Rational Religious Scientists: Big Brother’s Big Comment Gets Promoted

The following was posted as a comment to the last Carnival of the Godless post. It was pretty long but I thought its author made a good point or two, so I figured I would cut and paste it into a post of its own. So here it is.

The post is by my big brother Allen, so he owes me copious amounts of grog. Feel free to add your own comments in agreement with him.

http://blogs.usask.ca/medical_education/archive/technology/

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I’m so glad you’re posting again especially your traditional holiday photos at the end of the Carnival posts.

I do however have a slight problem with a quote from the Primate Diaries:

Because the assumption of God is so obvious to them (and I’m sure they feel it powerfully)… They’ll bend over backwards trying to rationalize irrationality.

Perhaps many do, the ones that fit into that category I encounter most often are the ones with very little or any formal science education. Real, practicing scientists I have studied do not suffer permanent lower back pain because of their beliefs. Yes, religious people can be good scientists, here is just a few of the more famous ones, all of whom were in religious orders, either Jesuits or Augustinian, I think:

Christopher Clavius, astronomer
Roger Boscovich, astronomer, mathematician, general genius
Georges Lemaître, astronomer, astrophysicist (discovered the Big Bang)
Gregor Mendel, botanist (discovered laws of heredity)

Please note that these people worked in the two fields most in conflict with organized ‘Big Church’ religion and with fundamentalist groups. If they tried to ‘rationalize irrationality’ they would have not been so famous now, their names would be given second-billing at best in science books. Their observations and conclusions would have been checked by independent observers in other countries, some of which were very anti-catholic and their publications and lectures would have been ignored or publically criticized by educated people in their own countries and else where.

Then there’s this statement “There are certain questions that don’t probe too deeply into the foundations of a person’s faith and they have no problem employing their reason to its fullest in those cases.”

There are hundreds of examples of real, important, long lasting scientific work done by devout people of all religions in geology, astronomy and physics. These sciences, along with biology, are now under attack by a variety of unreasoning, closed minded people. But in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the discoveries were not ignored but fully researched and probed to the fullest allowed by the technology and theories in place at the time.

Somehow they managed to either separate the science from their faith or accept that the new discoveries were a part of the workings of whatever version of God he or she believed in. A person’s religious views generally does not demean any scientific endeavour that person engages in, no more so that the person’s race, gender, age or sexual orientation.

I am not a religious person, not even a slightly spiritual person, unless it involves good beer or single malt scotch. But I will not ridicule or demean someone’s contribution to the knowledge of how some portion of the universe works just because they believe that a supernatural being or beings was/were the cause of the universe.

In closing (Dr. Jim now breathes a sigh of relief), some words from the master scientist Albert Einstein:

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. “

“I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”

And one of my all time favourite quotes: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”