by Bartlett Meeks

Created on: December 16, 2008

In asking this question you can rephrase it to "do scientists reject God, and if so why?" It is not a matter of blunt cranky atheism on the part of the scientist, but rather on the nature of scientific thought and experiment.

During the birth of scientific investigation, all scientists believed in God. Not because it was a personal choice on their part, but because they lived in a very religious time, and most people had some form of religion. In order to get a university education, you had to learn from Church trained individuals. Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Paracelsus all strove to understand how God created the world, then later the universe. Trying to understand the mind of God was what these early scientists were after. It was their idea that somehow understanding how the world operated could shed light onto the mind of its Creator. Even then this outrageous idea caused ripples. The idea that observation could trump the word of God or the church was dangerous ground. This was the time of pre-scientific ideas as well; astrology and alchemy were practiced side by side with mathematics, medicine, and other fields we recognize today as "science". Newton was a well known alchemist as well as the inventor of calculus. Paracelsus is alternatively seen as an alchemist, a con man, or the father of modern medicine. How does the modern idea of Scientist cope with this perceived contradiction.

Charles Darwin tends to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop in this subject. He is often portrayed as some godless atheist trying to tear down the holy walls of the church. In fact, he was not. Before his voyage on the Beagle he was a seminary student, and he was a believer in the idea that nature reinforced the existence of a Creator. Yet his theories revolutionized the scientific community because his observations were universal. The main reason he published was that another biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace, had come to similar conclusions and was about to publish.

God is out of the laboratory merely because that very idea is not quantifiable. One cannot dissect God. You cannot show someone an atom of miracles, or even quantify one's faith. There is no theory of turning water into wine. Faith belies proof. What good is faith if God's existence can be scientifically proven? With this in mind, the question is not even a scientific one. Science is reductionist and is based on repeatable phenomena. Religion is not either of those things.

If a scientist, in reaching a point in his studies says "God did it", or "Because God said so", and stops there, they are not performing good science. If they say "God did it" or Because God said so" then continued on in their studies and reached a verifiable and repeatable conclusion, they have done good science. It is not the fact that scientists are godless heathens, but rather because God is not a scientific idea anymore. The faith of the scientist today is, like many things today, a personal and private choice.

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