"Is being a scientist compatible with believing in God?"

One can be, the same way as you can have an honest politician, oxymorons aside...

I would have trouble with the research of anyone that was, the same as I have issue with any politician that is, they're obviously easily deluded. It's not a relativistic question, like what's your favorite colour, it's Q:"Do you believe in Santa Claus ?" A:"Yes I do."

It seems to me that there is no inherent contradiction. Gould tried to express this in his concept of "non-overlapping magisteria".

As a person with a strongly positivist intellectual modality I found this a very confronting idea. How could anybody take the idea that some things are not empirically definable? However, of late I've been compelled to do a lot of thinking about the subject for various reasons and I'm coming to the view that there is more to understanding than knowing what and how. There is also why.

Davidf put me onto EO Wilson's idea of eusociality, for which I'm grateful. I think it explains a lot of the proximal "why" about the higher purposes and finer feelings of people, just as religion and other moral philosophy has tried to do.

In other words, a belief in God is a means of expressing and encouraging the fundamental nature of people as parts of a greater whole in an accessible way.

The semantics are what matter.

Dear Banjo,

In your excursions into history there are parts I agree with and parts that I don’t. However, my article was about a response to Randall’s “confusion”, i.e. how a CONTEMPORARY scientist who believes in God MIGHT interpret divine action. Of course, if you do not believe in God, if you believe that reality that science has access to is all reality that there is, then the question of divine action does not arise, does not make sense.

Only a few remarks: Galileo was not a contemporary of John Paul II, so it is not fair to judge the contemporaries of the one on what the other said.

>>religion has no place in science and science has no place in religion. Science does not seek to contradict religion. Nor is it in competition with religion. <<

Well, I prefer the last two sentences of my article (although they are somewhat unrelated to the rest, as david f rightly pointed out), because not only “fundamentalist religions”, (more precisely theologians) make statements that belong to the realm of science, but also other "philosophically unsophiscated" individuals (including some scientists) think that science can answer questions that are of a worldview - in particular, but not exclusively, religious - nature.

AJ Philips,

Please accept that other people - those less educated than you as well as those with a broader perspective - subscribe to worldviews that you don’t like or don’t understand. Most of them don’t want you to change the basic premises of your worldview as a consequence of an online debate, and I think neither should you. Fundamental worldview premises - about what exists, what is reality - if scrutinized from an a priori opposite worldview position will naturally have to be dismissed. That follows from the very meaning of “opposite”.

A priori assumptions, as you put it, can be criticized and validated PROVIDED all agree on the meaning of all words used to express the assumption and its criticism. Otherwise it is just a monologue. For instance, you can criticise, validate, or what you want, somebody’s belief that “God exists” if you can agree with the believer on the meaning of the words “God” and “exists”. Both are fundamental concepts that cannot be unambiguosly defined. Physicists, or rather philosophers of physics, cannot even agree on the strict meaning of “matter exists” (just google for “does matter exist, physics”).

Valley Guy,

>>I would have trouble with the research of anyone that was (a scientist believing in God)<<

Well, you indeed would be in trouble since all research undertaken by atheist scientists necessarily builds on research by other scientists, some of whom believe (or believed if dead) in God. And vice versa.

Dear david f,

Thank you indeed for the Spinoza quote, though I am still not sure whether Spinoza used the word (natural) science, and if, how does that relate to our contemporary understanding of it. I admit I don't know much about Spinoza’s philosophy.

Now I can see why Spinoza is usually seen as something between a deist and a pantheist (a deist pantheist?). The same about Einstein: “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... “ in his letter to Rabbi Goldstein.

Dear George,

I am reading Spinoza as part of my study which hopefully will produce a history of the separation of religion and state. The scepticism of the Yanomamo is relevant to that. The roots of that separation go deep and also include Protagoras, the prophetic tradition in Judaism and Jesus’ injunction to render to Caesar and render to God what is appropriate to each.

Spinoza was the first secular modern man. He wound up living attached to no religious group. He gave lectures to a group of radicals who were officially part of the Dutch Reformed Church. The difficulty in understanding Spinoza is the difficulty in understanding any philosopher. Throughout their life they produce writing, and their later writing might contradict or negate their earlier writing. Spinoza wrote much biblical analysis of both the Jewish Bible and the New Testament. He wound up rejecting all historical narrative religion which makes his biblical analysis rather pointless except as a path leading to his rejection of all historical narrative religion. I am primarily interested in his ideas on the separation of church and state but am reading all of his work.

His personal life was apparently quite ascetic, and he can be regarded as a secular saint. He has been described as a “God-intoxicated” man, but his God does not necessarily have anything to do with the Bible. Spinoza wrote:

“The multitude ever prone to superstition and caring more for the shreds of antiquity than for eternal truths, pays homage to the books of the Bible, rather than to the Word of God.”

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Dear George,

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« ... if you believe that reality that science has access to is all reality that there is, then the question of divine action does not arise, does not make sense. “

If “divine action” is a reality, George, then I see no reason why science should not have access to it sooner or later.

Would you agree as a scientist ?

Naturally, if it is not a reality, but merely, as I understand it to be the case, the fruit of the imagination, then I see no reason why science should not be able to provide access to the human imagination as well, at sometime in the future.

My hunch is that this latter development will be rather sooner than later – on the cosmic time scale, of course.

So not to worry, George, if the worst comes to the worst, it won’t affect us.

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