• Question: Do you believe that science and religion can co-exist, and that you can believe in both?

    Asked by imogen98 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 9 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by ankita.
    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      Super good question! Personally I’m not religious at all, but I don’t mind at all if other people are (and I don’t care which religion either). Everyone should be allowed to believe what they want, as long as it doesn’t harm others.

      So I think the answer is yes; I have religious scientists as friends and they seem to manage just fine. I think those people are more likely to take some religious things a bit less literally though, like a religious geologist probably wouldn’t think that the Earth and everything else was actually made by God 6000 years ago, since their science tells them that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old!

      g

    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      I’m with Grant on this. At the end of the day science and religion are very different things: religion is all about faith and science is all about evidence. Science can’t answer the big religious questions, so there’s often not a problem.

    • Photo: Usman Kayani

      Usman Kayani answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      Science exists independent of religion but there is no contradiction with religion and you can have science with or without religion. A lot of famous physicists in the past had believed in God and in fact their quest to answer the questions about the universe was related to their quest to understand God and His creation. The father of moden physics, Sir Isaac Newton was no stranger to religion, his science actually revolved around his religious beliefs and he spent just as much time studying religion as he did physics, despite the way he may be seen today without religion. Einstein was also a famous physicist who believed in God and his ideas about the nature of space and time revolved around there being a divine creator.

      Personally I am a religious and do believe that science and religion can co-exist and I am not against those who aren’t religious and do science because everyone is entitled to their own opinions and beliefs. For me, they work together in a harmony and I have never felt that science has said something that would contradict my religious beliefs. Though it is true that science is about evidence, that only applies to the science that we fully understand. There is a lot of areas where we have to have faith in because we don’t quite understand it or have direct evidence for it. (e.g dark energy, dark matter, string theory, loop quantum gravity, supersymmetry etc)

    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      100%, yes!

      As Usman rightly points out, many, many famous scientists were actually members of the clergy (i,e, they worked for the church) and did experiments in their spare time. This notion that science and religion are totally independent of each other is actually a fairly modern-day idea.

      I am a Christian, and have been all my life (my Dad is a vicar!), and for me the two combined makes perfect sense. If anything, studying astronomy has only strengthened my faith! Most scientists I know aren’t religious, and it normally stems from their natural desire to have hard evidence to back up a theory – something you can’t always do with religion.

      I have never had a problem with my work due to my beliefs, and I completely respect other people’s views as well. At the end of the day, you have to go with what makes the most sense to YOU! 🙂

    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      DEFINITELY! 😀 I’m not religious myself – not in the practicing sense – but believe that religion can be an important part of people’s lives. I also think the questions religion is best suited to answer are the ones science is completely incapable of addressing. What happens after you die? Is there a God? Are there many gods? These are questions are not ones we can address with the scientific method, but they’re ones religious scholars and leaders have been addressing for millennia.

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