In fact, the quoted sentence doesn't make much sense. There are plenty of people who who believe in a creator and work in science, and they're not simply laboring with a massive, unacknowledged contradiction.
I posted an article on that subject to this list some years ago. The initial grafs follow. The full article is in the list archives at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2003/2003-June/016528.html>. --CGE
"In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.
"To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science -- I don't mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.
"It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It Is perfectly possible to say we now have science (we didn't have It In the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that, by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning. In this century we have seen totalitarian societies which have been extremely keen on improving their technology and answering detailed questions within the accepted framework of science, but extremely hostile to the kind of radical thinking I am envisaging; the kind of society where Wernher von Braun Is honoured and Einstein is exiled. I also think that the same effect can be produced in more subtle ways in societies that don't look totalitarian. And of course it was notoriously produced In the Church confronted by Galileo. The asking of radical questions is discouraged by any society that believes in itself, believes it has found the answers, believes that only its authorised questions are legitimate.
Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can, of course, say: well, wait and see: you will find that in spite of everything, science will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that our whole world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine. But that is just to assert your belief. And this I think is parallel to asserting your belief in God. I think a belief in God -- in the sense of a belief in the validity of the kind of radical question to which God would be the answer -- is a part of human flourishing and that one who closes himself off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I welcome, such belief in God, but what I am asking myself now is not whether I believe, but what grounds I have for such belief. And here again I think the analogy with proving the validity of fundamental thinking in science is helpful. How, after all, do we show that there is still a long and probably unexpected road to travel in science? By pointing to anomalies in the present scientific world picture. If your world picture includes, for example, the idea of ether as the medium in which light waves occur, then there is an anomaly if it turns out to be impossible to determine the velocity of a light source with respect to the ether; and so on. Now in a parallel way, it seems to me, proofs for the existence of God point to anomalies in a world picture which excludes the God question. It is, it seems to me, quite anomalous to hold that while it is legitimate and valid to ask 'How come?' about any particular thing or event in the world, it is illegitimate and invalid to ask it about the whole world. To say that we aren't allowed to ask it merely because we can't answer it seems to me to be begging the question. The question is: Is there an unanswered question about the existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of the world instead of nothing? I can be and am; and this is to be puzzled about God..."
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