Today, I want to talk about this notion of some sort of alleged division between science on the one hand and God on the other.
You hear this a lot don’t you? That if you believe in God then somehow you are surrendering your intellect. You are ignoring science. You understand that science is necessary but somehow there’s a great internal conflict within your brain — between your faith and God on the one hand and your need for science on the other.
I mean, where would we be without air conditioning? And the light bulb? And the internet? And computers and so forth? Right? And all your love of God would somehow suppress all that. That is nowhere close to the case.
The funny thing about this is that they somehow impute this fear of science to the believer — that the believer doesn’t believe in science at all because it somehow contradicts God. Because you know, after all, we believe in miracles. And therefore we don’t believe in science. That’s the mantra that many of your atheist friends will espouse to you. They assume it about you. I know because I was an atheist once too. That’s exactly what I thought.
They will tell you that these are two very different worlds. God on the one hand, science on the other. But is that the case?
Ironically, it is because of Catholicism and Christianity and Judaism that we have science in the first place. It seems like a surprise. The Catholic Church actually created the university — not for the purpose of making everyone believe in Catholicism or indoctrinating people, on the contrary… It was all about science, math, the universe, geology, the sciences generally speaking whether it’s medicine or otherwise.
Why would they do such a thing? Because they believed that science was the path to God. That the more you learn about science, the more you realized that God is real. It was an opening to God and they felt that God gave science to us as a gift. And they were right. Science makes no sense without God. There is no reason to pursue science. At all.
This is the major assumption that atheists will make that is categorically wrong. You need to nip it in the bud. Let them know that all the great discoveries that you can think of were created or discovered by very religious scientists. And in the name of science — they didn’t happen to be Catholic, they didn’t happen to be Protestant, they didn’t happen to be Jewish… No, they pursued their science BECAUSE of their faith. A very good example of that is Georges Lemaître, who was a Belgian monk who understood and believed that there was a beginning to the universe — because the Bible said so. And so he wanted to discover that. And lo and behold he discovered the Big bang. Did he get resistance from the secular world? Yes he did. He took a tremendous amount of heat and it was because of his faith — his certainty that there was a beginning, that he was able to resist and finally win the day and convince the world that indeed the universe had a beginning. 
Even Einstein — his theory of relativity demanded that there was a big bang to the universe. A beginning. But Einstein didn’t like it. He himself was not very religious. He insisted that the universe was static and always had been static. Always will be static. He was wrong. He wanted it so badly for whatever reason — perhaps because they were worried that if they did prove that there was a big bang, that it might further give credence to this fantastical notion known as the Bible.
Science is indeed a gift from God that allows us to get ever closer to him and to see the incredible breathtaking wonders of God’s creations. Yes, that’s exactly why we have science. So the next time somebody says that there’s a conflict, understand that there is none. In fact, that science came to us precisely because of God.