How Science Led Me Away From, Then Back To, God

Having just written an article on creationism/intelligent design and its incompatibility with evolutionary theory, I think that the scientific camp is going to feel let down after reading my current article. And yet, I find no contradiction with my scientific outlook on life and my increasing spirituality as I move headway into the third decade of my life. In fact, I am finding out that my increasing spiritual background lets me better understand, almost intuitively, various aspects of biology, chemistry, and physics. Furthermore, though I do conduct experiments to test out my "hunches", in many cases, those hunches actually prove true, thanks only to my prior meditation (premeditation?) on the Infinite.

I am not advocating any particular God, god/dess, or religion in this article. And while many of my colleagues may forever shun me after reading this clip, I would like to at least give a bit of personal background first, and then provide some arguments on why belief in something beyond ourselves in not only possible, but highly probable.

First, my background. Having sprung out (and I do mean that in every sense of the word) of a very religious, Catholic family, I went off to obtain my bachelor's in microbiology, and then my doctorate in genetics. There were two driving forces here: first, to use my education as a handy excuse to distance myself, as much as possible, from the sanctified views of all my family members. And secondly, having learned about such things as the Miller-Urey experiment (in a nut shell, the discovery that basic chemicals could form the building blocks of life), to finally prove that science could, in fact, answer all our questions about this universe.

Not much took me away from these two driving forces during the earning of my bachelor's degree. But once I embarked upon the doctorate, something started to change. Perhaps it was because, by the time I was halfway through my PhD, I had pretty much learned all that there was to learn in science. Anything further was uncharted territory, and it would be up to me to discover these hidden truths.