Being Religious and a Scientist

Despite my own opinions and biases, I do think that you can be religious and a scientist- I just don't see how you can. The science always tends to outwit the religion or the beliefs. Simple physics and biology disproves the most profound religious beliefs, but if you're willing to ignore the facts, then ignorance is bliss. My concern isn't of what a scientist believes, as long as it doesn't effect their science.
Science attracts a lot of people from all types of backgrounds, and that's what makes it beautiful. In the scientific community, we should only be concerned on how well the science is. However, the religious scientists must put religion to the same amount of criticism as they do with their discoveries, and they must be willing to tolerate those who try to debunk religious beliefs.
In my opinion, this isn't a real concern. When religion starts being a problem is when it effects our politics, our education, and our rights.

I enjoy the above contributions. I would like to add something more between the strict "scientific" and the strictly "religious". Consider this: Sometimes we have our emotions and sometimes our emotions have us. This implies that not only our body, but our entire psyche is involved in our day to day lives. Stress, anxiety, hope, guilt, longing---these are common human motivators. The question then arises, "What is the source or foundation of these pressures? Is it yourself? Is it your worldview? Is it your religious faith? Is it your social circle or family?" If these various emotional pressures sometimes "have us" so to speak, there is in turn a place in our worldview where these pressures are situated.

Put it this way: On top, we have our mindful, conscious reason, then a bit lower and more bodily we have our experience our emotions and in turn, even lower still, these thoughts and emotions are situated around our way of framing reality itself...possibly in terms of culture, family, education, profession, etc. Now, the common and modern way of seeing things (whether religious or scientific) is to imagine that we bear the full responsibility for what we are. We imagine our thoughts and emotions are strictly our own and the rest is either God or Science or the world or whatever...but this may be a giant error common to both sides of the religious question, you see, there is also a bit of our own identity and self-expression which is like a shadow companion to our attempts at ordering the world. Much more than just a moral conscience or soul (or however you wish to imagine it) we experience this pressure as part of our psyche. It is one of the players in our life. It very nearly has autonomous force by way of compensation, inflation, projection etc. This is of course the domain of the psychologists. Dealing with neurosis and such...but we often overlook the fact that healthy minds are only healthy by way of their functional psyche, both conscious and unconscious. We have or psyche, and in turn, certain aspects of our psyche sometimes "have us."

A hysterical or neurotic person is a perfect example of to much automatic or out-of-control mental pressures...but likewise, trying to control the back-pressure of one's own psyche is also a kind of neurosis from the other direction. Too much is too much, not enough is not enough. Health fluctuates, moves and changes to fit situations and life challenges.

Now, getting back to the purely religious or purely scientific view, the psyche and the very real reality of the psyche's affect on our conscious life is not admitted or addressed by either view. For all practical purposes, the religious explanation of reality is peculiar in how closely it aligns to the symbolic, emotional and pressured reality of our psyche. Religion seems to not only address, but help manage our many anxieties and social pressures by giving them stories and a vocabulary for understanding ourselves and our motivations toward a good and balanced life. The disadvantage is of course, these old or ancient texts and symbols do not always keep up with the changing evidence and social outlooks of our up-to-date ways of doing business and going about our lives. Furthermore, if one totally drops the religious iconography and narrative from view with a total reliance on reason, science, evidence and facts, we risk forgetting something vital. We risk a bit of arrogance in asserting ourselves as the total authors and controllers of our inner and outer world. In doing so, we have forgotten the psyche. The psyche (or unconscious or soul, as you like) is a very real pressure on our lives. We each possess limitations of endurance. We push ourselves and try to fully master the world, but in moments of weakness, our moods and emotions "have us." The more we try to push away the reality of our healthy and compensatory psyche, the more we get ourselves into mental troubles and stresses. Here is where science is not enough and religion is not enough. Here is where we begin to see the unique advantages of and special place of both science as science and religion as religion. These are different domains. Of course these two domains can critique each other! Wonderful that they do! Wonderful that each has its own story and its own strength! But mental health and psyche demand more from both sides. A healthy human life demands a great deal from both science and religious/mythological domains. Our science fiction genre is nothing more than the overwhelming recoil and longing for fantasy thinking deep within our psyche. Good Science fiction is like a pressure valve for our daily stresses and hopes. We must find some vent for the build-up of confusing urges and impressions and hopes about our world. More than that, we need our myths and stories to give us a vocabulary and a foresight to imagine moral heroes and moral errors before they occur and a comfort in thinking about them after real life events occur in parallel to these mytho-poetic problems.

Now you ask me whether or not religion is real or whether science is real? To this, I just smile and say, "Well...yup."

The living reality of both narratives not only have efficacy, they also pose a very specific problem---not a problem of word games of arguments or evidence---but a problem which you yourself must encounter, confront, and respond to in a sane and healthy manner. I see two extremes also: I see the religious person navigating the world through highly charged emotional symbols with a very real and living reality to them (Soul, God, Redemtion, Grace) and I see the science minded person excelling at the material reality of things (Technology, Data, Application) and I do not regret the excellent and well evolved strategies of both. Those who can surf the absurdity between them have my respect, but even so, I must still call the space between the two narratives an overwhelming place of absurdity, tension, anxiety and no solid foundation. In response to this strange gray area between science and religion we have of course even more clues and options for understanding the world. We have surveys, we have history books, we have art museums, anthropology, radio pundits, distracting advertisers and, of course philosophers.

Taken in isolation, none of these things quite add up to a complete or satisfying picture. None of these things by themselves can fully resolve the tension of the psyche. The place of doubt and anxiety between religion and science often involves various creative leaps between them, or else a complete evasion of the shadowy unanswered questions. People who seem to swim calmly where the rest of us are drowning are often the psychologists or mystics of the world, since in a way, these types are experts at psyche. The human psyche has its own irrational language, its own seeming allure of subliminal impulses, desires and compensations...marketers know the value of aiming for the gut...aiming for that area of desire and longing and vulnerable self-esteem. The factual and real world success of marketing and advertising is all the more reason to lend an honest ear to what the psychologists and mystics are saying about our own mental blind-spots. These blind spots go beyond simple knowledge seeking and data collection. Often, a psychology case study describing the mental path of a patient from neurosis back to health looks a whole lot like the story of a religious convert or a "spiritual experience" where a person confronts what is unbalanced or neurotic in their life and finally achieves a state of acceptance or grace (or health).

Of course the terminology is changing and the particular beliefs are changing, depending on the case. For the dogmatic scientist, this is a stumbling block, but for the flexibility of the psychologist, this change of terms or strategy is really nothing too special, since the psychologist has seen it happen so many times and so many ways; it happens in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons since people themselves are also living and breathing a variety of different bodily and mental states and impressions.

For some personality types, this entire description will sound like a kind of plea for "relativism" or pseudo-science or total bunk which deviates from their horizon of tradition, but this is not so. This world we inhabit is after all, quite strange and wonderful. Any layman on the sidewalk will offer you their own hypothesis or belief...and if you take a bit of time to hear a dozen of them, you realize a great deal of problems between them. Listen a bit longer and you hear some sympathies and parallels between them. Listen even more and suddenly you are no longer the expert...suddenly there is this giant abyss of mad impressions and symbols for us to confront. With our conscious focus we have our ideas and feelings and attitudes, certainly, and this is healthy, this is normal...but beyond that, some of these attitudes also "have us."

That is all I ask you to see.

One need not go toward the problem. The problem comes to you.