The Strange Idea that Science Excludes Belief in God.

 "Atheists say there is no evidence of any god, that science has shown that matter and force are eternal, that the earth was not created from nothing".

I copied and pasted the above from something I read which was written by someone whom I am afraid was not vert logical, and merely was caught up in a rant against religion in general and the Christian Church in particular.  Nevertheless it is worth examining what he said, since so many young people are being caught up in this illogicality, and I am afraid he has overstated his case to the extent that even atheistic scientists would disagree with him.

First of all what is a scientist?    I once went into a botanical garden when I was very young.    I saw a beautiful rose and I asked how such a beautiful flower grew.    "It grows from a seed" came the reply.   "Yes, but how does the seed change into a flower?" I asked.   She told me about the roots taking food from the earth and the sun causing photosynthesis on the stem, which I did not quite understand.    But the woman then said "It is a beautiful gift from God"    Now I did not answer "Well you have explained it so we do not need God anymore"   I said in reply "Isn't it wonderful what God can do"    Just because I had been shown how nature works did not mean there was no need for God.    So I had had my first piece of scientific knowledge.    Now scientists are people who look more deeply into how things are in the world.    They can talk about atoms, fusion, physics, gravity, and so many other things they have found which they may believe are more wonderful than my rose.   But the fact that they have found how the system works, does not mean they have any more insight into why the system is. and the have no more knowledge into the existence of God than I had with my beautiful rose.  Indeed when I heard about the seed and photosynthesis I thought about structures much more complex just like the human body.   We have eyes to see the things around us, we have ears to hear the things around us, we have mouths which which we taken in food to fuel our bodies, we have lungs with which we breath in oxygen through our noses, and the mouth to breath out carbon when the body has used the oxygen.  Our body has a system to resist infection and out brain helps us to think about things and communicate with others.    Call me simple and uneducated if you wish but it seems to me that the more complex something is then a lot of planning must have gone into it.  I cannot accept that if something works intelligently then that is just a fact  we should not think about and draw conclusions.    If I accepted this then I would consider myself pretty dumb.     If scientists say there is no God, then they have to show us how from their work they have evidence for this.   Not just tell us they are scientists so the matter is settled.    Yes, they can go through the evolutionary process, life came from the sea, life evolved into different species, men are descended from apes, but what has this to do with the existence of God.    Who set life and evolution into motion?   "But look at it, it is there" they say, and I reply "But where did it come from?

A well known scientist wrote a book 'The God Myth'.    It was a best seller, though it was full of these assumptions that knowing how things work means there is no God.   We just have to show they work and they explain their own existence.    He did quite well from the book, which became a best seller.   He toured the world giving lectures on how stupid God Believers are.   He usually had the audience laughing with him, but in Australia he suddenly found that the audience was laughing at him.    Now where the person in the first paragraph went wrong was his claim that form and force was always there and that was the scientific explanation.   But, strangely, it is not.    Scientists, and this one in particular, have moved on to the Big Bang theory.    Everything began to exist at the Big Bang, and yes, we see planets hurling through space, and we ask what put them into motion.   But at this meeting the scientist was asked where the matter and form for the big bank came from, and his strange reply was "that it came out of nothing".  He even quoted another scientist who had said that yes, you can get something out of nothing.  The audience erupted into laughter which upset our scientist and he asked "Why are you all laughing?"   A Catholic Cardinal replied "They are laughing because you have just said you can get something out of nothing"   It was a humiliation for the poor man, and his tours came to an end.    Though he did appear on a debate in the UK shortly afterwards to assert that science cannot find God.    

The point is that matter and form could not have always existed.   To say that they stretch back to infinity is irrational.   If I had had to wait an infinity of time before I existed then I never could have existed.  There is no way that a point could be marked where my existence was half way there, infinity means reaching back into endless time which is impossible and illogical.     And in believing in God despite the rose being explained to me, I was just as much in a position to say there is a God, as scientists are to say there is not.