Sunday, August 28, 2005
Scientists who believe in God are speaking out
Today, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.
"It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific circles," said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute. He speaks freely about his Christian faith.
Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world. And they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional -- capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation.
This belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force.
Their belief in God challenges colleagues who regard religious belief as little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people.
Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms -- "non-overlapping magisteria," as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book Rocks of Ages (Ballantine, 1999).
Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, thinks that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and scientific theories strictly separate. "I don't find it very satisfactory, and I don't find it very necessary," he said in an interview.
He noted that until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. "Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature," he said.
According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God -- and not just a non-specific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer."
The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists.
By Cornelia Dean
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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