Russia Today carried a story that I liked a lot:
"An amateur astronomer from the Russian Republic of Adygea has built his own planetarium out of locally available materials. Victor Matyushin, a Baptist priest, explains the structure of the universe to his visitors, including from a religious point of view.... When the lights go off, the mystery of space unfolds. Using home-made projection devices, Matyushin shows his visitors Saturn and its rings, the sun and the stars. He says some guests are so fascinated that they come back several times. The place is open to everyone and free for all.... At 76, Viktor is full of hope that someday he’ll be able to save money for modern astronomy equipment. So he can share with his guests - young and old - even more secrets of the universe."
A religious person who also has a passion for science? That's not hard to believe at all. Civilization needs more of them.
While not necessarily going for the entire universe, this gives me an excuse to steal from Fark and post. I was going to ask AL to post this as part of the "Discovery" of the header:
Original site
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One of my favorites
"The more I study science, the more I believe in God." —Albert Einstein
I am guessing that the point is... religion and science are logically incompatible (one based on empirical evidence, the other on faith) and here we have them co-existing, perhaps thriving, in one person - therefore they are not incompatible. This notion might follow if human thought was exclusively rational, and therefore consistent, but it is not. The dichotomous nature of human thought and behavior (some rational, some not) is the reason that two otherwise incompatible notions can co-exist in one person. When they do, it says more about human thought processes than it does about any congruence of the disciplines.
I recall giving myself a massive headache trying to disprove the philosophy of strict determinism while a student many years ago, but I could not do so rationally. None-the-less, then and now, I live my day to day life as if there was free will. This does not mean that free will and strict determinism are compatible; just that we human beings are not the strictly rational beings we usually purport to be.
Another example would be that of John Dobson, for whom the Dobsonian telescope design was named.
Not a christian, as I recall, but still qualifying I think. this is the Wikipedia entry for him with the usual caveat about the unreliability of Wikipedia.