The Times provided a very informative and fairly balanced summary of the newly published Religious Beliefs and Attitudes of Maltese University Students Revisited - 2009 (June 22). As one who was indirectly involved in launching the preceding survey, I would like to take just one point which has always fascinated me.

It is the statement, "A scientific understanding of human life and the world has made a religious understanding superfluous" (Q35 l) and the agreement of a third of the respondents with it. Of course, I am not surprised; in fact, I expected even more agreement.

The reason that I expected that answer is that there is the idea, not only among atheists but also among Christians, that science and religious faith do not go together. This idea is partly founded on the unfortunate reaction of the Church to Galileo; his condemnation has been like an albatross hanging from the Church's neck ever since. It may also follow from the fact that many eminent scientists are atheists, some, like Richard Dawkins, even becoming propagators of atheism in the name of science. It seems to be lost on many that a number of scientists have been and are Christian believers.

Prof. John C. Lennox in his book God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? gives a whole list of contemporary Christian scientists. I was surprised to find among them a convert from atheism, Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, US. Prof. Lennox could have added Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne who are Anglican priests as well as scientists, along with the recently deceased George Lemaitre, a Catholic priest, professor at Louvain University, who first suggested the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. If there are so many atheists among scientists, it is certainly not because science and faith are incompatible or because science renders religion superfluous, even though science, especially Evolution, is brought up as their reason for atheism. An answer to this last apparent dilemma is attempted by Denis Alexander in Creation or Evolution - Do We Have to Choose?

He shows in detail how we can accept evolution as God's means of creation.

In his Preface, Dr Alexander states:"This is a book written by someone who is passionate about both science and the Bible, and I hope reading it will encourage you to believe, as I do that the Book of God's Word and the Book of God's Works can be held firmly together in harmony."