Scientists do(n’t) Mix God and Science
24 August, 2005 | This item was filled under [ Religion, Sabbah, Say That Again, Science and Technology ]
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Should Scientists Mix God and Science?
At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: “Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”
The answer was quick and sharp. “No!” declared Herbert A. Hauptman, a Nobel laureates who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.
Posted by Haitham Sabbah
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20 Comments on “Scientists do(n’t) Mix God and Science”
Well, whatever works for them.
I don’t think that science and religion should be mixed either. Not in the content that they shouldn’t believe in God though, one of the things that keeps me believing in God is science.
“Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”
This is clearly and overloaded question; “believe in God”, in what sense exactly? What does it mean?
For example, can you be a scientist and still, somehow, “believe in” (as in “honestly conceptualize”) a God that is not bounded by space-time in any way and yet … has thought processes, memories and knowledge (all of which can only be defined within space-time).
Well .. can you ?
skeptic, would you mind explaining how the very basic unit of life was formed? (forget that “it happened randomly over time” theory!)
I was always taught that something cannot emerge from nothing. Yet the basis for evolution is just that.
Whoever says “you can’t be a good scientist and believe in God” either doesn’t know what science is or doesn’t know what God is.
Hareega, most likely the latter. Anyone here read Michael Behe’s “Black Box”?
Here’s something to read about:
The Scientific World Is Turning to God- http://www.harunyahya.com/articles/70scientific_world.html
I personally believe that science always leads to one fact: the presence of God.
I’ve made a quick research in university about religion, God and scientific research, I asked people of different religions. I even asked those who don’t believe in God, who replied to me: if this whole evolution theory wasn’t there, we’d most probably believe in God.
And while arguing with them we always reached this question: where did it all start? And that’s when they’d say: randomly over time!
To be perfectly honest with you, there’s this very thin line between believing and not believing when you follow the scientific analysis of things, and there was a time when I almost reached this not-believing level, until I made my own research and watched Dr. Zaghloul El Naggar speak. He explained everything scientifically, and showed how it leads to God.
I’m not a pro in other religions, but in Islam, Koran asks its followers to meditate and to research and achieve scientific progress, because it’s the best way to since God.
Just like my parents used to put it when I was a kid, they used to say: do you see air? Smell it? Or taste it or touch it? Yet by learning about our planet and about life on it, we knew it’s everywhere around us and without it we would die… same goes for God.
And then they’d follow it by this perfect saying in Arabic: “Allah ma shafouh, bil 3aqel 3irfouh” which means: they didn’t see God, but they knew him by brain, i.e. with knowledge.
Abu Sinan, what do you mean “something cannot emerge from nothing”. I suspect you’re referring to a shallow description of the first law of thermodynamics - as it is referred to in classical systems, here mentioned out of context.
To a quantum physicist, nothing is, in fact, something. Quantum theory holds that a vacuum is subject to quantum uncertainties. The vacuum is not empty at all - it is filled with vast amounts of fluctuating energy. Quantum fluctuations exist even at a temperature of absolute zero where no thermal agitation effects remain. This zero-point energy is the result of the unpredicatable random fluctuations of the vacuum energy, which is zero in classical theory. These fluctuations can be intense enough TO CAUSE PARTICLES TO FORM from the vacuum SPONTANEOUSLY. This means that things can materialize out of the vacuum, and things can vanish into it. This is not merely theoretical, it can be measured. Case in point: the Casimir Effect. An imbalance in the quantum fluctuations of empty space can PUSH two metal plates together. Consider plates set at a certain distance apart. In the space between the plates, only those vacuum fluctuations for which a whole number of half-waves just spans the distance can exist. Outside the plates, the fluctuations can have many more values because there is more space. The number of modes outside the plates, all of which carry energy and momentum, is greater than those inside. This imbalance PUSHES THE PLATES TOGETHER.
BelieverInGod: your question cannot be answered in a single paragraph. It is something that is being investigated heavily and we’re closing in on that. I highly recommend the following books: “The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution”, “Investigations”, “At Home in the Universe” by Stuart Kauffman.
Your question is also irrelevant. 500 years ago you could have asked me “what is the origin of thunders and earthquakes”, perhaps trying to force me to 1) stop investigating, questioning and researching, 2) accept your answer, which of course would be equally undefined and useless as the aims of the question itself.
