Last year Stephen Hawking released his book, The Grand Design, which purported to explain why a creator is unnecessary. The claim is based on the premise that the universe's existence is a result of M-theory, which suggests that the collision of two membranes could have caused the Big Bang.
While Hawking's M-theory proposal may well be valid, it raises the question of whether the existence of God can be disproved by science. While many scientists support such a view, others disagree. As science has progressed into the 21st century, a growing number of scientists have begun to explore the complementary nature of science and religion.
John Polkinghorne, a theologian and scientist from Cambridge University and co-author of Questions of Truth: Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief, recently shed light on a new, harmonising model of science and religion.
Polkinghorne claims that the 20th century saw the death of a merely mechanical view of the world, and 21st century science has re-opened the possibility of a world that is random, unpredictable and cloudy at times; not because of the absence of God, but due to the fact that God designed a world with the ability to create and act freely, according to its nature.
Yet Polkinghorne suggests that such a world, with the capacity for change and creativity, is indicative of a god who does not intervene in magical ways. For example, the earth's crust, as a result of God's design, is free to behave in accordance with its nature. This may lead to earthquakes and tsunamis, but nonetheless the earth is free to act in its own way, just as we are free to act in ours.
The unpredictability of nature, therefore, is bound up in the very essence of its design.
The terms 'cloudy' or 'unpredictable' may not match up to the rigid, clear-cut science you were taught in high school. But neither is science always rigid or predictable. As Polkinghorne points out, the quantum world is anything but.
Quarks are particles smaller than protons and neutrons. Their properties are entirely random, and no one has ever isolated a single quark in the lab.
Thus, the discovery of the quark was an interesting experiment in faith. Several properties of the physical world could only be explained by the