A well-known (to astrophysicists, anyway) 20th century astrophysicist who believed in God was Georges Lemaitre- he was an astrophysicist (he came up with the idea of the Big Bang) and a Catholic priest.
I have personally known a number of the top mathematicians of the 20th century and, hard as it is for me to credit, at least one or two were really believers. When I say top, I mean among the top 20 or 30 of the century. Of the rest, most either said nothing of their beliefs or made it clear that they were non-believers.
No, I will give no cites (and no names either) and if you don’t believe me that is your problem
Hmmm. My education must be lacking. I recognize none of these names.
Synthesizing the data here and from what I have read about religiosity among those who go to college, those with advanced degrees, etc, it seems that the smarter you are the less likely to believe in god you are. However, the the chance never seems to hit zero no matter how smart the subset of the population.
They’re various religious study professors. I can’t independently vouch for any of their beliefs, though.
Then why even post here if you aren’t even going to try to support your lies?
They’re philosophers and anthropologists — quintessential thinkers. You can Google any of them and probably Wiki most. They may not all be famous, but in their fields they are well respected. The OP asked for people who “can be a genius and believe in a higher being”, not necessarily pop-science idols and entertainers. Lots of great contemporary names have been brought up in this thread.
Most are more generally accomplished as well, which is why I included them. Like Richard M. Jaffe, for instance, who has done pioneering research in computer languages (especially Fortran) and scheduling algorithms for parallel processes.
I’ll mention one of my college professors, Frank J. Tipler www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/.
I don’t know about his personal faith, but he is trained as a mathematical physicist and seems to do his work in the area of the mathematical physics of God, immortality and miracles. I had him for two classes, one a seminar on his book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. I didn’t follow everything in that seminar, but there were times when he appeared to be writing mathematical proofs of God’s existence on the chalkboard.
He also filled in to teach my calculus class for a few weeks. I didn’t follow all of that, either.
The Roman Catholic Church’s religeous order known as the Society of Jesus, a.k.a. the Jesuits, are a highly educated order known for teaching in universities and other schools of higher learning.
John Polkinghorne is a pretty interesting guy.
Kenneth Miller, one of the staunchest opponents of creationist nonsense, is a devout Roman Catholic.
I don’t have a Snap-On Handy-Cite[sup]TM[/sup] like Bricker is demanding for the main topic, but I did hear an interview where she alluded to making more than $100k a year for her column. A friend of mine in the business believes, based on her per-article cost for the paper they work for, that she could make juuuuuuust a wee bit more than that.
[QUOTE=Anne NevilleThis article says that a 1997 survey done by Nature showed that 40% of scientists believe in a personal god that you could pray to.[/QUOTE]
Yes, but the more prestigious the scientist, the less likely they are to believe in god. A similar survey shows that only 7% of members of the National Academy of Science believed in a personal god.
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**Derleth, ** this kind of post is inappropriate for GQ. You know this.
Colibri
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It does seem that atheists are better represented among the well-educated than among the population at large (I wouldn’t read too much into this), but you’d have to have a pretty insular perspective, I think, to not realize theism, of some stripe or another, is still very popular, even among the cream of the intellectual crop. It may drop from “almost everyone in the world” to just “reasonably common among smart people”, but the idea that it would drop to zero is just ridiculous.
Werner Von Braun became a devout Protestant after the war. God knows he had a lot to repent.
How about Mark Noll, the historian?
I’m not saying they don’t, but do you have evidence they all believe in God?
Ah, speaking of computer scientists: Donald E. Knuth.