Alan Honour begins his book Cave of Riches: The Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls<\/em>\u00a0with how young\u00a0Muhammid Ahmed el-Hamed (of the\u00a0Ta’amireh Bedouin tribe) was searching for his stray goat when he stopped to throw a rock in a hole. He heard the rock shatter something that sounded like pottery, and this near-aimless act led to what might be the greatest discovery of the 20th century<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A second remarkable story is less dramatic, but its implications are almost as important as the first. According to Honour, archaeologists at the Wadi Qumran dig sent a piece of linen cloth that they found in one of the excavated rooms to Dr. Willard F. Libby at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago for Carbon-14 dating<\/a>. These scientific tests proved that the Dead Sea Scrolls were at least a thousand years older than the oldest known biblical manuscript of that time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, left behind by the ancient Essenes <\/a>at Wadi Qumran (in what is today the disputed West Bank area), meant that an issue of faith suddenly became strengthened by facts<\/a>. The scrolls affirmed the accuracy of many Old Testament books in the Bible. More than this, the discovery at Wadi Qumran ended much of the debate surrounding the historical authenticity of the Bible. Dr. Libby’s accurate Carbon-14 tests proved that the oldest scrolls dated back to the\u00a0Hellenistic era of the Second Temple, perhaps 250 years before the birth of Jesus, and thus could not have been concocted by partisans of Jesus to retroactively prove his messiahship. This is what critics in both learned and fashionable circles often claimed.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Alan Honour’s story of the Carbon-14 dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrates that if you are a religious person, if faith is an extension of who you are,\u00a0<\/span>then you should consider studying the sciences. Whether you are struggling with choosing biology or social psychology as an academic major, or contemplating the further development of an amateur<\/em>\u00a0(from the French, ‘lover of’) interest in space engineering or environmental studies, the sciences have much to offer a person of faith.<\/span><\/p>\n Has someone told you that science is anti-religion or religion is anti-science? Do not allow this to dissuade you. Many who profess to be \u2018pro-science\u2019 cannot tell you the difference between\u00a0carbon monoxide<\/em>\u00a0(a poisonous exhaust) and\u00a0carbon dioxide<\/em>\u00a0(a naturally-occurring gas that is an important resource for botanical life on this planet). Likewise, cultural religionists who discourage honest inquiry forget that all faith deals with questions of purpose and existence.<\/span><\/p>\n As a religious person, University of Chicago professor Wayne C. Booth<\/a> argues that you have more in common with scientists than you realize. In his book\u00a0The Rhetoric of Rhetoric<\/em>, Booth draws on his experience as a literary critic and teacher of rhetoric to argue that there were seven \u2018warrants\u2019 (or common assumptions) that scientists share with religious people.<\/span><\/p>\n Warrant One: The Flawed World<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Most religions agree that something has gone wrong with creation, and science has its own version of\u00a0The Fall<\/em>. As Booth puts it, \u201cThe world as we experience it is somehow flawed.\u201d Prince Hamlet asks this existential question for all human beings<\/a>: “<\/span>And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?<\/em>“<\/span><\/p>\n Shakespeare echoes the questions of religious people who must simultaneously acknowledge the marvelousness of creation with its fallenness. Similar to Hamlet, the awareness of flaws leads scientists to ask existential questions: What is the universe made of? What is consciousness? What distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom?<\/span><\/p>\n Warrant Two: The Measure of All Things<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n According to Booth, religious persons and scientists think that \u201cflaws are seen in the light of the Unflawed,\u201d which means that \u201cstandards of judgement of the brokenness exist somewhere.\u201d For monotheistic religions, God is the standard for his fallen creation, but scientists have their own measure of comparison. What the \u2018unflawed\u2019 means for a scientist is that we learn what is wrong with a diabetic body by contrasting it with a nondiabetic body, a unsanitary environment with a salubrious one, and so forth. However, as\u00a0this example from a 1971 social psychology experiment gone wrong<\/a>\u00a0illustrates, a person can also embody truth for a scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n