To be a Christian is to bear witness to Christ. To bear such witness, no particular training is necessary. Christians need only to let Christ inspire their actions. They only need to “let their light - the light of Christ in their life - shine” so that others may see it and glorify God (Mt 5, 16).

To glorify God is to make him visible. It is what Jesus of Nazareth did. It is a call that obliges all Christians, and those Christians who take it seriously employ every ability and facility in their effort to make visible God’s love, his power, being, personhood, face, proximity and his relevance to human life.

The call to make God visible, as Jesus did and in his manner, obviously compels also those Christians whose respective professions count them among the empirical scientists.

No surprise that time and again such scientists and other intellectuals, in the course of their work, have been inspired to affirm God. Catholic astronaut Michael Hopkins saw the beauty of the earth from the International Space Station and later said: “It’s hard not to sit there and realize there has to be a higher power that made this.”

It is ridiculous of atheist scientists to proclaim the non-existence of God on the basis of empiricism

This is not to say that belief in “a higher power” or God was a factor in his scientific assessment of the universe. It is to say that the affirmation of God as creator arises spontaneously in those who go beyond scientific assessments. God lies beyond such assessments. God precedes science, makes it possible and is glorified in it.

As I said in my previous article, scientific investigation is self-governing and its procedural method is autonomous; faith or belief in God is extraneous to scientific procedure.

Fabiola Gianotti, who directs the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, states her belief in God and says that “science is absolutely compatible with faith”. She hastens to add that nevertheless “science and religion follow their separate ways”, which means that one does not encroach on the other.

It is ridiculous of atheist scientists to proclaim the non-existence of God on the basis of empiricism. They may do it on the basis of ideology or philosophy, but... empirical science?

As Gianotti and so many leading scientists unhampered by ideology have often said, “science can never prove the existence or non-existence of God”.

In his interesting response to my article on ‘Faith and Reason’ (May 13), Joseph Caruana speaks of the unease he feels when he hears talk about the compatibility of faith with science.

I had actually spoken of reason, which is different from science, but the issue is almost the same. The question remains: is faith compatible with reason, which is after all a basic tool for any scientific activity? I feel no unease stating that it is.

I have learned not to be surprised when I read about scientists who not only find it difficult to sit at ease with Christians but would go further and say that Christians cannot be scientists, real scientists anyway.

It seems that for some humanist ideologues, among whom I do not count Caruana, the litmus test for a scientist to be a real scientist is to affirm the conflict, existential or intellectual, between religion and reason or science.

The sequitur of this stand, which I don’t say that Caruana implies, would be that Georges Lemaître, the father of the Big Bang hypothesis, was not a real scientist. This Belgian scholar, far from seeing any incompatibility between faith and science, when still in the course of his scientific training, decided to become a Catholic priest.

Becoming a priest not only did not hinder his scholarship, it actually enhanced it. It served him well because it afforded him the advantage of doing studies in philosophy. The problem with atheist scientists is generally their lack of training in philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology.

Too often modern scientists - the charlatanesque Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion is one of them - drift into headliners which they describe as deriving from science but which are not and cannot be the result of experiments that, as scientists point out, should yield physical and repeatable results.

How can the affirmation or denial of God’s existence arise from the scientists’ experimental remit? It cannot. If it could at all - and here I am not saying that it may - empirical science might only necessarily presume God’s existence given that we exist and on our own we will never be able to explain our own origins. But even in this case empirical science would be intruding in metaphysics.

The universe can of course lead to God but only when it is considered at the higher level of transcendental, philosophical and theological reflection.

As Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory said, when scientists who have no training in philosophy try to philosophise, they only embarrass themselves.

Besides rejecting the compatibility between faith and reason, that like others I affirm, Caruana claims a monopoly that I cannot concede: that of the alleged inability of those who lack training “as a scientist” to engage in the subject.

This objection is rooted in the inclination of empirical scientists to restrict scientific scholarship to their specific area of activity. Empirical science is a noble and amazing activity that, a layman in the subject, I happily embrace and value.

But science includes a wide range of disciplines, not just empirical knowledge. Science, it has been said, takes up every human activity, from physics to stamp collecting. Physics and zoology are sciences. So are philosophy, history and theology. To the diversity of science, that is, of knowledge, corresponds a diversity of ways to it. The science of God has its own procedures. Transcendental experience is the most basic.

Admittedly, religion in general has not always grasped clearly the boundaries between faith and science. In the case of the Christian world, this started to happen in the early Middle Ages with some fallbacks that came with the Reformation. The effects of the latter are still felt.

As a Catholic I reject the Evangelical fundamentalism of literal Bible reading. I also reject the Protestant voluntarism of a God who - as Caruana puts it - violates natural law at his whim or, as Muslims would have it, can arbitrarily act against reason.

Catholicism offers the best, the most resourceful and the most comprehensive system of knowledge to date. What it has given to humanity over its 2,000-year history bears this out.

It has embraced preceding knowledge. It has sought hitherto inaccessible information, explored buried history, challenged established fact sheets and addressed mystery itself. It has always been, and remains, in search of the truth. It strives for the truth in the confidence that we are already possessed by it. By The Truth, that is.

God’s glory requires Christians to do no less, and with the momentous legacy of the Catholic Church we are all the richer.

Mgr Joseph Farrugia is a senior lecturer at the University of Malta.