While recently watching an episode of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, a connection emerged between religion and science. In an episode entitled “What Are We Really Made of?” the viewer is taken deep into CERN, and shown the tunnel where the Large Hadron Collider slithers like a 17-mile metallic snake coiling back on itself. In a quest for what ultimately constitutes sub-atomic particles, the script informs us, when the Collider is up to full speed it will recreate conditions as they were nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Scientists will be witnesses to creation itself. Their book of Genesis, however, will not be as easy to read as the one we currently have.

From CERN's website; the apocalyptic LHC

CERN represents perhaps the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever built. And the Kepler Space Telescope, one of the far-sighted members of our arsenal of understanding, has discovered rocky planets like our own 2,000 light years away. When the light of their sun left, Christianity was just beginning. Since then, millions of earthlings have died because of religious fanaticism. The deeper we peer, the less unique we become. Life is surely out there, and maybe building cyclotrons larger than CERN. The more we populate the universe, the lonelier we feel.

Kepler's guide to planets, from NASA

Scientists are also closing in on the creation of life itself. Working with self-replicating collectively autocatalytic peptide sets, they are nearing the point where we might say life has emerged independently in a laboratory. Where might religion be then? Human initiative in discovering the secrets of nature has balanced a divine creator on a precarious precipice. If life may emerge from a large soup of non-living peptides, and if we push the moments from the Big Bang back to merest fractions of a second while waving to our neighbors light-years away, have we consigned God to the unemployment line? I feel in better company now, although the light may have taken eons to arrive this far.