God Wherever We Look

This is an excerpt the "eSTEAM" newsletter that will appear next week. If you'd like to sign up you can do so here.

Because I've found my faith enhanced by science (and challenged at times), I have a positive sense when I ponder how to read God's Book of Scripture and book of nature.

But I also realize, as a church teacher and leader, that a church member's felt need about science is often how to remove uneasiness. It's based on a simple, and often understandable, fear: 

"If I accept modern science, I’ll lose God." 

What Christian congregations, college groups, and adult fellowships don’t want is science without God. Or even more science that denies God’s activity.

This means, that for most of us, it’s not about a resistance to science per se, it’s about science with no God. It’s about those voices that proclaim science’s power to oust God from the universe. And this might be based on some prior decisions. As the noted physicist Stephen Weinberg phrased it,

"Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists." Stephen Weinberg

Sometimes, despite what scientists themselves say, the culture or political powers will change that message. 

The first cosmonaut in space Yuri Gagarin (who achieved this feat in 1961) was quoted by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in line with the official atheistic Soviet line, to have announced, 

“I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev quoting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Interesting, it seems that Gagarin, a Russian Orthodox Christian, never made that proclamation, but that the officially atheist government put those words in his mouth. The Soviet Union had an official atheistic stance and thus started by not finding God on earth. So God couldn’t be in space either. In fact, Gagarin’s friends remember his saying, 

“An astronaut cannot be suspended in space and not have God in his mind and his heart.” Yuri Gargain

To me that adds up to some great news about bringing science to church. 

We find more and more places throughout this astonishing creation, whether in space or on earth, to look and to see the Creator God we know in Jesus Christ.