Being a Christian sceintist.

[PhantomWolf]

I beat you think this is a thread about the Religion of the name, however it's not. ;D

I'm going to note here that many scientists and skeptics see no ned for God anymore, and so are athiest or agnostics. For me I'm not, and a while back I was asked by a friend how I resolved my belief in God and my being a scientist. How could I rely on facts and figures on one hand and yet still hold a faith and belief in a God I couldn't see or test. For me I feel I have enough evidence to take the step of faith into belief, though I always am understanding that it is a faith.

I have noted that there are a number of others here who are both christian and scientists, so I wanted to ask the same question of you.

How do you resolve your faith with your science?

[Kiwi]

I've been hoping there would be some interesting replies by now.

But "sceintist", "I beat", "no ned" and "athiest"? What's water, HO₂?
(It's okay, folks! Taking the mickey out of something like that is a time-honoured and almost obligatory tradition in New Zealand and Australia.)

<Edited to ensure absolutely no typos, for obvious reasons.>

[Jason]

I can't really call myself a scientist, or I might have written something.

[JayUtah]

My original answer was going to be, "I haven't found it necessary to resolve anything," but that wasn't entirely true.

This is one of those questions that merits either a one-line inaccuracy, or many thousands of words. To be honest, now that you asked it, the question has occupied my mind more so now than it has previously. Occasionally I go for walks "in the wilderness" to clear my head and get out of my over-airconditioned, windowless office. And I'm now thinking of all the many ways in which scientific and religious beliefs could collide.

An interesting passage came to my attention written by one of the early church Fathers regarding the extraction of Creationist timelines from Genesis -- the origin of the various young-Earth figures. Apparently the early Fathers were under no delusion that their timeline should be considered dogmatic or doctrinal. The gist of this Father's statement was that since Genesis and its events were so far removed from their knowledge and experience, it would be foolish of them to predicate any strong faith on their work precisely because they would have to abandon that faith should empirical knowledge eventually disprove them. So apparently the learned formulators of Creationist doctrine were quite conscious of the possibility that they might run afoul of empirical understanding -- which they have. And because modern professors of Creationism have not heeded the wisdom of their predecessors, they are now faced with exactly the dilemma they were warned about.

I don't believe in all the typical cosmological clap-trap you hear about in some churches. And so part of my approach to reconciling Christianity with science is to heed the advice of the Fathers and not to place rigid faith where there are matters of doctrinal uncertainty, lest I be forced to choose between faith and empirical evidence. I believe faith is important where empirical study shows us nothing, but the intent of faith is not to dispute what can be evidenced to the contrary by observation.

That is, some "Christian" doctrines are merely appendices to the more central and saving tenets. Believing one way or another about them doesn't really seem to matter, but beliefs along those lines can run quickly afoul of empirical knowledge. In those cases it's simpler to dismiss the appendix belief. There is so much "traditional" belief that falls into these categories. Believed for centuries, it simply doesn't hold up to modern views of the world, and ultimately doesn't matter.

I remember working with Dr. Stephen Hawking on Fate of the Universe. Now there's a guy with a great sense of humor. The topic of religious cosmological beliefs came up in a session once, and Dr. Hawking was amused to learn that one of the cosmological beliefs for which Mormons were originally ridiculed was that matter and energy were interchangeable and uncreated, a truth we now recognize empirically in the laws of thermodynamics. Religion occasionally gets it right, and maybe even for the right reason. That has implications for the creation, since the traditional view of God is that "without him was not anything made that was made," implying that God came first and then matter and energy at his command. But for me it isn't important whether matter existed first and then God. Sure, people would then tell me that if matter existed before God then God isn't really omnipotent since he cannot actually bring matter into existence nor dismiss it. Then I would ask whether that degree of omnipotence denies God his due. I'm not impressed by a formulation of God that assigns to him all superlatives of each applicable property simply because superlative is good. Is there any who can bring matter into existence? If not, then is God not still supreme?

But it gets worse. If God cannot create matter and energy from nothing, nor dismiss it back to nothing, then this implies there are rules to the universe which even God himself is compelled to obey. This poses many problems for the superlative God. Must God obey rules? Can God be held to a bargain? If not, what is the promise from such a God worth? The sophistical formulations of God, in my mind, are little more than mealy-mouthed attempts to define a God that, in some person's mind, is worthy of worship. Such a God must be superlative in all properties that allow the superlative.

I prefer a more practical formulation. Omnipotence does not mean doing all that is conceivable to do, but doing all that is possible to do. We know that omnipotence does not extend to the ridiculous or the paradoxical -- such as microwaving a burrito so hot that he himself cannot eat it. So if omnipotence has limits, it falls to us to determine where those limits lie. I simply choose to posit that the limits lie such as to make God supreme among all that can be known or done, but to allow that there are things that cannot be known or done at all, aside from the absurd and paradoxical. If the act of creation is the organization of unorganized matter into more advanced or less entropic patterns of behavior and the differentiation of higher orders of matter, then I would certainly consider that godlike.

I don't believe in creation ex nihilo and a moment's thought demonstrates that it is neither especially practical nor necessary to do so and yet remain a Christian. "Without him was not anything made that was made," allows for things to have existed that were unmade. The act of reconciliation in that case comes from examining the origin of each of two competing beliefs. Not comparatively, of course, since they came from two distinct disciplines of thought. But within each discipline is a hierarchy of credibility and of authoritative provenance. Within science we speak of the holy crucibles of "methodology" and "peer review" which assign a gradation of confidence to conclusions reached in that tradition. In religion we study the origins of teachings as far back as we can and explore the reasons for the surrounding debate. And religion is the one field were subjective impressions are considered reasonably admissible. Here we find that the ex nihilo doctrine is essentially imposed as a "necessary" superstition because we can't have a God that can't snap his fingers and make things appear out of nothing. Anything less, it is said, just isn't God.

So that's one example of a reconciled belief.