Can a religious person be a good scientist?

[Nilgiri]

You presented a rationale for the Adam-Eve thingy and then you say God's actions can't be rationalised.

The former carried no commentary on intent....i.e the why....simply that its one possibility of what could be a logical argument for what is...given we have no idea of the "why" behind absolutes.

The point I was trying to make was a very simple one, an evolutionary biologist cannot believe in evolution and at the same time say that God explained the human origin allegorically with the concept of Adam and Eve when he knows that a 2000-year-old brain was certainly evolved enough to grasp the concept of evolution the way it is taught to today's students.

Like I said if god is absolute he doesn't come into the picture of trying to explain his actions through relative standards. A Scientist can have an interpretation of an absolutist god that revealed religious structure, explanation and doctrine (either explicitly or implicitly) for reasons (if any reasons even exist) that simply are unknown to us. It's like asking Science the question why did the big bang happen? Assuming the theory as truth, we just know it happened (a singularity like the big bang is much a physical representation of an absolute that I can think of), the question why is simply irrelevant....and unanswerable anyway.

Hence, to say that a scientist can be good at what he does and still believe in an allegorical interpretation of religious doctrine is certainly a fallacy.

If there is major intersection between his field of study and the literal religious doctrine (taken to be absolute truth), then there is definite deterioration in his/her ability to deduce logically proportional to that intersection. I would find it hard for a strict literal interpreter/believer in such doctrine to even be able to approach science (that involves what that religion can be taken to be literal about) in the first place.

If the interpretation is taken to be allegorical and not literal, I fail to see why that automatically means he cannot be good at science....since allegory by its very definition is end-meaning, end-moral motivated rather than absolute-truth based and dogma-motivated for every detail. You can thus apply whatever degree of it you feel necessary to contain, mitigate and manage the logical conflict that may otherwise arise through literal dogmatic interpretation.

So yes he would be near 100% of the time fundamentally flawed if he has a strong literal interpretation of non-science based doctrine and claims to be a scientist in fields that overlap with this doctrine. But not the case with allegorical interpretations (and others that achieve the same) and also not the case if there is no or little overlap to begin with (even with strong literal interpretation). Why would a scientist that believes literally in the earth being 4000 years old and the entire story of genesis....be affected by that in a very specific pursuit of fluid dynamics ( say figuring out best K factors in CFD modelling conditions)? There is no intersection in that case...the logical conflicts do not come into play. Yes he may have severe issues expanding his science to modelling of a historical earth...but that does not relate to him being a good scientist in his specific original study. Plenty of scientists also suffer a variety of other bias problems (unrelated to religion) when expanding the scope of their findings/analysis....it doesn't mean they are bad scientists. If they choose to go the allegorical path, its mitigated from the get go since one at that point looks upon religion as really a historical work that produces defined and absolute morality while being unable to explain why the godhead unveiled it as such (if a godhead needed in the explanation) but realising/understanding that the inability of answering the why is part of the faith in absoluteness of the divine/unknown in the first place. Again I don't see it being naturally antithetical to the scientific process.

Einstein after all quite famously kept intrinsically believing in a cosmological constant for the longest time (because of his bias against an expanding universe and thus the big bang model). He later admitted it was his biggest mistake, but did that make him a bad scientist during the earlier phase?

 

[Skull and Bones]

Depends on what is your definition of a good scientist? Can he publish peer reviewed papers and do path breaking research? Yes.

Is his mind open to criticism when the facts contradicts his belief and indoctrination? No

So, in my definition, he could be a good researcher/scientist on a selective domain.

 

[ashok321]

Source Pew

 

[wiseone2]

People believe that a cow is sacred while having no second thought eating it when outside of India.

Can you see the pattern?

most first generation Indian immigrants do not eat beef
you can argue what is the hypocrisy over eating chicken not beef

 

[Manama]

As long as he knows not to bring religion in when studying science. for example shouting Adam and Eve when studying evolution

 

[El Sidd]

Scientology is a different beast altogether. It transforms you into a superman. Don't trust me? Ask Tom.

