God By Another Name?

Science, Scientists and God have a mixed relationship .....

Homer Simpson And The God Particle

.... after all, often their work seems to prove that no divine order is in place, but rather that a natural order exists with empirical evidence.

Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century philosopher and cosmologist, Bruno was burned alive by the Catholic Roman Inquisition for not recanting what they considered to be his his heretical ideas, including the belief that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. He was right of course.

Michael Servetus, also a 16th-century physician and theologian, Servetus was condemned to death by the Catholic Holy Inquisition for both his religious views, and scientific theories, including his challenges to Galen's theories on the human blood an. He was generally right of course on the science ideas.

While Galileo Galilei, a pioneer of modern science, was not killed for his scientific views, but was found "vehemently suspect of heresy," for being a proponent of the heliocentric model of the solar system, where the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, a view that contradicted the prevailing geocentric model (Earth at the centre) which the Catholic Church subscribed to .... he was  sentenced to house arrest, dying a natural death in 1642. He was right of course.

The French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace once said, “An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature, and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain, and the future just like the past, would be present before its eyes.” .... kinda sounds like the powers of a God to me?

Perhaps the two big daddies of science are Einstein and Newton (but I accept that this not an empirically provable statement and other great scientists may be considered as the 'big daddy' of science). They however had very different views on the existence of a personal god.

• Isaac Newton, believed in God as the creator, and saw all scientific investigation as a way to understand both the creator and his creations (us).
• Albert Einstein, admired the universe's structure and its order and rules, however he rejected the idea of a personal God and creator, but said that he wasn't a rabid atheist and could appreciate the  'music of the spheres'.

Others have had views, one one side or the other: Stephen Hawking, the Cosmologist and Theoretical Physicist, considered himself an atheist, and believed that science could explain everything, including the universe's origins."Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation."

While others have sat on the fence:

Blaise Pascal, the French Mathematician argued that believing in God was the best bet, even if it couldn't be proven. His argument, known as  "Pascal's Wager" was that if God exists, believing in God is the only way to achieve the greatest possible reward (heaven and eternal life), while if God does not exist, the loss of believing in God is minimal as you would be just as dead as the next man.

Finally: Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author has famously taken a lot of stick, especially in the USA from Christian groups, because of his public rejection of of creationism, a religious belief that humanity, life, and the universe were created by God (and sometimes disguised as Intelligent Design), and as an outspoken atheist.

I guess that faith is just that, faith .... while science is empirical.