Listen / Read
We’ve heard this before, of course. From Wilkinson on occasion, as well as from Atkins, who boasts of her physicist brother (or something like that). Others have touched on the subject of religion versus science also. The purpose is to say ‘look, I’m religious, but I don’t believe the Earth is 6,000 years old anything. Science is fab. Science is God’s greatest wonder. Amen.’
Science and religion are in conflict in our culture because they’ve been in conflict, as Wilkinson mentioned, since the dawn of science. Religion had its conception of the universe, science refuted that. Some believers refuse to accept what science has proven and some, like Wilkinson, fit their religious beliefs into the gaps in our knowledge of the universe, despite everything we have learnt thus far pointing farther and farther away from supernatural causes.
Like Wilkinson says, the wonder of the universe does not prove God. And nor does it suggest God. Wilkinson, being Christian, has God in the heavens suggested to him by scripture. He approaches the science with those preconceptions, just like those who studied nature once did so comfortable in the knowledge that the individual design of each species was the handiwork of God. Then Darwin proved otherwise.
So it was that even Newton attributed those things he could not explain about the universe to be the business of God. Anything that cannot yet be explained leaves humans wondering. Those who have been conditioned by a given school of religious thinking attribute those wondrous mysteries to God, rather than our current cognitive and technological limitations.