The following points are just some points I took away from a co-worker sharing during the staff morning devotions. Now this fellow co-worker is what I called a "colorful character"**. He's the type who will start off a devotion session using a sound clip from a Dilbert cartoon episode. He loves all things to do with engineering and science, and he's someone whom we called has been born with the "knack". So on that particular morning*, he started off with introducing a book he was reading at the time, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" by Richard P. Feynman.
No, Feynman wasn't a great theologian scientist. In fact, he was a staunch humanist, who only believed in the goodness that Christianity brought to western civilisation through the ages. He believed Christian ethics and morality brought about an advance in western thought and stability to Western civilisation, which contributes to the advent of science. Yet, in all his years of research, he couldn't "buy" the concept of an Almighty God, because he can't proved it. I think the picture my co-worker puts forth is that Feynman was an agnostic, and not an atheist. Hey, to be an atheist, you have to believe fervently in the belief of a non-God, and that's almost faith in itself. :p
Back to the sharing, after that, my co-worker asked us a simple question, "What does a scientist do?" haha, got various people try to give their answers - we "mere mortals" just said something along the lines of "physics and chemistry lor"; the engineer in our midst gave some long answer^ involving words like "experiment" and "data". In the end, the elegant and simple answer my colleague gave was that a good scientist tries to answer "What happens when I do this?" He then elaborates how very few people do good science thesedays, because they cannot be both curious and honest about what they do and do not know.
He also explained the bedrock of good science is based upon Doubt, while the bedrock of Christianity is based upon Belief.^^ Good science is doubting what others have said about how a certain thing will turn out, and doing experiment to verify what that group has said to be the truth; whereas in Christianity, the Truth has already been revealed to us, and all we need to is hanging onto the truth. Now, it does not mean there is no room for doubt in Christianity - remember the Bearens! But ultimately, we must remember as Christians, the truth has been given to us by grace. Many a times God has rebuked the nation of Israel for continually testing Him in the Old Testament. Only in one instance did God asked us as believers to test Him^^^^. Ergo, "do believe your beliefs, and doubt your doubts^^^^^"; do not doubt in your beliefs and believe in your doubts." We can do good science in our theology, and examining over each and every word that is written in the Bible.
so in the end, how does this help my blogger friend's in his dilemma? I also don't know :p I guess the only thing I can do is pray that he will continue to have joy and peace in his research field, while not forgetting where his true Joy lies.
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Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.—Miguel de Unamuno
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* at last Wednesday's morning, between Singapore time 0840hrs till 0925hrs, at 22 degrees Celsius, to be precise and scientific about it... :P
** as compared to me, who probably just go for the "worship-sharing-prayer" format... :D
^ more than 15 seconds :p
^^ or something along those lines. I'm fudging a bit, because I'm recollecting bits of memories after such a long break^^^...
^^^ ok, so it was only 10 days ago, but hey, in this age of data overload, you can have billions and trillions of bits of information passing before your eyes... :D
^^^^ haha, do you know where? Answer is here
^^^^^ by Fred Francis Bosworth (1877-1958)
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