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Asked by maddiiee to Alan, Caspar, Diana, Murray, Sarah on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: Scientist. This question was also asked by cm95, wangchung9000.
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Sarah Thomas answered on 14 Mar 2011:
Hi there,
I don’t have any religious beliefs. So it doesn’t affect my work in any way. But I do understand that it could affect other scientists work, like they wouldn’t be able to work on a Sunday, or maybe they wouldn’t be allowed to work in certain fields of science. I suppose the main problem with being religous and being a scientist is that you would have assumptions before you did your experiments because of your beliefs. Whereas it’s really important that a scientist keeps an open mind. Because sometimes you can have data that is difficult to understand or could have 2 meanings and you have to report it as it is, you can’t have any beliefs about what it means without evidence to prove it.
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Caspar Addyman answered on 15 Mar 2011:
A very good question.
I am an atheist. It mostly just a feeling so in some ways that is no different from a feeling that god does exist. But one can also argue from a scientific point of view that we don’t need the God hypothesis to explain the world. And that in fact science is doing a better job of explaining the world than any of the religions ever managed.
Yes are quite a lot of questions to which we don’t have answers and when faced with that uncertainty, ‘God did it’ or ‘God made it that way’ might seem like a satisfying explanation. E.G. Why was there a Big Bang? Because God caused it to happen.
At first that seems like a good answer but in reality it seems to replace one mystery, the big bang with a bigger one… God. So, in fact it hasn’t explained anything at all. (Well, unless you are happy to accept the mystery of God.) As a scientist, I try not accept anything without a good reason. and God is by definition beyond reason so I tend to ignore him or her.
On the whole, I don’t think you will find many scientists who bring God into their laboratories to explain their daily work. But they might include God in their personal life and their personal beliefs. However, as a psychologist my research is about beliefs. It is about how we come to learn things and how we come to believe what we believe. So I am actually forced to think about God at work. But I don’t give the concept of God any special treatment over other concepts. Neither incidently do young children.
You know how toddlers can ask those never ending chains of “why” questions.
‘Why is it dark?’
-because the sun went down.
“Why did the sun go do down”
-because the earth is rotating
“I don’t know”the persistent toddler will always win because with a long enough chain of why’s the final answer is always ‘i don’t know’.. (the answer ‘it just is, now shut up’ isn’t an answer.)
But on some questions we are very afraid of admitting that we don’t know. God is more reassuring than that.
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Diana Drennan answered on 16 Mar 2011:
For me, I think that science and religion address different things and do not overlap. I am confused by the uproar between creationists and evolutionists. If God created the universe, who are we to say that he didn’t do it using science and evolution ? If God made the rules, he’d probably use them. I don’t see any intrinsic conflict in believing in both.
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Alan Winfield answered on 16 Mar 2011:
No, Maddi I don’t have any religious beliefs. You then ask ‘do they affect your work’. That’s an interesting question because you have made me think about whether my non-belief affects my work differently to other scientists who do have religious beliefs. There are plenty of well respected scientists who are religious and they claim that science and religion are perfectly compatible. One of the arguments they use is that science and religion are different realms of discourse, or argument, i.e. science deals with observation, experiments and theories to try and explain the observations, whereas religion deals with questions of faith and belief. They argue that you can be both religious and a scientist because the two realms don’t overlap – faith doesn’t come into scientific experiments, they say, and matters of belief are not things you can do experiments to prove or disprove. I have to say that I’m not so sure about this. However – to answer the last part of your question, yes I think that a very careful and disciplined scientist can do great science without letting their religious beliefs influence their scientific work. But I suspect it’s very hard work to keep religious beliefs separate from science.
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