• Question: if you were religious would you become a full science if it affected your beliefs?

    Asked by myersh to Hannah, Ian, Jono on 27 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Hannah Brotherton

      Hannah Brotherton answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Hi myersh,
      I was brought up as a Catholic, so I do have religious beliefs, and I am a full scientist 😀

      Being a scientist should never affect your religion because science is trying to understand what the world is – and religion tells us that God created the world. So science is just discovering how God did.

      People think science is trying to prove God doesn’t exist. But, science can’t do this, because we can’t even explain how the Universe was created and what was before it. Questions like this are too big for scientists to explain and that is why many scientists believe in a creator. Things in the world and universe have been created so perfectly for life, that the chance of science creating it is slim – meaning someone or something must have created it.

      I called myself a theoscientist 😛 Just means I believe in God and science and think the two should complement themselves.

      Sometimes science can’t explain everything 😀 and this is why religion can answer these questions

    • Photo: Jono Bone

      Jono Bone answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Hi myersh,

      That’s a hard question for me to answer because I was not bought up in a religious family and so don’t remember ever believing in a god. Like Hannah their are lots of scientists who are religious and manage to balance their faith with science. People often see belief in evolution as not being compatible with believing in a god but evolution could have just been god method of creation. For me personally though, I don’t think I could be religious and a scientist. Science is based on understanding the world by collecting evidence evidence. However, religion bases its understanding of the world on faith. For me its either one or the other and I chose to base my understanding of the world on evidence.

    • Photo: Ian Wilson

      Ian Wilson answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Hi myersh,

      That’s an interesting one! I’m not religious but I do know a few scientists who are. One of them even studies Evolution, which I think must be quite difficult at times for her.

      I think that, if I was religious, I would probably not be a scientist if my research would disagree with my beliefs. But there are loads of areas of science that sit quite nicely alongside religion and don’t disagree with it, so it would be entirely possible to be religious AND a scientist 🙂

      Hope that helps,

      Ian

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