We in the Christian community have fallen into a black hole of silence.

 …it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions…

  - Sir Isaac Newton, Principia

Give thanks to the Lord of lords…to him who made the great lights, for his steadfast love endures forever; the sun to rule over the day, for his steadfast love endures forever; the moon and stars to rule over the night, for his steadfast love endures forever.

  - Psalm 136:3, 7-9

Sir Isaac has just been elaborating the regular patterns of the motions of planets and other heavenly bodies. This is in the context of his explaining gravity and how it works. But, he continues, “though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.”

That statement, Newton’s lead-in to the quote that opens this article, would not have caused a stir in his day. Even though he was in the midst of a hugely important scientific treatise, the idea that something other than “mere mechanical causes” was at work in or upon the cosmos would have been part of the intellectual consensus of his day.

And that certainly not because Newton and his colleagues were a bunch of backwoods rubes who didn’t know how to think about, you know, really important stuff.

But Newton is not finished. He continues: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must all be subject to the dominion of One…”

Again, no reader would have thought Sir Isaac had lost it at the Creation Museum or whatever. This was the most brilliant mind of his generation, and his brilliance stemmed in no small part from his faith.

Newton’s passing expression of faith, in the midst of a scientific treatise, is typical of what we find in the writings of these early scientists. They believed in God. They understood that the creation could not exist apart from Him. They were quite comfortable with Him being given appropriate acknowledgement, credit, and even praise, right smack in the midst of very sophisticated reports and studies of a scientific nature.

It is true, the intellectual consensus has changed from the days of Isaac Newton. Leading scientists no longer consider God a necessary component in their scientific reasoning, and so much the better for that, given the enormous moral baggage that comes with acknowledging God.

But God is still at work in the cosmos and still managing and upholding the creation He has made. We who believe in Him know this – at least, we profess to believe it. However, do we assert this as part of our work in the sciences – or the arts, education, government, or any other public sphere? Or have we tacitly, at least, agreed to the “ground rules” of our secular age, so that we keep our musings about God, and especially about His role in our particular discipline or field of study, to ourselves and among like-minded friends?

At some point we’re going to have to recognize that, when it comes to talking about God as He relates to our work in the sciences, through all the various avenues available to us, we in the Christian community have fallen into a black hole of silence, imposed upon us by our unbelieving age, yet acquiesced in by our timidity, lack of skill, or both.

Yes, it will take courage to return God to His rightful place in the professional and academic disciplines. But that’s true for every area of life. We can’t just continue talking about God within the safe confines of those who share our belief in Him. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard understood that the West had ejected God from its mindset, but he insisted this was folly. He boldly declared that looking to God was the West’s only hope of deliverance from its tailspin of doubt and decay. He was vilified by all for his pains.

So we get vilified by our peers. Are we willing to suffer the outrage of colleagues for the sake of truth? Was Newton right? Was David right? And if so, what right do we have not to represent the truth at every opportunity, by every means, before every audience, come what may?

We look to Newton as a father of modern physics. Perhaps we should look to him also as an exemplar of faith in practice.