Researching Creation

Christian Scientist Featured in Science Careers

JB

UPDATE - original link broken - now fixed.

A friend of mine forwarded me this very cool profile of a scientist, Imre Miklós Szilágyi, in the Science Careers section of Science's website.  Here's an excerpt:

Szilágyi sees his religious faith and his research efforts as two complementary aspects of his life. Within the scientific environment, "I have some options where I can express my faith," Szilágyi says. He directly referred to God both in the acknowledgements of his master's and doctoral dissertations and while receiving his awards. He runs a Bible-study group for young adults, and together with a friend he founded a Christian scientific group.

But although Szilágyi's views often lie far outside the scientific mainstream, he expresses those views only off-campus and in his personal time. For him, "the debate over evolution, design, creation, supernatural intelligence, etc., is not a scientific question in the first place but the collision of worldviews, the confrontation of materialism and idealism," he says. He takes the Bible literally, but when he lectures on the subject--outside of work--he presents what he calls "the options" and indicates which one "to me … seems to be more probable." But he insists that it is up to "everybody to make his or her own decision."

"As a Christian who works in the field of science, I find it quite important to deal with the relation of Christianity and science," Szilágyi says. But "I know that it is a minefield in today's scientific life and can be quite dangerous for one's scientific career. ... Therefore, I do these activities absolutely separately from my university work. … I am very cautious and careful that whenever I am talking [about these issues] I do not represent my university.

"My belief is very important for my career because this is the first thing that gives me my motivations so that I could work hard and I could achieve the best I can," Szilágyi says.

Anyway, the article is very nonspecific about this person's beliefs, but it is very encouraging that Science would publish something like this.  I'm starting to sense a sea change.  There are simply too many people who see the obviousness of God's design in nature for the scientific establishment to be in such denial.  I imagine that students are starting to see this, and what is a professor to do?  Fail his whole class?  There is definitely a sea change forming, though it may take a generation for it to fully take hold.

For those of us who are Creationists, this also means that the evolutionists' rhetoric will now help us.  Since the evolutionary biology community has spent the last 15 years chanting "ID is Creationism", as ID starts to take hold, this will actually be implicit support for us, too.  If ID is Creationism, then support for ID and tolerance for ID will hopefully lead to tolerance for Creationism as well.