Well, Dawkins believes it is immoral to NOT abort Down Syndrome babies, and Hawking said that "the universe created itself." So, when they make fun of Christians, it is a massive case of projection, as they so richly ridicule themselves. :-)

Seriously, Van der ventel above is like the great scientist of old who knew that objective truth is only grounded by the One Who is Truth and that all truth, God's Word or good science, is God's Truth and thus cannot self-contradict. His call for Christians to engage seriously in apologetics and STEM fields should not be underestimated or neglected. Too often, even strong conservative churches have held an anti-intellectual bias against such endeavors, to our shame, myself included. Since God literally owns all truth, it is a mistake for us Christians to neglect that which He gives us in general revelation. (Psalm 19:1-6 and Romans 1:19-20 come immediately to mind here.) Here are a few scientists, many who formed the core of the Scientific Revolution, who chose to investigate general revelation precisely because such work glorified God:

Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galilei, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz (a brilliant theologian-apologist too), Boyle, Faraday (a pretty awesome fundamentalist preacher too, BTW), Mendel, Lister, Pasteur, Babbage, Maxwell, Stokes, Riemann, Joule, Linnaeus, Kelvin, Planck, Einstein (a deist only, non-Christian), von Braun (a creationist got us to the moon - with God's help of course! :-)), etc.