All scientists - including agnostics and atheists - believe in God. They have to in order to do their work.
Vern S. Poythress 'Why scientists must believe in God: divine attributes of scientific law' JETS 46(1) (2003):111
"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.
This argument may have applied in the 19th century (when scientists still felt popular pressure to at least pretend to have religious faith), and some nostalgic sense of godliness might linger among modern physicists with their silly search for the "theory of everything," but such a proposition hardly applies to genuinely modern sciences like molecular biology. For example a cancer biologist who believed in a divine Creator would go nuts trying to understand why He is so cruel and/or incompetent as to make/allow his creations to become so viciously and randomly destructive. It's far more sane and profitable to accept that powerful tenet of modern science: contingency, which does not support much in the way of faith in anything but luck. Given that more people buy lottery tickets than go to church nowadays, I'd say the general public has also become pretty "scientific" in this regard.
ReplyDeleteI'm a molecular biologist / biochemist and I find a faith in God is what gives me hope. I also happen to have come across plenty of other Christians in this field. Being a Christian and being a logical, rational scientist are not mutually exclusive. However, I don't believe you can use science to prove God, that is ultimately down to faith. I also strongly believe that science can't and never will disprove God. I would far rather place my 'luck' in God than in a lottery ticket.
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