I am an astrophysicist. I am also a Christian
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Organized religion is pervasively political. It is literally about delegating resource management and community gatekeeping to a class of upstanding parishers and clergy. In modern societies, that class is symbiotic with the ambient social political framework.
That's why we get the whole "Jesus and guns" nonsense - Christianity as a belief system says nothing about guns, but it is vital for the symbiotes, and suddenly guns become a Christian thing; instead of the original "turn the other cheek", we arrive at a fetish of doing harm to others. (*)
(*) Proper disclosure, I am not American and not Christian.
> In the earliest years of the Scientific Revolution, leaders like Galileo and Robert Boyle wrote extensively about their faith.
Galileo was a client of and then oppressed by Christian clergy. While I am sure Christianity helped shape his scientific persona, Christianity as a performed religion was a negative factor in him being able to communicate the heliocentric theory and collaborate with his peers.
Overall: I think the author lives in an ideological ivory tower, without giving a moment's thought to the fact that they are promoting an ideology that's pragmatically used to embellish the waste of resources and lives of people quite directly in her plain view. I cannot condone this attitude.
Not only is any of that not uniquely Christian, it's not even particular to religious faith. Neither does the author make a compelling case merely by listing prominent Christian scientists. There's not a lot of force to an argument that points out that by some modest definition of faith and science both aren't literally contradictory.
At that point faith has shifted from something that reveals transcendent truth to something that people just keep around for psychological reasons. A lot of scientists stick to some sort of natural theology, but it often mostly is a cultural sentiment. You could take the theology out, and nothing would change.
It would be very hard to marry that kind of scientific scepticism with received wisdom from religion instantiated by the bible, or almost any documentary form faith book. Not that I doubt she is a Christian or a scientist, but that I suspect she is not a biblical literalist regarding either the old or new testament.
The existence of prior faiths being reasonably well documented, and the foundations of radio carbon dating living in the same science as astrophysics, it's very hard to avoid questions why as a Christian she'd invalidate these other beliefs, against her own. So again, I suspect a degree of ecumenicism in the widest sense is required.
Maybe different meaning has to be attached to belief applied to science, and religious belief. One is evidenced, the other is (with no offence intended) the antithesis of evidenced, It's demands are different: belief in God demands belief in the absence of evidence as well as in its presence. (Which it should be clear I would say is absent but opinions (and beliefs) differ on that)
I've known a few Buddhist computer scientists, and many Christian mathematicians. I haven't known many scientific Christians beyond the adherents of Christmas rituals, which many enjoy without much other belief required.
A protestation of religious faith in a scientist is a rare thing. It doesn't need to be confronted or denied, I just note it demands a peculiar (to me at least) segmentation of thinking.
Promises, promises. In resume: After a while, true facts and bad decisions will hit over people in denial of science like an steamroller. Is slow, but unavoidable.
There is not worse problem for humans that to lost the touch with society. Her previous stance can't be milked anymore to win sympathy or power and is a negative trait now. We normally will try immediately to attract a new tribe and make a warm bubble that we can control.
The surprisingly common solution is to glue the broken pieces of the ruined ideological landscape with science, and then to pretend that the glue was there all the time.
Trying to negotiate (lets improve science with the right amount of pseudoscience!) or change the past (agriculture was developed by Jesus!; or Thanks Muhammad for the potatoes! if you prefer), is part of the mourning process. Could work or not (Try to raise a church to worship Zeus now). Is a busy road and there are plenty of competitors. Assimilation will comfort her for a while, until the next crack.
In her own words,
> The wonder I experience when studying the heavens synergizes with my faith, moving me to worship the Creator who made it all. For me, Christian faith is not some political ideology, but a daily choice to follow Jesus Christ. The God who hears my prayers and heals my soul is the same God who created the Universe.
In particular, the article talks about how certain Christian values (curiosity, belief in the comprehensibility of nature, humility, and service) are exactly in line with core parts of the scientific mindset. She inserts quotes from the Bible to justify the Christian part of this, and the science part is largely self evident.
