At one time in our history as a human race on this planet, our curiosity about our world was always coupled with a belief that there was a God or gods, who was, or were responsible for our being here and who interacted with us. Yes, it seems that religion and science were married and raising a family. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all claimed belief in the God who introduced himself to Abraham. Some of the greatest contributors to our vast reservoir of scientific knowledge have also been defenders or practitioners of faith. In fact, the list of scientists who believed in God, or whose religious beliefs were integral to their scientific inquiry, from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths is amazing.
It appears that the more we learned about ourselves and our world from a scientific point of view the rocky the marriage became. Perhaps the divorce papers were filed somewhere in the latter part of the 19th century after Charles Darwin published his, Origin of the Species, 160 years ago in 1859. Darwin’s theory of evolution became the basis for the expulsion of God from earth and scientific inquiry, and Stephen Hawking the 20th century cosmologist expelled the notion of God from the study of the Universe. The amazing thing is that both the children of science and the children of religion are now predicting the same outcome for the human family on earth, and the forecast does not look good. Stephen Hawking spoke of the dangers of global warming, artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation, and even the destruction of much of the earth from a meteor. Like Hawking, an avowed atheist, others have declared the ‘death of faith’.
Often in a messy divorce, the parents will attempt to convince the children that the other parent was the cause of the divorce. So, it has been in this messy divorce between science and religion. Yet, the grandchildren and great grandchildren have discovered old picture albums and love letters from the happy days of marriage. Comparing notes, the predictions of the scientists and the prophesies of the children of faith seem to be saying the same thing, trouble is on the way.
Perhaps our disciplines have taken us in different directions only for us to discover as Job in the Bible discovered, after tremendous debate, that there is a God over science and religion. And perhaps like Job, if we reckon with God, we to can be restored and perhaps save others around us.