Childhood: Science, Christianity

In this blogpost I briefly summarize my childhood interests.

My father was a university professor.

My mother was a science teacher, history teacher and accountant....

My childhood home in Houston, Texas, USA, was full of books. 

My mother taught me to read before I began school.

I loved pictures of planets and galaxies. (How big the universe was!!)

I saw the rings of Saturn through a small telescope. 

We watched the first satellite go overhead our home in Houston.

I drew pictures of the constellations.

I used a primitive handheld counter to count through the integers. 

I watched thunderstorms and lightning move slowly across the Chisos Mountains in West Texas.(See the beautiful volcanic dome in the background!) 

I did childish experiments with pillbugs in my backyard in Houston.

In high school I wrote a paper on amino acids. I decided to be a microbiologist!

In high school I also photocopied the first 100,000 digits of pi from the nearby college library!

My parents' religious life was sporadic. Beginning when I was about eight, we began attending a church. 

In my teens I had a friend, Tim, who was my competitor for "smartest" (nerdiest?) high school student. 

Tim and I challenged each other regularly. (He was Sheldon Cooper and I was Leonard Hofstadter -- or the other way around?)

Tim invited me to his church and I began attending regularly. There I came to believe 

• that the Creator of the Universe personally cared for me,
• that God had entered His universe in human form,
• and set up a system in which I was freed to enter His kingdom. 

In retrospect, that is pretty wild. (I'll say more later.)

So I made a conscious decision to be a disciple of Jesus, and, as a member

of His Kingdom, place all my brokeness under God's control, relying on a promised gift of forgiveness and personal renewal.

Several small changes occurred at the time.

(1) Over several months I discovered I liked other people and I really began to care for others.... so I lost some of my nerdy shyness.

(2) I began to question and then discard the racism I inherited from my upbringing in Texas.

(3) I was still very deeply in love with the universe. (At no time did I sense a conflict between my religious beliefs and my beliefs about science.)

Through 50+ years as a Christian and 47 years as a professional mathematician, my Christian life and my love of science have strengthened each other.

It is common to claim that Christianity and Science are in conflict. Are they? Are the Bible and Science truly in conflict? 

I want to examine that question in four parts:

• What does the Bible says about our universe?
• What does Science say about our universe?
• What does the Bible NOT say?
• What does Science NOT say?