Beyond Shouting: Religion and Science in Conversation
Scott Hoezee, Director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary
Perspectives

In the beginning, a few Renaissance geniuses used belief in God as the impetus to launch an investigation of the universe. Their development of science changed history. At the turn of the millennium on December 31, 1999, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis asserted that the single most important development of the last one thousand years was the rise of the scientific method through the experimental testing of hypotheses. Lewis may well have been right. Name almost any commonplace in our modern world and you can likely trace its origin back to science's open investigations. Aspirin, airplanes, cellphones, canned vegetables, contact lenses, window screens that keep out insects: all such things and millions more are available, safe, and useful because once upon a time someone had an idea and then proceeded to experiment to see how it could be developed.

But many of those daily realities are the technological fruit of science. The root of the enterprise is a deep investigation into the fundamental nature of reality. What is this cosmos made of? Way down at the tiniest substrata of existence, what are the forces that somehow combine to build mountains, coral reefs, kidneys, and chickadees? Further, how did the universe get to this moment in which we human beings--so objectively puny on a galactic scale — can now peer so far out into outer space as to detect the background echo of the Big Bang and so far down into inner space as to glimpse the impossibly small world of leptons and gluons?

Whatever else distinguishes the human race from fellow creatures like Boston terriers and damselfish, surely our ability to ask questions sets us apart as much as anything.

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Read the author's address to the 'Grand Dialogue' conference