Tom who? His new name is Supernova Cruise

As long as he knows not to bring religion in when studying science. for example shouting Adam and Eve when studying evolution

the biological Adam.
the mathematical God.

google them for few books and let me know how smooth it went

 

[SecularNationalist]

I absolutely doubt it.A religious person cannot think rationally.

 

[Super Falcon]

Why can't infact sciense is a part of religion as far as Islam science has described in Quran Kareem infact science is given birth by religious books by ALMIGHTY ALLAH we humans were living like animals

 

[Godman]

There have been many religious scientists, however religious scientists see things differently from normal religious people. Its the normal religious people that try to prove religion over science pushing stuff like Young Earth Creationism seeing Science as a force trying to debunk their faith. Most scientists both religious and non-religious don't give a damn about that and many religious scientists don't think that Religion and Science clash.
Science isn't there to prove or debunk religion.

Ibn al-Haytham was a Muslim, Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar so yes a religious person can be a good scientist but some people may not see them as religious because they see scientists as trying to go against Religious teachings.

Some religions are more encouraging to scientific thought than others

 

[Well.wisher]

Yes they can and they'll be honest .

 

[my2cents]

Can a religious person be a good scientist?

Source: Pew

In the culture of science you occasionally run into the sort of person who believes as an apodictic fact that if one is religious one can not by their fact of belief be a good scientist. You encounter this sort of person at all levels of science, and they exhibit a range of variation in terms of the volume of their belief about beliefs of others. I don’t want to exaggerate how much it permeates the culture of science, or at least what I know of it. But, it is a tacit and real thread that runs through the world-views of some individuals. It’s a definite cultural subtext, and one which I don’t encounter often because I’m a rather vanilla atheist. A friend who is now a tenure track faculty in evolutionary biology who happens to be a Christian once told me that his religion came up nearly every day during graduate school! (some of it was hostile, but mostly it was curiosity and incomprehension)

This is on my mind because a very prominent person on genomics Twitter stated yesterday that Francis Collins by the very fact of his evangelical Christianity should not hold the scientific position of authority that he holds (the individual in question was wondering if they could sign a petition to remove him!). The logic was very straightforward: science by its nature conflicts with religion, and those who engage in the sort of cognitive processes which result in religion will be suboptimal in terms of scientific reasoning. As I indicated above the people who promote this viewpoint treat it as a deterministic scientific law. And, importantly there is little reference to cognitive science or survey data to support their propositions. Ten seconds on Google will yield the figure you see above. A substantial proportion of American scientists aver a religious affiliation.

UMind you, there are patterns. The data when examined in a more granular fashion suggests that academic scientists are more secular than those in industry, as are the more eminent ones. But it doesn’t take much time to think of great scientists who avowed some sort of religious affiliation. In evolutionary biology R. A. Fisher and Theodosius Dobzhansky affiliated as Christians. The mid-20th century evolutionary biologist David Lack was an Anglican convert. In Reconciling Science and Religion the historian of science Peter J. Bowler outlines a movement in early 20th century Britain to accommodate and assimilate the findings of evolutionary biology to that of mainstream Christianity, so it is entirely unsurprising that Anglicans such as Fisher and Lack were active researchers within evolutionary science.

Outside of evolutionary biology there are two examples which stand out in my mind. Larry Wall, the originator of the Perl language which has had a long history in bioinformatics is an evangelical Protestant Christian. And Donald Knuth, the author of the magisterial series The Art of Computer Programmingis a Lutheran.

My point in reviewing this data, which should be widely known, is to bring some empiricism to this discussion. What do the data say? Not one’s prejudices and intuitions. One response on Twitter was that empiricism precludes faith. That’s the theory about empiricism. The reality is that there are many great empirical scientists who have a religious faith. Any scientist worth their salt who wishes to air hypotheses about the incompatibility of religion and science on an individual level needs to engage with these facts.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a correlation in the aggregate between secularism and science. But this issue is complex, emerging at the intersection of cognitive science, sociology, and history. These subtleties can’t be waved away airily with a reference to facts that everyone knows which happens to reflect one’s own personal prejudices. That reminds me of things besides science.

