Science and God

I've become a fan of Neil Degrasse Tyson recently.  He has an uncanny ability to take difficult scientific topics and distill them down so that anyone can understand them.  He reminds me of a scientific version of Andy Stanley, well except for the fact that he's an outspoken atheist.  He gave a talk called, "The Perimeter of Ignorance" at a conference that I listened to the other day that really got my wheels spinning (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTFwDpr14Bo).  In that conference he mourned that more scientists we're atheists because he saw faith as a hindrance to scientific discovery.  He pointed to prominent example after prominent example from Newton to Einstein where scientists reached a scientific roadblock they couldn't figure something out and they essentially just gave-up, called it miraculous and said it must be God, only to have a future scientist be able to explain the previously explainable.  He said they "basked in the majesty of God" only have their discovery stop and he wondered how much more a Newton or Einstein could have contributed without having the "parachute" of a God hypothesis.

I guess this is my frustration sometimes with science and church.  I believe God and science can coexist and can actually have a synergistic relationship.  What I don't like is when people look at a tough problem and don't even try to solve it because it appears too hard and just fall back on the miraculous.  I believe there are miracles, but I also believe God setup a systems of natural laws, many of which he is eagerly awaiting for us to discover.  In ancient times people got sick from evil spirits, but we now understand germs.  We also now understand gravity, the atom and hundreds of other former mysteries.  I think it's a shame when people use faith as an improper justification of ignorance for themselves or their children.  It's almost like there's a fear that science will minimize God, but what I see is quite the opposite.  All you have to do is look at something like Hubble or the fact that scientist have discovered more stars than there are grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches to see that science can enhance God's majesty, not diminish it!  I think he smiled when we saw these images for the 1st time and probably is saying, "I can't wait until NASA gets more funding and they build a bigger one, it'll blow their mind!"



Neil DeGrasse Tyson did share one quote from Galileo that I love, “The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”  I couldn't agree more.  Let's believe in God, but let's also use the intelligence he's given us for the most good possible.