Is it possible to be religious and a scientist

I will fully admit that not all scientists have these traits. I also know that not all Christians have these traits.

We are better scientists, better Christians, and better people when we do. And although popularity, simplicity, and loyalty are not always bad—they should not be prioritized over truth for scientists or Christians. Studying science helps me live in peace with the unknown. Beyond this aggravating place, the next level is realizing that no one knows the answer. This is even more unsettling. However, scientists live in that unsettling place.

Science is about speculating on the unknown, then testing it to see if our speculations were right or wrong, or still unknown. Typically, once we find the answer, it yields an entirely new slew of questions. I once read a book which said that studying science is like giving our Founding Fathers a computer with amazing battery life, obviously. They figure out how to click icons and make things work, type, and open some apps.

Maybe they rock at Minesweeper. They think they have it figured out. That is what it is like to be a scientist. Studying science makes God bigger. As a child, I realized God made that little world with plants and animals and rocks.

As I got older, I realized God made the great big universe with stars and atoms and photosynthesis and all those blood-clotting chemicals, which I immediately forgot after my board exams. The more we learn, the bigger God has to get.

If He created all of it, he has to be bigger and smarter than all of it. Psalm lays this out beautifully. The more we understand about the world, the bigger God gets. Why is this important? See my next bullet point. Science brings back the awe of God. This is not an excuse to avoid learning. It is a call to see how far we can go before we reach the end of human understanding. We live in awe from studying everything humans have the capacity to understand, and yet still falling woefully short from fully grasping all that God has done—and will do.

Psalm says it best. God tells us that we are his most important creation and his greatest love. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. Our selection of the week's biggest Cambridge research news and features sent directly to your inbox. Enter your email address, confirm you're happy to receive our emails and then select 'Subscribe'.

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Annual reports Equality and diversity Media relations A global university. Events Public engagement Jobs Give to Cambridge. Research at Cambridge. Home Research Can a scientist be religious? And, indeed, many humanists and theologians insist that there are multiple ways of knowing, and that religious narratives exist alongside scientific ones, and can even supersede them. It is true that scientists take certain things on faith.

And yet, scientific practices—observation and experiment; the development of falsifiable hypotheses; the relentless questioning of established views—have proven uniquely powerful in revealing the surprising, underlying structure of the world we live in, including subatomic particles, the role of germs in the spread of disease, and the neural basis of mental life.

Religion has no equivalent record of discovering hidden truths. So why do so many people believe otherwise? It turns out that while science and religion are as different as can be, folk science and folk religion share deep properties. Most of us carry in our heads a hodgepodge of scientific views and religious views, and they often feel the same—because they are learned, understood, and mentally encoded in similar ways. In the first article that I ever published for The Atlantic , I argued that many religious beliefs arise from universal modes of thought that have evolved for reasoning about the social world.

We are sensitive to signs of agency, which explains the animism that grounds the original religions of the world. We are naturally prone to infer intelligent design when we see complex structure, which makes creationism more appealing than natural selection. We are intuitive dualists, and so the idea of an immaterial soul just makes sense —or at least more sense than the notion that our minds are the products of our physical brains.

There are many religious views that are not the product of common-sense ways of seeing the world. Consider the story of Adam and Eve, or the virgin birth of Christ, or Muhammad ascending to heaven on a winged horse. According to humanism, suffering of the innocent in this life is just an unfortunate fact the suffering is irredeemable.

On the other hand, Christianity views life in relation to a divine purpose of love, and sees how out of suffering can come a good of infinite value, a good which justifies the pain of the suffering. Because certain aspects of the vision offered by humanism are unpalatable does not mean that the philosophy must be untrue. However, it seems to me that, since the God hypothesis can answer the tragic aspects of the humanist philosophy so comfortably, it should at least be carefully considered by all.

On the other hand, while it may well be comforting to believe in the existence of God, is such a belief reasonable, or lust a comforting illusion? A belief that is reasonable simply means that there are adequate grounds for the belief. Are there adequate grounds for belief in God? I believe that for some people there are adequate grounds and for others there are not. Did Jesus himself have adequate grounds for belief in God?

It is clear from the gospel that Jesus believed with every fibre of his being that he lived in the presence of God, with whom he had easy and open communication. For Jesus not to believe in God would have been to reject his own sanity. So, what about the reasonableness of our belief in God? If we find that the teachings of Jesus strike a deep chord in us and stake a claim on our hearts and minds, if the words of Jesus strike us as coming from a cool and sane mind, if following the teaching of Jesus produces positive effects in our lives, then I believe we have adequate grounds for belief in the God of whom Jesus spoke.

As a scientist I am proud of the spectacular progress that science has made over the last several hundred years in advancing our understanding of the natural world. And there is no reason to think that this progress will not continue indefinitely. But there is more to understanding the world in its entirety than science alone can command, powerful and all as it is.

I believe that the appropriate way to approach such a large question as the existence of God is by the apprehension of the world with all our human senses, that is using our wisdom gained from experience, our intuition, our capacity to love, our emotions, in addition to our analytical minds. If the question is approached exclusively through logical scientific analysis one will probably come to the same conclusion as Bertrand Russell.

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