Finally, this truth that in the aggregate scientists are a diverse lot even if there tends to be particular patterns of social concentration is a general one. E.g., most scientists are more liberal than not. But a substantial minority are not, with a fraction of those being rather closeted about this. The average scientist, in particular in the academy, is a secular liberal. But the minority are not trivial. We’re in your lab meetings, at your conferences, collecting data for you, and on your committees, reviewing your grant applications.* Because of the nature of the academy outside of religious colleges there is often silence from this minority lest they be pigeon-holed as out of step with the social culture of science. That’s human nature. And scientists can’t escape that, whether they are in the majority, or the minority. For all the talk of logic and empiricism, scientists are all too human in their basic wiring.



http://www.unz.com/gnxp/can-a-religious-person-be-a-good-scientist/

You cannot separate nature and god. So, a religious person is also a scientist in disguise.

 

[ashok mourya]

In the past, this quest for understanding has given scientists both past and present plenty of opportunities for experiencing wonder and awe. That's because at their core, both science and religion require some kind of leap of faith -- whether it's belief in multiverses or belief in a personal God.

In chronological order, here's a glimpse into what some of the world's greatest scientists thought about the possibility of a higher power.

• 1 Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
  
  
  
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  The astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei was famously convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church for supporting the theory that the planets revolved around the sun. In private letters, he confirmed that his beliefs hadn't changed.
  
  Writing to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, Galileo criticizedphilosophers of his time who blindly valued Biblical authority over scientific evidence.
  
  "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations."
• 2 Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)
  
  
  
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  Known as the founder of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon believed that gathering and analyzing data in an organized way was essential to scientific progress. An Anglican, Bacon believed in the existence of God.
  
  In an essay on atheism, Bacon wrote:
  
  "God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."
• 3 Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
  
  
  
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  Charles Darwin is best known for his theory of evolution. On the question of God, Darwin admitted in letters to friends that his feelings often fluctuated. He had a hard time believing that an omnipotent God would have created a world filled with so much suffering. But at the same time, he wasn't content to conclude that this "wonderful universe" was the result of "brute force." If he pressed for a label, he wrote that the term "agnostic" would fit him best.
  
  In an 1873 letter to Dutch writer Nicolaas Dirk Doedes, Darwin wrote:
  
  "I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of the many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty."
• 4 Maria Mitchell (1818 - 1889)
  
  
  
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  Maria Mitchell was America's first female astronomer and the first woman to be named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was born into a Quaker family, but began to question her denomination's teachings in her twenties. She was eventually disowned from membership and for the rest of her life, didn't put much importance on church doctrines or attendance. Instead, she was a religious seeker who pursued a simpler sort of faith.
  
  After hearing a minister preach about the dangers of science, Mitchell wrote:
  
  "Scientific investigations, pushed on and on, will reveal new ways in which God works, and bring us deeper revelations of the wholly unknown."
• 5 Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)
  
  
  
  SCIENCE SOURCE via Getty Images
  Marie Curie, a physicist, was brought up in the Catholic faith, but reportedly became agnostic in her teens. She went on to become thefirst woman to win a Nobel Prize. Both Marie and her husband Pierre Curie did not follow any specific religion.
  
  She is quoted as saying:
  
  "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
• 6 Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
  
  
  
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  Albert Einstein, one of the most well-known physicists of the 20th century, was born into a secular Jewish family. As an adult, he tried to avoid religious labels, rejecting the idea of a "personal God," but at the same time, separating himself from "fanatical atheists" whom he believed were unable to hear "the music of the spheres."
  
  In a 1954 essay for NPR, Einstein wrote:
  
  "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive."
• 7 Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958)
  
  
  
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  Rosalind Franklin, who helped pioneer the use of X-ray diffraction, was born into a Jewish family in London. In letters to her father, Franklin made it clear that she seriously doubted the existence of an all powerful creator, or life after death.
  
  When her father accused her of making science her religion, Franklin told him that she had a different definition of faith:
  
  "In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world...I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals."
• 8 Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
  
  
  
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  Astronomer Carl Sagan is best known for hosting the TV series "Cosmos." He rejected the label of "atheist" because he was open to the possibility that science would perhaps one day find compelling evidence to prove God. Nevertheless, he thought that the likelihood of that happening was very small. Instead, Sagan talked about "spirituality" as something that happens within the realm of material world, when humans encounter nature and are filled with awe.
  
