Do you think it's stupid when people say they're scientific and religious?

Question

I always hear people say that science makes them more religious. But I don't understand this. I think that it couldn't when they're trying to explain and rationalize everything away. It seems like to me, that the more I find out the more faithless I feel. What's your opinion?

I've seen Ken Miller speak before and the entire time he was talking about how evolution was true and he barely said anything about how his religious beliefs were affected. I'm just wondering how people will have faith when it comes to the point where everything can be explained.

Answer 1

Though i'm not religious myself i can kind of understand how science and religion don't have to be contradictory.

Religious awe is where you find it. To many hard core fundemental christians evolution is an attack on god.
But if you really understand evolution then i think it is impossible not to be moved by it. It makes you realize just how amazing we are.

If god is the creator then it doesn't make since to deny that the natural laws, such as science are, exist.

Its just a matter of attempting to understand a god thats bigger than you had previously thought. I mean scientests can understand science and god must be like.. what?..twice as smart as a scientest! : )

Answer 2

If both are true they will agree. Science including evolution is false. Check out the institute for creation research, and stuff by Dr. Kent Hovind. Be careful with Hovind's stuff. He has some very solid scientific evidence, but his political views are kind of whacked. There are countless flaws in evolution. Evolution is just as much a religion as Christianity. Evolution requires you to take lots of things on faith. Matter, Energy, space, and time have always existed or occurred spontaneously. We don't know how we just know it did. There might have been a big bang, or maybe just a little boom. They still can not account for the origins of time, space, matter an energy. They defy the laws of nature. The second law of thermodynamics states that things naturally break down and decompose to simplier forms. Where does the information come from that makes lifeforms more complex and how do they acquire it? It's so much more logical to say, "in the beginning God."

Answer 3

Not nearly as stupid as when they say they're religious and ANTI-science.

Religion isn't all about explaining things (like where all living things came from, or how the sun was formed).

Most religious people accept science, and therefore find them compatible.

Reasonable people don't think of the Bible, for instance, as being a work of science. They interpret all the origins stuff as being metaphorical and symbolic, not literally true.

There's a sense of 'religious' that simply means awe. The world IS awe-inspiring, the more so the more one understands.

To me, that's not religious, but a lot of people use the r word in that way.

Science isn't about "explaining everything away" but about understanding how things are and (in some sense) why.

Answer 4

I believe in God and I am a scientist. I don't see any conflict. Before Quantum Mechanics, physicists thought that, at least in principle, science could predict future events. Today we know that science can only deal in probabilities. If science predicts something and it doesn't happen, that's all right because there was always a probability of the theory being wrong. Why was the theory inaccurate? We don't know. Could it have been God? We don't know. In science today, every formula carries an explicit or implied random variable which by it's very nature is unpredictable. Could God be guiding evolution? We don't know and we'll never know and science ought not speculate

Answer 5

I've seen people twist all sorts of quotes around to suit their 'reasoning'. Those who say they're both don't take the Buy-bull as literal and ignore the obvious that there is evidence all around of masculine and feminine (nature) but the Buy-bull concentrates only on masculine. Just considering humans, we're obviously social creatures and since when has a dictatorship (or rule by an individual) worked? So, why is it that any concept of God be that of a single male?
The more complex their study is, the more they forget the basics, it seems. They decide that since there is no absolute answer for 'How did everything get started?' 'God did it' makes more sense than actually trying figure it out.

Answer 6

Science can explain or describe just about anything, from the big bang to evolution. The laws of physics are fairly straight forward. But what created physics and its laws is the question. The difference is that a scientist has to at some time say that "something" started the ball rolling. But to have a big sky daddy looking over your shoulder and thowing thunderbolts - of any style or imagination, as most of the fundies on this forum seem to rally around. - when you p*ss him off is ludicrous. Some day science will be able to prove, the existance or non-existance, of that "something" but until then it is all speculation.

Answer 7

No. I'm an engineer (basically one that take scientific knowledge and uses/transforms it into object / systems man use every day) and a christian.

Science can provide forms to understand how God made certain things, which rules/laws He set on the universe He created. Other God's methods and laws are still in research & investigation, scientists are still figuring they out or revising what they thought they knew years, decades or centuries ago.

I'm sure that in ten or twenty years scientists will change many things in today's science textbooks because they will learn that they were not completely right when they affirmed that and granted Nobel prices for those discoveries.

Answer 8

Not necessarily.

There are people who are able to either suspend their religious beliefs, or who can find ways to fit new information into their bleief system in order to become objective observers of phenomena.

Some of them find that the more they learn about science, the more evidence they have to support their belief in 'God'.

Ken Miller (search kitzmiller vs. dover school board) who is a practicing Catholic, was the #1 defender of science in court when religious groups attempted to have their intelligent design pseudoscience inserted into high school biology curriculum.

Someone once said that reality is what is still there even after you stop believing in it.

You can have beliefs without letting them destroy your ability to be objective.

Answer 9

Taking basic science classes made me more deeply spiritual. Evolution is a grand idea and beautifully executed. The fact that anything exists strikes me as so incredibly illogical to begin with that I feel something must have had a hand in it. Where that something came from, I do not know, nor likely ever will.

Answer 10

Kinda... lots of religious people try very hard to use scientific method to give the illusion of hard evidence... but a lot of it is people just reaching too far for a truth that may or may not be. I'd say just focus on what we can verify and develop theory and hypothesis based on that. But then again, goals like curing cancer can seem hopeless, but far more lofty I think. Let's cure cancer before we find proof of our religions. At least we know cancer is real.