On God and Science

I was raised Roman Catholic. I got my first version of the bible when I was maybe six years old, a tiny paperback with little writing and a lot of colorful pictures which depicted maybe seven of the most important stories of the bible. Over the years, I was given various versions of these bibles for children, each getting more violent and having less pictures the older I got.

When I was 10, I started attending a Catholic school, was taught mostly by civilians, and had mass every Tuesday, first class in the morning. My art teacher was a priest who drew amazing abstract art, had a piercing and wore jeans and t-shirts. I read the entire bible during two years of incredible boredom during religion classes, after which I left the school, but if I had stayed, I would have learned about evolution and astrophysics and the big bang in my science classes – without stickers on the textbooks which claim it to be “only a theory”.

Religion was part of my childhood, and my mom’s guardian angels protected me from monsters in the closet and under the bed - I cannot remember ever being afraid of them. Praying consoled me when I was worried sick about something – that my parents would divorce, an important exam the next day, or that my grandparents could become ill and die.  

Yet, I am a geek. I have always been one, fascinated by science, the world around me. And my parents, being academics, have always supported me, buying me books and encouraging me to ask questions. I have never, as a child, really felt the conflict between religion and science, because in my family, both were allowed to co-exist. And my mother, who is quit religious and was the driving force in my family to educate me and my siblings religiously, calls creationism ridiculous and shakes her head at people who demand it to be taught in schools.

But it is not that easy for me. I am caught in a conflict between religion and science, my upbringing and an idea which has given me a feeling of safety as a child, and the reality of this world and science. I have difficultly employing this double-think mentality (not that there is anything wrong with it), and have been forced to admit that God has no place in science, not in the traditional way at least.

The origin of live - how living things, the first primitive cells, arose from a few acids – or the origin of the singularity which started the Big Bang, or even what caused this singularity to evolve into the Big Bang… A lot of people try to use these things to explain the existence of some intelligence, some kind of God - it’s the typical God of the Gaps. The practice to stuff God into every gap in science, to explain his existence with the things science can’t yet explain. I know what it is, this God of the Gaps and how it works, and I know that science will most likely find answers to these questions. To employ this God of the Gaps to justify my belief in God would again result in a double-think mentality, something I have enormous difficulties with.

But maybe the mistake here is to look for God in science and for science in God. Maybe God, religion, the supernatural, is just a human instinct, the desire to explain, the desire to seek comfort and safety in something which will always be there to rely upon. Maybe there is no need for God to exist, at least not in any physical way. Maybe it is just a concept that exists in our heads.

Or maybe, possibly, it is something else. Maybe God can be found in science. In the way everything fits together, like pieces of a big puzzle. How simple equations, a few letters and numbers, can be used to explain the behavior of particles, objects, light and sound, how patterns can be found in even the most chaotic places and things in this universe.

Maybe it is like Einstein once said: “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”