  In his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan writes:
  
  "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual."
• 9 Stephen Hawking (Born 1942)
  
  
  
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  After years of hinting at it, physicist Stephen Hawking confirmed to the press in 2014 that he was an atheist. Hawkings doesn't believe in a heaven or an afterlife and says that the miracles of religion "aren't compatible" with science.
  
  In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Hawking said:
  
  "Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation."
• 10 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Born 1952)
  
  
  
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  Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in an ancient town in Tamil Nadu, India, that is known for its famous temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva. A physicist and molecular biologist, Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on ribosomes. While many Hindus consider astrology to be an important Vedic science and schedule life events around the movements of the stars, Ramakrishnan has spoken out against this practice in the past. He believes astrology evolved from humans' desire to search for "patterns, generalize and believe.
  
  In an interview with the Hindustan Times, he said:
  
  "There is no scientific basis for how movement of planets and stars can influence our fate. There is no reason for time of birth to influence events years later. The predictions made are either obvious or shown to be random ... A culture based on superstitions will do worse than one based on scientific knowledge and rational thoughts.”
• 11 Neil deGrasse Tyson (Born 1958)
  
  
  
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  Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and a popular television science expert. He told The Huffington Post thathe isn't convinced by religious arguments about the existence of a "Judeo-Christian" god that is all-powerful and all-good, especially when he observes the death and suffering caused by natural disasters. Still, he told Big Think that while he's often "claimed by atheists," he's actually more of an agnostic.
  
  In Death By Black Hole, a collection of science essays, Tyson writes:
  
  "So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
• 12 Francis Collins (Born 1950)
  
  
  
  Bloomberg via Getty Images
  Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In a 2007 book about the intersection between science and faith, Collins described how he converted from atheism to Christianity and attempts to argue that the idea of a Christian God is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution.
  
  In an essay for CNN, Collins writes:
  
  "I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship."

 

[Anubis]

Sure why not. One can segregate their internal faith/"moralhood" from the pursuit of purely perception based truth finding. Just depends how you internally think and organise.

If one accepts we will always have a knowledge ratio of 0 (i.e infinite bound of reality), it becomes even easier....because there will always be a infinitely larger amount of unknown than what is known.... no matter the elapsed discovery time....and thus a infinitely larger realm of the unknown where the supernatural/godhead/mystery can reside.

It is why Agnosticism is probably the most balanced approach at least when immersing in the scientific approach (and you can personally be leaning to faith while being agnostic to different degrees). The truly atheist scientists are logically unsound and are as bad as the most extreme religious brainwashed people in many ways.

Atheism is the lack of belief in god(or any other deities)...All logical agnostics have to be atheists as it would be stupid to have belief in something whose existence you are unsure about...Most logical atheists(true hardcore atheists like myself) are agnostics...we do not know if there is a god...due to lack of evidence we do not believe in the existence of one...the flag bearers of modern day atheism ie Hitchens,Dawkins,Harris all claim to be agnostics..they do not say there is not god or it is impossible that god exists. Atheism and Agnosticism are answers to different questions.

On the OP topic I think it would be difficult for a religious person to be a good scientist since both are contradictory claim to reality...besides how does a person believe in something with ZERO evidence and still be in a profession that not only requires you to accept things only based on evidence but also reject stuff that have no evidence backing it up...the person has to have serious internal conflicts if he both a scientist and religious....However when it comes to applied sciences I can see it working...A biologist or a theoretical physicist shouldn't be religious.

 

[Nilgiri]

However when it comes to applied sciences I can see it working...A biologist or a theoretical physicist shouldn't be religious.

Yah thats what I was getting at (quite long windedly). Whats the intersection and thus inherent logical conflict etc.

In the end it boils down to what you define as religious and what you define as scientist.

 

[LimitedCivility]

I can't embed a URL, so an interview-excerpt of one of my literary idols. I can't articulate my position better:

Playboy: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?

Nabokov: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Here's one from him on the nature of reality:

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me— I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.