Science and Religion- with drawings from both

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A few thoughts on Religion & Science + drawings from both.  Can a scientist be religious?

Some people think that you can't be a religious person and a scientist.  I want to dispel that myth. Partly because I have heard this myth from both sides.  There have been religious people who think my wife and I are controversial because we have studied and taught Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.  We even went to the Galapagos Islands where Darwin started to figure out Natural Selection.  On the other hand, there was one scientist we met who thought that we being believers in God was totally incompatible with scientific thought.

To these two sides of the argument I say that God is and always will be the greatest scientist.  There are things we do not understand clearly in scripture and there are things we do not clearly understand in science.  I'll admit that there are apparent incompatibilities between some scientific ideas and some religious ideas.  But I think that in the end we will see that there really are no incompatibilities, just our previously limited understanding of the complete picture.

So look at the huge lack of knowledge we have in Astronomy.  I am an armature astronomer and I know a little about this subject.  As we gain more knowledge about the universe we have discovered that apparently there is a huge amount of matter and energy that we know nearly nothing about...other than it must be there.  (Dark Energy and Dark Matter)  

Through the study of Biology and Paleontology we have come to understand so much about how Natural Selection gave us such a diversity of life, but many if not most of the life of the past is not known to us because everything did not get preserved as fossils.  Trying to understand the ecosystem of the Cretaceous or Jurassic Periods can only go so far because much of the biodiversity can only be guessed at.  In fact we have to infer a great deal about extinct ecosystems based on our modern ecosystems.  New discoveries frequently tell us that our scientific inferences were wrong.  One example is that we used to think the long necked Sauropod dinosaurs lived in swamps. Scientists learn new things all the time and revise their theories.

In religion we hope for happiness in the next life, but we rely on faith that it will be good for those of us who had faith and were good in mortality.  Many scientists are also religious and many feel that in their studies and research they are working on trying to find out the mysteries of God's creation.  My father, a physician and surgeon, called medical science Man's attempt to "subdue the Earth."  That does not mean destroy or wreck the Earth, it means control the Earth appropriately while we preserve it.  Vaccines subdue part of the Earth.  Central heating and air conditioning is subduing the Earth.  I was born with severe birth defects and my dad said the surgeons and other medical professionals were subduing the Earth by beating my birth defects and keeping me alive, (against all odds).
Yet my parents also prayed for the surgeons to be able to figure out what to do to save me, (since all the other babies, before me, with a tracheoesophageal fistula died).

So, faith AND medical science saved me...and continues to save me.  I just got a new T-tube put in last month to keep my collapsing windpipe (trachea) open.  My doctors gave me a choice of the
T-tube or try to stay alive with my trachea collapsing when I coughed or exerted myself at all. Through prayer I felt that the T-tube was the best choice.  It has turned out pretty good so far.  I am grateful to modern medical science and the Lord for the answer to my prayers.

We don't know how some apparent inconsistencies between science and faith will work out, but I believe that they WILL work out in the end.  We can speculate for answers.  I find that kind of fun. For instance, there are many ways you can conjecture how Adam and Eve came into existence.  A scientist might say that Adam and Eve could not have been real people, but what if they evolved and were the perfect end product for God to begin modern Mankind...so He, God, plucked a very young Adam and Eve from their respective villages and wiped much of their memories and placed them in the Garden of Eden.  Maybe (or probably) I'm way off with this speculation, but I know the evidence for evolution and even Human evolution is fairly strong, and yet I believe that Adam and Eve were real people.  So for me it is fun to think about it.  And YES I know this is a lot of speculation. . .
I'm not saying it is true, just some fun speculation.

What is frustrating to me is religious people who just dismiss the science and scientists as evil heretics and the scientists who just dismiss the religious people as deluded kooks.  As my wife says, "Someday God is going to take the scientists and religious people all together and say 'Now let me show you how I REALLY did it!'"

At the very least we can do without attacking the ideas of the other side of the religion vs science debate.  I take exception to a scientist who says there is no proof that there is a god.  Religion or perhaps faith are about believing in things that generally can't be proven physically.  Science is about collecting and analyzing the facts.  You can't take scientific facts and say it proves that faith is nonsense because faith is not about physical facts.  It is like a carpenter saying since he doesn't comprehend nuclear power then nuclear power can't be true.

I hope this does not offend any of my readers.  As a teacher I never used science to attack another's beliefs.  I DID say that these are the current theories and ideas of science and we were going to study them.  To people of faith I say: You can reject a hypothesis or even a theory, but don't reject others who accept the theory.  The same goes for scientists:  If you have a problem with the ideas of religion please remember that along with some bad, religion has done a lot of good in the world too.  You can keep you ideas and still respect people of faith.  True, some scientists do not believe in God. However, over the years I have met and known many scientists that were religious. This includes scientists from both religion sponsored universities AND  public universities.

So, often, to keep my ADHD brain focused in church I draw.  If there are nearby kids I give them some drawings to color: dinosaurs, unicorns, puppies, etc.  But, I also draw pictures from scripture stories or drawings like the below one of Jesus near Jerusalem.  I often like to draw a picture of Jesus as a young adult, before he started his ministry.  The other picture is of the mating dance of a type of bird found in the Galapagos Islands called Blue-Footed Boobies.

Religion Drawings

Jesus at 20 years old near Jerusalem

A neighbor of mine,11 year old Brielle, colored this drawing.

 She is very good!

 I have it framed and hanging on my wall in my art room.   

Jesus at about 25 years old again near Jerusalem

I know I'm kind of late with this, but I did this drawing

 from a photo of my daughter and grandchild. 

Science Drawings, from the Galapagos Islands

This is a quick drawing of Blue Footed Boobies doing their mating dance.

We saw these birds diving into the water at 45 mph. 

This is the photo I took in the Galapagos that I used to draw the below coloring page drawing. 

The drop of liquid off the end of the beak is hyper-tonic water or salt water.  Boobies use their nostrils to excrete excess salt.  They drink sea water and have to get rid of all that extra salt.  Also, they could not use their nostrils to breathe because they dive into the water at high speed and so if their nostrils were used for breathing they would drown when they dove for fish.  

The island across the water shows how some islands there in the 

Galapagos have many many volcanoes. 

Some of the islands have over 100 volcanoes!

Notice the drop of salty water off the end of the beak. 

All these drawings (that are not colored) are available on the Free Printable Downloads.