Sir Isaac Newton…I trust you have heard of him?
Not scientists, but one of my favourite trolling activities is posting the Apollo 8 recording onto Dawkins type websites.
Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Charles Darwin (for most of his life, anyway, and probably all of it), John Dalton, Antoine Lavoiser, Joseph Priestly … the greatest scientists, the men who created modern science, and in fact, practically every person who ever lived before the late 20th century and who can reasonably be called a scientist, were Christians, often devoutly and ostentatiously so. (The few who were not Christian were mostly Jews or Muslims.) Many current scientists, very possibly a majority in majority Christian countries like the USA, are Christians today.
If you can’t get your head around that, then the problem is in your head, probably you have extremely simplistic conceptions of either science or religion - most likely, both - rather than in the heads of all those people, some well recognized scientific geniuses, who were and are both scientists and Christians.
:rolleyes:
Also, Max Planck, sort of. And, Jesuits.
Well, yeah, that’s just one belief among creationistish ideas. Although I don’t agree with Old Earth Creationism, I can sympathize when some evangelical OEC minister is baffled by Young Earth Creationism. Their fights are entertaining. I think that strong ID is a minority opinion. It is trying to be scientific often by changing the burden of proof.
In my experience, most scientists don’t talk about religion and maybe tend towards subtle agnosticism. A minority express vocal atheistic beliefs, and another minority are maybe quietly but publicly religious. It’s not easy to get far if you are vocally creationist at non-Bob Jones universities, even if you don’t personally accept everything.
My late father, a hydrologist for the US Geological Survey and a lifelong Catholic. Most of his co-workers were Catholic or Jewish. Insisting that there’s a conflict between Darwin and Genesis these days appears to be a uniquely Protestant preoccupation. However questionable you might find his religious beliefs, he was one of about five people in the country who could work a Bubble Gauge and he had a great head for numbers.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, Collins’ Wikipedia page states that he is both an evangelical Christian (or at least was at a certain point - peoples’ views can change over their lives so you’d probably have to ask him yourself to really know his present views) and a supporter of theistic evolution, having rejected the idea of intelligent design. Many other Christians of various stripes have no problem reconciling evolution with their faith, including many priests and ministers.
The one group of Christians you will never see admit to supporting evolution are the Young Earth Creationist fundamentalist types. While they are typically what many people think of when they think of science vs. religion, most Christians are probably not fundamentalists. The ones that are just happen to be more vocal about it.
Science is not inherently incompatible with Christianity - it’s only incompatible with fundamentalist Christianity. Science just provides answers as to how the universe and life evolved based on the mountains of evidence supporting it. Whether anything started the process off is outside the realm of science. Scientists are entitled to their own religious or philosophical views just like everyone else so a Christian scientist is not an oxymoron. The oxymoron would be a fundamentalist Christian scientist, who would generally only be found teaching at private Christian institutions or keeping extremely quiet about their views as no one would ever take them seriously as a scientist otherwise.
Which Christian doctrine? There are hundreds of them.
Why is that?
You can be an excellent microbiologist, physical chemist, or mathematician, and still harbor a lot of unscientific beliefs. My boss has a Ph.D and he believes in chakras and past lives and woo along these lines. But unless you’re stuck in the car with him for several hours, you wouldn’t know this.
Unlike Christianity, science is what you do, not what you believe. As long as an individual acts like a scientist, they can believe whatever crazy stuff they want and still call themselves a scientist.
My late colleague’s thesis I will call HZ was a world famous mathematician. He once explained to my colleague that he got into mathematics because of astrology: he wanted to refine his astrological calculations. My colleague then remarked to HZ that he assumed he no longer believed in astrology. “Yes, I do.”
A friend of mine once remarked that Darwin didn’t require atheism, but it made it possible. What he meant was that before Darwin, there were no plausible explanations for life, except special creation. There many, including Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, who believed that species, genera, families, orders, looked like they evolved, but it was hard to imagine evolution having created phyla. After Darwin, there was (and remains) the question of how it all started, but we can imagine it and then evolution led to everything else.
I agree, I did a lousy job explaining my thoughts.
Christianity is very diverse, with more denominations than you can shake a crucifix at.
The whole concept is a bit amusing to me: People have this mythical idea of ‘scientists’ being geniuses who can put even the smartest Christian to shame with logic and ‘scientific facts’.
Scientists deal in observed, tested, and recorded physical phenomena. Observations, tests and records can all be fallible.
Christianity deals in spiritual phenomena. The Christian concept of miracles vis a vis ‘science’, etc… is that the power of spirit can, as Qin Shi Huangdi pointed out, override/intersect with the physical.
