I am an astrophysicist. I am also a Christian
This article makes a lot of false correlations. I think what bothers me about articles like this is that they are presented as a sort of unbiased and objective look at someone&#x27;s personal perspective, which can be very interesting if done right, but then in reality, they are just pushing yet another agenda in shifty ways.<p>&gt; Science has Christian roots<p>This is bending the truth quite a bit. Yes, many scientists such as Galileo and Newton explored Christian oriented or adjacent faith, which is not a surprise given the broad interests of scholars of old, but I don&#x27;t see how they share the same roots. Scientific inquiry began <i>long</i> before Jesus was supposedly even alive. Archimedes, Eratosthenes, other Greeks, the Middle East, and East Asia, such as in China, were all doing mathematics and the beginnings of scientific inquiry long before the existence of Jesus and certainly long independent of anyone of Christian faith. It&#x27;s Western myopia to think that science and Christianity share roots. It&#x27;s just that Christianity was the main religion in Europe during the time of Galileo, Newton, and their peers were creating what&#x27;s known as &quot;modern science&quot;. Newton actually hid his faith because he would have been marked as a heretic, which he was according to the establishment at that time.<p>Really, the only sort of relationship I think there exists between science and religion may be in the sense of Feyerabend, in that they share a certain sense of ideology.<p>I think really, science&#x27;s goal is to continually show itself to be wrong or learn how it&#x27;s wrong. It&#x27;s about building models that describe what is observed in reality. That isn&#x27;t how Christianity operates. But scientists do need to be aware of how their models sit within philosophical thought.<p>&gt; Even in today’s America, most Christians are not anti-science.<p>I don&#x27;t believe that at all, and that has not been my experience. I had multiple teachers as a kid preface teaching us about dinosaurs that it disagrees with their faith and that they basically had to teach about dinosaurs. Several states have put Creationism into schools, directly violating the separation of church and state. Christians can obviously be scientists and vice versa, but in my experience, Christianity will win out when conflicts arise. I&#x27;m not saying scientists are somehow right by default (far, far from it), but I would say that Christians claiming they&#x27;re also scientists is both a sort of an appeal to authority and also a bit a misnomer since they&#x27;ll follow science until it conflicts with their Christian faith.<p>&gt; A majority of White evangelicals did get the COVID vaccine<p>According to the linked research, it&#x27;s <i>just barely</i> a majority (and I would be surprised if it was even that high) and <i>far</i> below every other category in the Pew survey. Pretty misleading implications for a scientist.<p>&gt; Values of curiosity, belief that nature is comprehensible, humility, and service<p>Yea, that&#x27;s just called being a good participant in society. Those values are not even remotely exclusive to religion and science.<p>&gt; For me, science and faith fit together. ... The God who hears my prayers and heals my soul is the same God who created the Universe.<p>Those two statements are incompatible, especially as an astrophysicist. The thing is, neither is right in their conclusion of who or what created the Universe, or if there even was a creation, because that&#x27;s basically impossible to know with our given knowledge and maybe even impossible period due to problems with objective reality and our biological limitations forcing a certain perspective and experience. But it does seem to me that the answers each tries to provide are incompatible.<p>What bothers me about Christianity is, how do Christians know their God is the one? As Ricky Gervais brought up to Stephen Colbert, Gervais mentioned that Colbert doesn&#x27;t believe in thousands of gods since he believes in the one Christian God. But then, it&#x27;s just that Gervais, as an atheist, doesn&#x27;t believe in just one more. It&#x27;s an interesting perspective. (I should note that I identify neither as an atheist nor a Christian.)<p>It&#x27;s okay to accept Christianity as a faith. Go for it, but I do dislike when it&#x27;s tried to be retconned into philosophical thought. As far as I can tell, the historical research shows that it&#x27;s likely someone named Jesus lived, was one of many prophets to arise out of the Jewish sects, and was taken out by the establishment. Then sometime later, his life and teachings were retconned into historians&#x27; works, either by themselves or others. As far as I have been able to read, there is basically no one who even mentioned Jesus while he was alive aside from maybe one or two sources (and if I recall correctly, one of those possibly was penciled in later after Jesus had died). I think Christians should be able to accept that as a probable reality. Is it that hard to admit that the Bible is a collection of stories about people interested in exploring faith based upon a possible historical prophet figure? (I actually think there&#x27;s more there, because humans are almost always more concerned about social and political power.) Whether that means he was the Jesus as in the holy trinity, that&#x27;s up to their faith.