Many great scientists believe in God

I found it incredulous that Julie Payette used her prestigious position as Governor General to insensitively deride people for their beliefs. Have her professional achievements as an engineer and an astronaut given her the authority to denigrate those Canadians who still stand on a firm faith foundation and believe in the God of heaven who rules over all the kingdoms in all the nations?

Perhaps she is unaware of the fact that numerous great scientists of the past believed in God, among them such famous names as Kepler (astronomy), Pascal (hydrostatics), Newton (calculus), Faraday (electromagnetics), Kelvin (thermodynamics), to name just a few. And, no doubt with her mockery of those still questioning whether life was a divine intervention she may not want to admit that there are many astronauts such as John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Jerry Carr, Charlie Bassett, James Irwin, etc. who are devout Christians, awed at seeing the glory of God’s creation from space and convinced that there is powerful evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer who created the universe and is the author of life.

I would like to encourage Julie Payette to use her God-given gifts to explore that amazing dimension more fully and realize that our natural world is orderly and therefore capable of systematic investigation. “A learned society is a better society,” Payette said, but along with her “deep faith that knowledge, research and truth is a foundation for any free, stable, successful society,” I trust she will not dismiss the spiritual dimension lest she also end up “in an echo chamber, just listening to what (she wants) to hear.” Joyce Schmidt, Saskatoon