‘Scientists’ generally do not test for such occurrences, and when they do, there are too many variables that cannot be isolated, etc… that the whole idea can show the test itself to be a waste of time.
A scientist who tries to explain the Virgin Birth would be at no more advantage or disadvantage than a person who never had a science class in his life, since there is no way to test/control for God to make a virgin conceive. The scientific method would be/is irrelevant.
I think this says it all, really, and much more pithily than I could. (I don’t think Christianity is ‘crazy’, of course, but I understand that others would).
Right- scientists study natural phenomena, and by definition they don’t and can’t address claims like the virgin birth which are outside the natural order.
If we had modern scientists, lab equipment and procedures around in the first century, perhaps we could ‘test’ whether Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, but we didn’t, so we can’t. Pointing out that normal biological processes preclude virgin births (well, in humans anyway- some lizards can reproduce parthenogenetically) isn’t helpful, because the claim here is supposed to be an intervention/suspension of the laws of nature, in a particular instance, by a supernatural being. If virgin births could happen all the time, it wouldn’t be a miracle.
There were atheists around before Darwin, and there was certainly a respectable intellectual case for atheism (always has been).
I don’t see the conflict. A Christian can believe nothing more about God than that he set the universe in motion according to His laws, and the Scientist’s mission is to interpret, understand, and explain those laws and to predict their effects. Einstein appears to have harbored a belief that was not altogether inconsistent with Christian theism…
Einstein repeatedly denied belief in a personal God, but did not entirely rule out a theistic (or at least pantheistic) view of the universe. He recognized the concept of moral virtue, not unlike that espoused by Christ, but did not accept that it was handed down by a personal God.
This would make Einstein, or any western scientist, a “Christian” in the sense that they are living in a Christian-coated ethical arena, subject daily to its laws and customs and subservient to them.
The number of Fundamentalist Christians who are scientists appears to be pretty small, and I would suspect that most of them have “learned” science the way a Christian theologian would study the Koran or the Upanishads – in order to make cogent arguments in denial of them.
Denial of a personal god (and of the divinity of Jesus Christ and the miracles performed by same) makes you pretty clearly not a Christian, I think. Christianity, like Islam, (and unlike, say, Hinduism) is defined by core beliefs, rather than by belonging to a particular culture.
Einstein was Jewish, of course, to the extent that he was anything.
I don’t get the OP at all. I’ve known many PhDs in Computer Science who are Christian. E.g., my last department chair was Roman Catholic and the one before that was a part time minister who left/retired to become full time. Roman Catholics tend to be more visible/open for some reason. So lots of program heads, assistant deans, etc. The RC church has no problem with age of the Universe, etc.
None of them have to worry about the Pope saying believe “P=NP” or burn in hell.
Also, why Christians? E.g., religious Jews are also quite common. I’ve known Profs who wear yarmulkes everyday and such. Publish dozens of papers, win awards, etc.
Certain flavors of religion obviously conflict with being a Scientist. E.g., believing the Earth is flat. But a general category? Not applicable.
And of course there are Atheists who believe woo and shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves Scientists. It’s not whether they are religious or not that conflicts, it’s whether they believe something directly contradicted by Science. And believing in an afterlife, e.g., doesn’t cause any problem in that department.
If you’re interested in Francis Collins in particular, the man has written and spoken about his own beliefs. You can start with the following article that he wrote for CNN.com, but if you want more there’s plenty more available, including his book The Language of God.
Collins: Why this scientist believes in God
I think this is your real question: If you allow the possibility of miracles, events that “break” the natural laws, how does that impact your work as a scientist in which your working assumption is that everything follows natural laws? Are you ever allowed, as a scientist, to “give up” and say, “I can’t explain it; it’s just a miracle”?
I’ve wondered something along these lines myself, but I don’t think it’s an irreconcilable problem. Maybe true miracles, while they do occur, are so rare that it “works” for a scientist to simply dismiss the possibility? Maybe when God acts he always, or almost always, does so without breaking any natural laws (perhaps taking adavntage of quantum-level “randomness” or something like that)? Maybe something else? This question might (or might not) be worthy of its own, more tightly focused, thread.
I really like this as a succinct, one-sentence answer.
It might even help to add that, even if you’re a scientist, science is what you do when you’re at work, when you’re acting as a scientist, and not necessarily in other areas of your life, like your love life or your parenting.
Here’s a list of Christian scientists:
Since that list didn’t happen to include many mathematicians, I’ve found a separate list of Christian mathematicians:
Regardless of whether you personally think that science and Christianity is incompatible, the fact is that there are a lot of Christian scientists.