Searching for Truth and God

THE NOBEL PRIZE in physics was awarded recently, and one of the two scientists who shared in the award is a Quaker. Joe Taylor and one of his students, Russell Hulse, discovered the first known binary pulsar. A pulsar is a "collapsed star," a star which has fallen in on itself ...The discovery is important because it lends support to Einstein’s theory of relativity....

I can remember the day nearly 20 years ago when Joe Taylor made his discovery.

One Sunday morning at worship, Joe came bouncing in the door-there is no other word to describe his energy. He sat down next to me and we settled into the quiet of unprogrammed worship. As we sat there, I could feel how excited Joe was about something—he was literally quivering with barely-suppressed excitement. The whole bench was shaking/quaking.

After a few minutes, Joe stood up and told the group about the discovery he and one of his students had made the night before. I didn't understand how important the discovery was at the time, but I remember the heart of Joe’s message. To him all scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world.

It has taken the rest of the world and the Nobel Prize Committee a long time to catch of with the purely scientific significance of the discovery. How long will it take the world to catch up with its spiritual significance? All of the various disciplines which seek to discover or to express the truth. ..have a basically religious impulse. Whoever searches for truth is also searching, one way or another, for God.
—Joshua Brown, 1993.

Return to our Page