own set of issues. Still, we can all be hopeful that this war between science and religion is coming to an end. After all, it should have never started in the first place. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
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