Of course feel free to be a lot more specific, if you want or if you can; I would love to see a coherent syllogism from you, one that I can actually engage in a discussion with.
Eman: “randomly over time!” is just as undefined and meaningless (and misleading!) as “God”.
We routinely evolve all sorts of complex entities by using the core evolutionary process (i.e. without intentional design, or other human - or other commonly thought of as “intelligent” - intervention). Example: create one million totally random sequences of assembly language instructions in a computer. Run them after load ing a register with an ASCII text, and evaluate each one of them as to how well they manage to sort the contents of the text in an address pointed to by another register. Most of them would crash instantly, as expected. Some of them might do something vaguely interesting such as start reading the contents of the text, and so on. There’s a function that evaluates the “performance” of each such program executed - some points are awarded for managing to read something from the text, more points awarded if they manage to store a word in the destination buffer, and more points if a pair of word is correctly stored in alphabetical order, and so on. Kill 999000 of the programs and only keep the top 1000 performers. Then randomly mate pairs of them (combine their instructions in some manner) and add every now and then (randomly) a random mutation to some instruction of the offspring programs. Thus create another million programs to evaluate. Now, repeat the above process a million times. You will be surprised to discover that in the end you get some rather efficient sorting programs, which do their thing often in ways no human being could have thought of.
Things are not as easy as most human intellects like to think they are - the universe is often not intuitive at all. Don’t rush into conclusions - lest you end up spitting in the creator’s face by insulting the creation itself!
Oh man, I read that harun yahya article, it’s so laughable!
So let me get it straight: “I am too dumb to figure it out, or too lazy to dedicate my life to research (not to mention I have other better things to do in life - like … erm.. God knows what actually!) so here’s my conclusion: the universe, mathematics, the very essence of the cosmos cannot possibly incorporate processes akin to modes of thinking well outside, above and beyond the human realm and the human concepts of “thought” and “intelligence” - narrow and inadequate though they may be. So I conclude that there is a being (much like humans are beings) that I call God which possesses intelligence and thinking processes (much like humans do) with the difference that God is like super powerful and stuff … kewl”
So .. I have to ask again: God is outside space and time, unbounded and in no way requires space and time (created things in themselves) for God to be defined in any way — yet God has thought processes and intelligence that by definition puts the concept of God firmly within the boundaries of the creation ??
What gives?
skeptic, you’ve answered your own question…
GOD KNOWS
But anyway… Maybe it is different in your APES planet. Enjoy your apes
Skeptic writes “The vacuum is not empty at all - it is filled with vast amounts of fluctuating energy.”
So indeed, you make my point for me, there is nothing that exists today that did not come from something. Thank you.
skeptic, first all I’d suggest you do a spell-check after carrying out hideous act of plagarism…. (http://www.zpower.com/documents/Outline_EverythingForNothing.htm)
let’s leave thermodynamics/ the kinetic theory of gases and go to a level where scientists discuss “the theory of everything” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything ); what do you find there? What keeps those “strings” wiggling the way they are?
Random binary data turns out to be meaningful data ONLY because the human mind designed certain “conditions” to make it meaningful. for eg.
ABC Hex = 101010111100 Binary …who defines what is ABC and what relevance/usefulness it has to the entity in question…?
Have you ever thought what would become of us if the moon was not positioned in its current position in space? (I’d surely do some research on this for sure before going any further)
“There is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows what lies before them and what is after them, and they comprehend not anything of His knowledge save such as He wills. His throne comprises the heavens and earth; the preserving of them oppresses Him not; He is the All-High, the All-Glorious.” (2:255 Qur’an)
Skeptic, you have an opinion you believe in and defend, that’s normal, but I still disagree with you.
“Things are not as easy as most human intellects like to think they are”
I never said they’re easy, in fact I was saying that through the complications that are sometimes beyond our understanding, we know there’s a God! How? We try to solve riddles and answer questions, we research and make scientific progress through which we get our answers and through which we know these complications are the creation of God not random interactions and coincidence.
