Galileo And Other Faithful Scientists

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Judaism has been a fertile breeding ground for scientists, many of whom have no difficulty squaring their work and their faith. In his 1990 book Genesis and the Big Bang, Israeli nuclear physicist Gerald L. Schroeder argues in detail that there is no contradiction between the Bible's account of creation and current science. Schroeder also notes that the Ramban, the great medieval commentator on Scripture, had the remarkably modern insight that at the moment after creation, all the matter in the universe must have been concentrated in a tiny speck.

Though Islam has factions hostile to science, it has spawned quite a few of its own researchers. Mustafa Mahmoud, an Egyptian physician, is host of the TV show Science and Religion and operates an education-and-research complex built around a mosque. In Islam, properly understood, Mahmoud contends, "if a believer ignores science and knowledge, he is not a true believer." Sounding like St. Augustine, Mahmoud says that "God, the creator of the universe, can never be against learning the laws of what he has created."

But he might get a strong argument from America's Protestant creationists, who still insist that life on earth was created about 10,000 years ago and that a Flood engulfed the entire planet. In recent decades, creationists promoted their own brand of science and even persuaded a few state legislatures to decree that schools give Fundamentalist theories equal time with Darwin's evolution. Those laws were eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Opposing the creationists is a group of devout, mostly Protestant scientists who are also conservative but willing to consider evidence for evolution. They are organized into the American Scientific Affiliation, based in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which counts nearly 1,000 Ph.D.s among its members. The A.S.A. has distributed 100,000 copies of a booklet urging schoolteachers to be aware of the unanswered scientific questions about Darwinism and to avoid slipping in the unwarranted assumption that evolution in effect displaces God. A.S.A. executive director Robert Herrmann, a biochemist, advises fellow Bible believers to remain open to "evolution as the process the Creator may have used to bring life and mind into being."

For Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich, an Evangelical Protestant, the real choice is not "creation or evolution" at all, but "purpose or accident." Like millions of ordinary folk, he says, "I passionately believe in a universe with purpose, though I cannot prove it." Purpose, like origin, is a point where the wisdom of empirical science ends and the quest for religious faith begins.