It's a lot more to do with the culture one grows up with than the belief itself, and anything you learn at such a young age is difficult to shake loose of completely.
Personally, I used to be a strong Lutheran, I'd say I'm now 20% Lutheran and 80% agnostic, but even that has far less to do with me intellectually not recognizing my God and a lot more to do with frustrations over the behaviors of organized religions.
In short: For a lot of people that I know and myself, religion is far less believing that God is going to help you in some way (frankly, if you know your Bible, you know God's help tends to come in rather rough and leaves a lot of things broken so you don't really want it anyway) and lot more in believing that it's just a nicer universe to live in if you assume that you simply cease to exist at the point of death and there is nothing but...well, nothing awaiting you over that line.
Is this something you have to do regularly, make judgements on scientists based on their speculations of an afterlife?
Wouldn't it be far better to make judgments based on their contribution to their field?
Does this mean we should not take Francis S. Collins seriously?
I don't want to get into a huge theological thing, my policy on this is always the same: You do you, I'll do me, and we'll get along fine. If we get to a point where we can find out what the afterlife is, if it exists, then we can re-evaluate beliefs at that point, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that, so until then I'll keep my faith and all I ask is the respect that anyone else would deserve.
However, it should not surprise someone in the sciences if they are passed over for job opportunities based on their religious beliefs. Those beliefs may limit your capacity to effectively perform your job.
In the US, its generally should, since its pretty blatantly illegal in virtually every case.
> Those beliefs may limit your capacity to effectively perform your job.
There may be some specific religious beliefs where that is true for some jobs (in the sciences or otherwise), but, in general, that's not even remotely true.
A law that cannot be enforced isn't really a law. Making a case for religious discrimination is difficult. And the subject of this thread revolves around whether discriminating based on beliefs should be allowed. If you worked at Bain Capital and openly supported Bernie Sanders, would you be surprised to not get promotes?
> There may be some specific religious beliefs where that is true for some jobs (in the sciences or otherwise), but, in general, that's not even remotely true.
See my comment below regarding skepticism and science.
To the extent that it is difficult to enforce, it is because it is difficult to know when it has occurred. But, that doesn't reduce the surprise one should have when one discovers that it has occurred, because that means that it is one of the cases where the problems that usually exist with discovering that it has occurred (and which pose a difficulty for enforcing the law) are not present, at least at their normal level.
> See my comment below regarding skepticism and science
Religious beliefs in general are not incompatible with skepticism on questions within the domain of science; some specific religious beliefs may be incompatible with skepticism in some areas of scientific inquiry, but, again, that's different than the generality posed.
> Religious beliefs in general are not incompatible with skepticism on questions within the domain of science;
I disagree. The Bible explicitly attempts to provide explanations for the order of the natural world.
> some specific religious beliefs may be incompatible with skepticism in some areas of scientific inquiry, but, again, that's different than the generality posed.
How so? This sounds like a restatement of my original point: "Those beliefs may limit your capacity to effectively perform your job."
One of the most significant obstacles to interpreting the Bible today is the unreasonable burdens placed upon the text. For example, the writers of the creation story in Genesis had no concept of modern science, and their purpose in writing was not to explain how the cosmos were created, but to explain that the cosmos were created by YHWH. When we read it expecting to find scientific explanations for the nature of the universe, we obscure the authors' purpose and the intended meaning. People who do so then discount the entire text based upon their own unreasonable expectations, and then accuse those who find value and existential truths in the texts of being irrational (or worse).
Considering how poorly we humans tend to communicate verbally and face-to-face, I guess it's no big surprise that we tend to do a poor job of interpreting the written word as well.
Even so, your counterpoint still holds no water. Just because many of them turn to faith during difficult times does not mean they necessarily perform their job function at a higher level as a result.
Sounds like an unsubstantiated belief to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_...
But to borrow from Sam Harris, if you met a scientist who openly admitted to believing Elvis is still alive, would you hold the same opinion of them professionally?
Skepticism is a core quality of being a scientist. Believing in something without proof is contrary to being skeptical. Thus, believing in god or Elvis are anti-scientific beliefs.
But people are remarkably good at erecting fences in their minds. Many of those brilliant people I refer to (I call them brilliant because of their past good work in science) were able to sort of build a fence in their mind around their work and let irrational beliefs take root around it. So they were not true scientists in all aspects of their lives.
Believing in God doesn't necessarily make you a bad scientist, either.
Skepticism is a core quality of being a scientist.
Anyway, I just got done reading [1] and found it interesting that Galileo's biggest advantages as a scientist were that he could grind a lens and being trained as an artist (so he had a good idea what he was looking at when he looked at the moon). [And probably also being really witty so he could make friends at parties and impress his financial backers.]
Also:
Believing in something without proof is contrary to being skeptical.
I took several history of science and technology courses at university and the impression I got was that the most important aspects of being a scientist was messing around with technology, taking notes, and having a lot of time to sit around and think. [Having some sort of rival who was also doing teh science whom you really wanted to show up seems to be a bonus.]
Being willing to be disappointed when you're proved wrong seems a lot more useful than only believing things you have proof for. In fact believing something without proof seems like a great way to get started on something very important as long as you're willing to do a lot of additional work.
[1] - http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
I also failed to differentiate "belief" from its use in common vernacular, so I'll rephrase my previous statement:
A scientist practices scientific skepticism. Accepting an unsubstantiated hypothesis without empirical evidence is contrary to scientific skepticism. Belief in a higher power is accepting an unsubstantiated hypothesis without empirical evidence. Thus, belief in a higher power is contrary to scientific skepticism. Therefore, belief in a higher power is contrary to being a scientist.
