Has Science done away with a need for God?

[Kingpin]

What I am showing is that we see something with complexity, function and purpose and we immediately assume a mind behind it.  Do you not look at something as simple as a letter and assume someone with a mind produced it?  

I find it fascinating how we can take something simple as the internal combustion engine and assume there was a mind behind it, but see something infinitely more complex as the universe and say its pure chance with no need for an intelligence behind it?  I don't find that logic very convincing.

I think that human history shows that we did apply that thinking to the world around us early on; anything that could not be explained (mostly due to a lack of knowledge and understanding) we ascribed to supernatural powers of some kind.  Weather, disease, natural disasters, fire, lightning, and so on.  As human knowledge and understanding grew, we learned more.  We then sought out more knowledge and understanding and eventually developed the scientific method to try and make our learning more efficient.  Throughout the greater part of that history, people believed in gods and spirits and the supernatural, to the degree that scientists who made discoveries that did not support religious beliefs had to deal with their own doubts, as well as possible persecution from religious and political authorities.

It is in that context that men who sought after knowledge kept coming up with discoveries and theories and inventions that moved the world forward.  But they never came up with god.  And that's the thing.  Real science --applying the scientific method in order to learn more-- is neutral when it comes to god.  If science found god and verified his existence, this would not affect science in any way.  It might affect individual scientists --such as those who didn't believe in god, or those who realize that they've been following the wrong one-- but the application of the scientific method to help us learn more would continue unabated.  The fact that we keep coming up with explanations that neither include nor require god is notable in light of human history and our desire to find god.

It's not that we can't find god because we're skeptical.  We have become skeptical because we never find god.

A great deal of the founders of modern science, Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, etc were theists and continued to be after their discoveries and contributions.  Netwon wrote his Principia Mathematica in hopes that others might believe.  C.S. Lewis put it this way: Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature.  They expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law giver.  There are a great deal of scientists today that identify as Deists/Theists. 

Modern Scientists all agree that the universe had a beginning and further that it is a closed system.  Neither side can prove the cause of the beginning.  Science will continue to pursue in hopes to answer it by natural means and deist/theists espouse that there must be a creator that lies outside this system that put the whole thing in to motion.  

Modern science still ascribes to the universe being created from "nothing" and that definition of nothing is varying.  It cannot be explained and the only answer I've heard that I can accept is that we don't yet know.  Agreed but could that be classified as a "science of the gaps" argument?  We don't know but science will explain it.  Perhaps.  To me personally I find it much more plausible that there is a mind behind the beginning as I look at the universe and I see order, design and intelligence.