Since “scientist” is such a broad and encompassing term I think you don’t really understand what you are asking. I am married to a bio-chemist and in pharmacy school and he is strong in our church. Most of our friends are studying dentistry and medicine (we are all mostly students) and they all go to church with us. They would all be considered scientists, yet are all very strong on our church. I think you are trying to vilify science, and make religion and science adversarial when they don’t have to be. I myself am a social scientist and again, very strong in my church.
Is there bigger fan handwaving than the concept of faith when God routinely does crazy stuff in the Bible? Even a cool guy like Moses wasn’t totally convinced until God manifested as a burning bush. But us plebs are expected to just believe? Sure, let me see Vegas turned into a pillar of salt first. Or God can appear in my living room and wrestle me.
The only thing religious people ever end up successfully demonstrating in debates like this is how easily the human mind can twist logic and ignore reality when it threatens its preconceptions.
It’s not just the Bible, though. For a group of people that are supposed to operate on faith, they sure pack their stories, both fiction and “non-fiction” with miracles. It’s a rare Christian movie that doesn’t contain at least one miracle, and almost every television show that concerns itself with the Christian god has them by the dozens.
I would posit that not only are more educated people more likely to not believe, but lower education people tend to have an unwavering commitment to it.
All IMO and observation of course.
Scientists are a self selecting group. People who want to devote their whole lives to making observations about the material world are apt to think that the only things of importance are observable things about the material world.
When you have a really great hammer everything starts to look like a nail.
Most religions make all kinds of claims about the material world and how their mythological forces affect it. People who devote their whole lives to making observations about the material word are thus, surely, the best qualified to make judgements on the validity of any such teachings. If you stripped out every element of Christianity that the material world can tell is is clearly false, you’re left with little more than some kind of deism.
Well, a while ago in Europe not being a Christian was not conducive to your health. Still, I’ve read a book of original scientific papers stretching from Copernicus to 1800. It is striking that in the earlier papers there were ample references to God as being the prime move behind all of this - this had pretty much vanished by the time of the later papers. Not that scientists then were atheists, just that they found natural explanations not requiring any miracles. Why the change? Because when you have no clue about how the earth began, God might be a good answer, but as you started finding the evidence god no longer is necessary. The devil neither.
The late growth of atheism is I think directly related to the fact that it is okay to be out of the closet, especially in the scientific community.
Strawmen always make this debate tiresome.
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Not all Christians are fundamentalist. Not all Christians interpret the Bible literally. Most Christians in the US are neither.
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Scientists are not creatures of pure logic and rationality.
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Christianity and Science are not at odds with each other.
If your arguments or questions presume anything like those, you’re on the wrong track. Don’t lump all Christians or all Scientists together. Narrow your focus to something specific.
Debates like this always remind me that the world would be a better place if science would stick to the “how’s” and religion would stick to the “why’s.” Every time they try to reach outside their natural domains, they end up looking silly.
My understanding is that doubt in Christianity is acknowledged as something people feel, but it is a negative and is supposed to be conquered by faith. Doubt in science however is a positive, and is conquered - but only to a certain extent - by evidence. In fact the very first thing you doubt is your own work. You are supposed to create experiments which can prove that your hypothesis is incorrect. Not much of that in Christianity, besides devil’s advocate. Then the whole review process is designed to subject your paper to doubters. That’s why you learn to write a bulletproof paper unless you want to get it rejected.
Someone supporting by conclusions by faith in a scientific paper would have it rejected so fast its mass would increase significantly.
Science gives us solid evidence for the hows and whys-Religion gives us “GODDIDIT”. If science shines a light that exposes a “mystery” that religion relies on to survive, it’s all to the good. Perhaps if you gave an example where science is unreasonably intruding on religion?
What do you consider not observable - and how can we saying anything about this stuff? Scientists read literature - probably more often than most English majors read science. But if we want to say something interesting about the world we need to study things we can observe - otherwise we are just blowing smoke.
And there are plenty of scientists, such as research psychologists, who study things you can only observe indirectly. They are just as rigorous in looking at statistics as physicists.
Not to knock you or your friends, most doctors and dentists, though they study science, are not scientists. Obviously ones doing research are. My wife is a biologist, and when she worked for a drug company getting results from clinical trials she found that the doctors who sent in results were fairly clueless about statistics.
Also notice that JohnClay’s excellent cites show that the level of atheism increases as scientific ability increases, so your experience in no way refutes his evidence.
Not taking the Bible literally is just watering down the religion when it doesn’t make sense. We’re supposed to believe Christianity is endlessly flexible as new knowledge and attitudes do away with what was once taken as part of the religion. Christianity is in constant retreat but somehow manages to convince people it didn’t need the ground it used to fight so hard for. I suspect the percentage of Christians who believe in nothing that scientific evidence disagrees with is very small, and I think whether or not such people even are Christians in any real sense would be debatable. Christianity and science most certainly are at odds with one another.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (previously mentioned by Musicat) has argued that God can be a block for religious scientists. He provided examples of religious scientists (including Newton) getting to a point in their explanations where they said “God did it”. At this point they considered their work on that subject to have gone as far as it could, where without that assumption they could easily have furthered their knowledge.
You can see him explain it much better here. He basically opens his talk with it - you don’t need to watch the whole thing.
Just anecdotally, the nominal head of my denomination (Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church) is a trained scientist. She was an oceanographer or marine biologist or something, IIRC, before joining the clergy.
This assertion always boggles me. What ‘why’ has religion ever answered? Have any of them ever actually answered any of the big questions, like Why Are We Here, and What Happens After Death with any actual evidence? How about a little one, like Why Does It Rain or Why Is The Sky Blue? Cuz science can answer those. The idea that religion has answered any questions is itself questionable.
Questions that science can’t answer,
- How should I live my life? Can I have a fulfilling life? Should I?
- Why should everyone be equal before the law?
- Why does the universe follow (more or less) comprehensible physics?
- Should I eat ham or tuna for lunch?
Science can provide guidance for answering questions like these, but not definitely answer them.
Of course, I don’t think it’s possible for science to intrude on religion. Science is the investigation of what is, while religion is a philosophy about how things should be. When a scientist makes claims about things outside of science, it’s not science. If religion ignores the world that is, it loses it’s foundation. (In Christian terms, the world is God’s creation and ignoring it violates one part of the greatest commandment, to love God with all of one of heart and mind and soul.)
Biblical literalism is actually a fairly recent practice – I believe it started in the 19th century. The largest denomination of Christianity, the Catholic church, does NOT believe in taking the Bible literally. And I hardly think you can accuse the Catholic church of “watering down the religion”.
This is just another No True Scotsman" argument.
As for “No Christian scientists?” How about this guy? Or this one? How about him?
No doubt (can’t watch at work) but any pre-ordained idea could be bad for a scientist. Look how ideas about white racial superiority screwed up so many in the late 19th century. the good thing about science is that conclusions reached by those with a bias will be challenged by those without that particular bias, and the evidence will determine the winner in the long run.