Let me elaborate on that. As most of us go through life, we strive to understand God better, even though we recognize that at best we can know only a little corner of Him. Before Christ, the Jews depended on the prophets to reveal God. Then Christ presented his blinding message. The apostles who followed helped to interpret Christ's message, and we read their words in the New Testament.

Since then, to mainstream Christians at least, anyone who says he hears directly from God has gained little credence. Instead, theologians and philosophers have taken over. Just as we asked what scientists do, we might ask what do theologians do? They carry out "reasoned discourse". That is to say, they think about all the insights we have from the bible, traditions, history, and prior writings, and then try to arrive at a "rational" view of God. This does not exclude information about the material world. Indeed, the findings of science do influence theological discourse. My hope has been to expound some essential science, and then discuss how science influences religious thought.

It was a surprise to me how many scientists have written, sometimes eloquently, about their views on God and religion. Some of them discover in the scientific view of the material world additional reasons for believing in God. Others write, of course, also with eloquence, that the material world visualized by science leaves no place, or need, for the God of established religion. Indeed, the debate among scientists about the existence of God has become the stuff of the media, as in the November 2006 issue of Time which carried a direct debate. Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, argued that an intelligent of view of the progress of life on earth leaves no room for the God of any of the organized religions. Francis Collins, an American geneticist, who led the Human Genome Project and has recently been appointed Director of the National Institutes of Health, and is also a forthright Christian, rejected this view.

Some great scientists were priests first, witness Gregor Mendel, the Austrian Augustinian priest who founded genetics. Scientists have also been led to opt for Christianity and become priests and theologians, witness John Polkinghorne, first a quantum physicist who then became an Anglican priest and theologian. He was eventually elected president of Queens College, Cambridge University.

I am neither priest nor theologian; it is not my place to lecture on the niceties of theology. For the reasons just stated, I do think the scientists who say that the new knowledge gained through science has rendered traditional belief outmoded are presumptuous. Nevertheless, a better understanding of nature helps us to know a bit better how God accomplishes his purposes. What those purposes are remains a matter for discernment, but for now are mostly a mystery and likely to remain so.

In 1787, Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason said: "Two things fill the heart with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the starry skies above, the moral law within." What we have learned in the subsequent 225 years about the beginnings of the universe or the evolution of life can only augment our awe of nature. That awe and the second item in Kant's declaration, "the moral law within", represent in many people's minds the two best reasons we have for belief in God.

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Lecture Index

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