Of course, (I would argue that) these four ideas are not uniquely Christian values. For every Bible quote I can find similar ideas in many other religions. And they seem like secular/humanist values anyway. But I at least accept that these values at least influence the author's own scientific motivations, given that she views herself as a Christian who follows these values.
Her arguments are a little too broad at times, and sometimes she overstates what she's arguing. For example, one topic heading says "Science has Christian roots" but I think the more accurate framing / faithful reading of her point would be that Christianity is not anti-science. So the article kind of starts to lose its punch because ultimately it's just arguing that her beliefs are non contradictory.
> Science has Christian roots
This is bending the truth quite a bit. Yes, many scientists such as Galileo and Newton explored Christian oriented or adjacent faith, which is not a surprise given the broad interests of scholars of old, but I don't see how they share the same roots. Scientific inquiry began long before Jesus was supposedly even alive. Archimedes, Eratosthenes, other Greeks, the Middle East, and East Asia, such as in China, were all doing mathematics and the beginnings of scientific inquiry long before the existence of Jesus and certainly long independent of anyone of Christian faith. It's Western myopia to think that science and Christianity share roots. It's just that Christianity was the main religion in Europe during the time of Galileo, Newton, and their peers were creating what's known as "modern science". Newton actually hid his faith because he would have been marked as a heretic, which he was according to the establishment at that time.
Really, the only sort of relationship I think there exists between science and religion may be in the sense of Feyerabend, in that they share a certain sense of ideology.
I think really, science's goal is to continually show itself to be wrong or learn how it's wrong. It's about building models that describe what is observed in reality. That isn't how Christianity operates. But scientists do need to be aware of how their models sit within philosophical thought.
> Even in today’s America, most Christians are not anti-science.
I don't believe that at all, and that has not been my experience. I had multiple teachers as a kid preface teaching us about dinosaurs that it disagrees with their faith and that they basically had to teach about dinosaurs. Several states have put Creationism into schools, directly violating the separation of church and state. Christians can obviously be scientists and vice versa, but in my experience, Christianity will win out when conflicts arise. I'm not saying scientists are somehow right by default (far, far from it), but I would say that Christians claiming they're also scientists is both a sort of an appeal to authority and also a bit a misnomer since they'll follow science until it conflicts with their Christian faith.
> A majority of White evangelicals did get the COVID vaccine
According to the linked research, it's just barely a majority (and I would be surprised if it was even that high) and far below every other category in the Pew survey. Pretty misleading implications for a scientist.
> Values of curiosity, belief that nature is comprehensible, humility, and service
Yea, that's just called being a good participant in society. Those values are not even remotely exclusive to religion and science.
> For me, science and faith fit together. ... The God who hears my prayers and heals my soul is the same God who created the Universe.
Those two statements are incompatible, especially as an astrophysicist. The thing is, neither is right in their conclusion of who or what created the Universe, or if there even was a creation, because that's basically impossible to know with our given knowledge and maybe even impossible period due to problems with objective reality and our biological limitations forcing a certain perspective and experience. But it does seem to me that the answers each tries to provide are incompatible.
What bothers me about Christianity is, how do Christians know their God is the one? As Ricky Gervais brought up to Stephen Colbert, Gervais mentioned that Colbert doesn't believe in thousands of gods since he believes in the one Christian God. But then, it's just that Gervais, as an atheist, doesn't believe in just one more. It's an interesting perspective. (I should note that I identify neither as an atheist nor a Christian.)
It's okay to accept Christianity as a faith. Go for it, but I do dislike when it's tried to be retconned into philosophical thought. As far as I can tell, the historical research shows that it's likely someone named Jesus lived, was one of many prophets to arise out of the Jewish sects, and was taken out by the establishment. Then sometime later, his life and teachings were retconned into historians' works, either by themselves or others. As far as I have been able to read, there is basically no one who even mentioned Jesus while he was alive aside from maybe one or two sources (and if I recall correctly, one of those possibly was penciled in later after Jesus had died). I think Christians should be able to accept that as a probable reality. Is it that hard to admit that the Bible is a collection of stories about people interested in exploring faith based upon a possible historical prophet figure? (I actually think there's more there, because humans are almost always more concerned about social and political power.) Whether that means he was the Jesus as in the holy trinity, that's up to their faith.