Simply look at your face, nothing else, and study its functions, its structure, its form, its features, tracking down the tiny bits to the skin, you will know this perfect creation is no result of coincidence or whatever! There are thousands and millions of interactions that form one single molecule, it can be no coincidence that forms all those molecules that are combined to form different organs and species and planets…etc. Which brings me to the evolution theory, I believe in the fact that we evolved and that species adapt to their surroundings and conditions, but I don’t believe in the part about origins! The part about humans evolving from apes makes no sense, if that’s true then why didn’t we witness new creatures evolve from us humans all these decades and centuries!
I believe explaining it as coincidence or random spontaneous interactions is the easy way out, unlike believing in God. When you believe you know that things are not as easy as they look and therefore you research and dig deep. You start from the basics and go as further as you could, challenging yourself and thinking of the unthinkable and proving that such a complicated system can’t be unplanned. But when you’re not a believer you exhaust yourself trying to prove that things just happened! You go backwards and limit yourself to only what the human mind could understand.
I think it’s the pride of the human brain that makes him deny God, and it’s our wish to escape religious boundaries that urges us to convince ourselves of the non-existence of God.
Combine science, all its branches, studying the body, soul, emotions, thinking, personality, psychology and you’ll know that it’s no coincidence that formed you with your specific features, specific mentality, specific emotions, specific personality…etc. It’s no coincidence that you inherited certain things and not other things, it’s no coincidence at all.
Anyway, I’m just saying this as a part of a nice discussion here, not trying to convince anyone of what I personally think
I’ve just come back. Interesting. BelieverInGod, that’s not plagiarism, I can list a good many articles and books (dozens upon dozens) that would further elucidate these matters.
You dont’ understand what the objection is, do you? Things in the universe happen according to some “logic” which is not intuitive to most humans, it seems, as we discover more and more. Nothing surprising there. Heraclitus used to call it “kinon nous” i.e. the mind that moves everything - it’s a metaphor. It’s not a human mind, with time-bound thought processes, associations, memories, information storage somewhere, and so on and so forth.
So assuming you acknowledge this (as I do) how can you then go on and imply even remotely that God (”kinon nous”) is a male with attributes that resemble in kind those of us feeble humans. Quantity is irrelevant - “infinite speed” still implies something being somehow measured against time/space … or if not then it’s a term totally void of meaning and content. Either way, it’s nonsense.
Do you see what a scientist means by saying that ?
BelieverInGod: Please go ahead and explain to me what YOU THINK that Quranic passage means. Maybe then you will understand which of us might be closer to being an idolatr, i.e. closer to assigning mortal/created attributes to something totally unlike anything else in the whole creation, something totally incomprehensible and indescribable.
Eman, busting your ass to discover even tiny fragments of truth in order to give the next generations somewhere to stand on in order to be able to reach even further into the unknown is the true struggle, the “hard way”. Abandoning the struggle to answer the TRULY hard questions by assuming you already know the answer, or worse by worshipping shallow, antrhopomorphic (human-like) interpretations is the “easy way out”. Yes,
Randomness and coincidence — these are not the common-sense terms that we use in our tiny human lives, my friend, as a convenience, in order to facilitate our daily needs. For a brief glimpse have a look here instead http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/physics1.htm
Any sufficiently unsophisticated human being will refuse to confront anything that is huge and overwhelming enough to be incomprehensible - and vice versa, there’s always something overwhelming enough for any given human being to refuse to confront its incomprehensibility.
Just to clarify: I am not an atheist nor an agnostic. In fact, I consider myself to be a true muslim in this sense: I do believe that God is unlike anything else in the creation and that there’s nothing at all in the creation that resembles God whatsoever. Consequently, to make a mistake either way is the most serious “sin” that can compromise one’s ability to discover truth.
I am not saying that there is no God (or that I don’t know if there is God): what I am saying is that I have no clue whatsoever what “God” might actually mean, in any shape or form. Simple as that. I do know that God is nothing like humans (or anything else for that matter), at all.
God is incomphrehensible.This is the root of faith.I am saying this because when we believe God knows everything we cannot really understand why God admonished Adam for eating the apple(he knows he is going to eat the apple before Adam even attempted to eat the apple)So wats the point here.Same is the case with Satan when he asks him to bow.He refuses & God should have known before the incident that he is going to refuse.So we have to firmly believe that God is beyond our minds capacity to understand.
If not its all confusion.The debate will go on & on.