God the Master Scientist COVID-19, Pandemics and Reconciling Religious Faith With Science

Accommodationists insist that during crisis moments like the current COVID-19 pandemic, scientists should lead with research and innovation while the believers should pray to God to bestow scientists with the knowledge to produce the needed vaccines.

Accommodationists approach pandemics with an understanding that prioritizes both religious faith and science. In this school of thought, there is an underlying agreement that science is important for human flourishing, and that it is equally important to admit that the search for objective truth has led scientists to questions that science cannot answer. Science, for accommodationists, cannot address all the questions that exist. It cannot answer why there is ‘something’ instead of nothing. It cannot explain how and why inanimate matter can organize to contemplate itself.

Unlike the advocates of science-centrism, accommodationists do not believe in ideological scientism or the uncritical application of science to all human situations, including those that are not amenable to the scientific method. Instead, accommodationists would argue that the vaccines that will cure diseases like the novel coronavirus will come from scientists, but that the scientific knowledge needed for that invention is based on God’s design. God’s omnipotence is a part of the equation—the reason why, for example, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica failed to account for why the planets tugging at each other’s orbits have not made the solar system collapse into the sun.

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