Of course it's human nature to become emotionally attached to a hypothesis of one's own design. And perhaps scientists would not so rigorously pursue empirical evidence to support their claims if they didn't "believe" them. But the difference between a scientist and a theist is that a scientist will back off their hypothesis when evidence to the contrary is presented, whereas a theist will not.
Everything I've seen of Galileo leads me to believe that he was't a scientific skeptic (the dude still had epicycles when all he had to do was pay a bit more attention to Kepler). I'm interested in what evidence you use to believe that he was practicing any form of skepticism.
Edit (you edited the post, now my joke makes no sense :( )
You underestimate the number of scientists with absurd beliefs.
There are people who believe in parallel universes, dark matter, spooky action at a distance, wormholes, time travel, simulating the human brain in silico, more than 3 spatial dimensions, strong artificial intelligence, aliens, etc.
Dealing with the absurd is a fundamental part of the human experience, and those denying this are only kidding themselves. See for example the atheists who give in to the absurd, semi-religious, arguments for the existence of life on other planets in the absence of any proof at all.
We're never free of absurd beliefs, we just find new ways to have them. The trick is to separate belief from fact when doing science and only draw conclusions from the latter.
Scientists do not believe in parallel universes, dark matter and all the other stuff you mentioned. They hypothesize about them, then they try to formulate theories and then they try to test these theories, by means of experiments.
When they do get to perform comprehensive experiments then, depending on the results, finally know what the truth is.
Not so much the same as with the beardy invisible man living in the sky now is it?
Not quite. The current substantiated hypothesis is always provisional until a better idea or contrary evidence turns up. That's not what most people call truth, and certainly not the kind of truth religious people have in mind.
Sometimes I wonder why I spend time to respond to people. No one reads anything. People just want to disagree to pass the time.
Even with an enormous and indefinite number of validating experiments, a theory is still provisional. There is no forever truth. For example consider Newtonian physics. For the 200 years until relativity and quantum mechanics were invented it was the best game in town. 200 years of experiment is pretty comprehensive. We can do experiments today that support Newtonian physics. But it was never 'true', because if you look very, very carefully you can find examples where it doesn't work.
You can not prove things true in science (unlike math), you can only disprove them. Things that resist disproof are held as provisionally true until we know better.
So: there is no moment when you "finally know what the truth is". Hence my disagreement with your post.
Scientists know what the truth isn't. There's a T-shirt slogan for you.
On the other hand what does all this have to do with the belief(as in faith) and the belief of scientists in various phenomena, theories etc?
You picked a word("truth") from my post and wrote an irrelevant(but kinda interesting) comment.
We were talking about the absurdity of believing in something(like god) rather than believing that something might hold true.
And then, you're just playing with words, you're not actually making a point.
If one would want to be concise they would say that everything can be true or false, for specific values of truthiness or falsiness under a particular context.
Case in point: Newtonian physics is true under a macroscopic context.
PS. I don't wear T-shirts that bear aphorisms.
> When [scientists] perform comprehensive experiments then, depending on the results, [they] finally know what the truth is.
and contrasted that with the beliefs of religious people. Your assertion isn't quite true, and I explained why.
Then you told me off for (a) not reading your fine comment; (b) irrelevance; and (c) having poor apparel recommendations.
I concede the last point gracefully. Have a great weekend.
b) Compared to the greater point, which was the dishonesty of equating "believe-in" to "believe-that", it was a bit irrelevant. Yet, as I said, interesting. Also I explained why this kind of nitpicking doesn't offer much(IMHO), by giving the example of how far we can go by playing with truthiness/falsiness values.
c) Hey, there's no accounting for taste! Also, I didn't judge. I just said that I don't wear them.
Have an even greater weekend
The only things actually pertinent to monotheistic doctrines are "invisible" and "living".
> Scientists do not believe in parallel universes, dark matter and all the other stuff you mentioned.
Of course they do. They create models and then try to interpret them using what looks more like philosophy than hard science. What they get sometimes is nothing short of unsubstantiated belief in absurd things. But as long as they don't try to pass that as the scientific truth, we don't mind. Crazy beliefs might lead to new discoveries, specially in that nebulous phase of hypothesis formulation.
Read the definition from wikipedia: "Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty"
The reason why you're confused is simple; you conflate casual speech with literal definitions. When you hear scientists say "I believe that... blah blah" is a figure of speech. In the same way I used "what the hell" but I really don't believe in hell :)
What they mean actually is "I hypothesize that ... blah blah". That's why you won't see any scientific papers saying "I believe that the number must be something around... 42".
And by the way, even if they believed in the sense that you said, any evidence contrary to their beliefs would make them adjust their beliefs ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Believe_But_Cannot_Pro...
There's a whole book with responses from real scientists regarding this.
Basing your professional opinion of someone on anything other than their professional work strikes me as very 'unsciency'
Belief A has no rational basis. Belief B has a rational basis. If you believe A yet have proven B, that doesn't make B wrong. Even if believe that it was A which led you to the discovery.
>If you believe A yet have proven B, that doesn't make B wrong.
It makes you wrong. All the time you spend as a proponent for A is wasted.
I agree that it's better not to waste your time believing A if you can avoid it.
Non sequitur. What you believe is separated from your work. Just like when you were a kid and your math homework had nothing to do with the fact that you believed wrestling was real.