Can You Be a Scientist and Be Religious?

Religion and science's interdependence or lack thereof has been an ongoing debate for centuries; there have been extreme opinions on both sides of the spectrum. In the following discussion I will endeavour to look at the tensions between science and religion, and reach a conclusion on whether or not they can co-exist in one individual’s outlook.

Many scientists in the modern world are almost addicted to doing anything that would allow them to 'play god' in a way, like genetic engineering, biological warfare and more, for purposes ranging from personal satisfaction to monetary gain and political power. Recent and less recent works of modern pop culture illustrate the endless cataclysmic schisms that could occur between different groups of people as a result of too much playing around with human nature or the order of the universe (example; 1997 film Gattaca)

The dangers of this sort of 'progress' is due to the complete disregard for moral ethics, because this unregulated progress of science that is practiced without a set of moral ethics that show respect to human’s sanctity is disastrous without religion, because religion gives us our sense of what are morally acceptable and unacceptable uses for science.

To give an example, for genetic engineering of children to become common, there would have to be many human embryos and foetuses that would simply have these procedures ‘tested’ on them. This is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future due to societal resistance on moral grounds. This example illustrates that perhaps a scientist cannot be religious as religion could hold them back from performing experiments that are increasingly meddlesome in human life.

In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, she examines whether science is enough to give human existence meaning, raises new questions about the aim and morality of science at the turn of the 19th century and whether science can ever truly replace religion.

On the other hand atheists such as Christopher Hitchin argue that: “Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.” He is suggesting that religions could have originated as the first attempt at making theories about the world and that religious stories and tales are analogies to explain the small scientific knowledge we had at those times.

Many hold the view that religion limits Science, and in some respects it could. For example Exodus 20:11 (King James’ Version) of the bible states that: “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” If literally taken, this statement obviously contradicts our basic scientific knowledge. So religion can indeed be ‘blind’ but only when it itself is followed blindly. Contrariwise, it can provide a unique way of looking at science, and interpreting it, as it provides good guidelines for how science can/should be used in correspondence to ethics. A scientist could well use religion as a guide for what experiments should be morally acceptable.

Religion without science is in danger of becoming an obsession. For example, in 2012 such a case made national headlines because of the story of a 27-year-old Jehovah’s Witness woman whose husband denied her her best chance at surviving her ruptured ectopic pregnancy, on the grounds that Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot accept blood transfusions. However, it is also against the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses to willingly commit suicide, and yet this is exactly what the woman’s husband was more or less asking her to do.

Scientifically, it would have been so much better for her to simply accept the blood transfusion; however her husband insisted that she shouldn’t, despite her pain and suffering eventually crippling her to ask for the transfusion of her own accord, even though it went against her own expressed wishes in three separate documents she had signed previously on the matter. For a scientist this is inhumane, and most 21st century people would agree. However if one were to question if a devout Jehovah’s Witness was to harbour ambitions towards becoming scientists, how incredibly limited they would be because of what their religion preaches. The primary moral in the Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm’ therefore, if a doctor of the Jehovah’s Witness faith were faced with a decision between saving someone’s life and honouring their religion; this could be potentially problematic.

Another case is when the American National Science Board which writes the American curriculum for science excluded the big bang theory from their 2010 edition. They gave the following statement defending that choice: that the big bang theory and the evolution theory are “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge and beliefs.” They are basically stating that they are unwilling to acknowledge these widely accepted and respected scientific theories with bountiful amounts of proof because they might offend people’s whose religions say something to the contrary.

This limits the amount of knowledge a person can access only because it contradict religious beliefs. The fact that the National Science Board decided to disregard these facts from the curriculum speaks for the staggering low percentage (33%) of Americans who accept those two theories. To summarise, therefore, if religion limits the amount of scientific knowledge one can access, then surely a religious lifestyle could not fit in with scientific ambitions?

In contrast to the above examples, Islam was the centre of the world's scientific breakthroughs for many centuries falling on the middle ages and beyond. Scriptures of the Qu'ran contained references to the roundedness of the earth. An interesting Hadith of the Prophet illustrates how a Muslim is expected to hunger after knowledge: "Seek knowledge even if it takes you to China" (Narrated from Anas by al-Bayhaqi in al-Imaan and Shu`ab al-Madkhal). There are many variations of this quotation recorded; however the general gist when translated from Arabic is "Seek Knowledge no matter how difficult it is to attain". This obviously illustrates that the Prophet is advocating that to comply with religion one must chase after knowledge to grow spiritually in an Islamic fashion.

Consequently, many scientists emerged during the ‘dark ages’ from the Islamic world (which stretched from North Africa and Spain to Turkey, Iran and central Asia),