Are all scientists atheists?
I was reading a blog the other day and one of those who left a comment on the blog was very insistent that ALL scientists are atheists. They never said where they got their information from but they insisted that those who accept the need for evidence must be atheists.
It may not surprise you to know that I don’t really agree with this.
First of all we need to understand what atheism actually is. Atheism is the assertion that there is no god (a-theism). Now it seems to me that this is as much a claim to knowledge as the belief that there is a god. So the atheist can’t say that there is no evidence for god so I conclude there is no god, they must have evidence to prove that there is no god. It is not logical to make a claim to knowledge from nothing. Now there is no absolute evidence that there is no god (even atheists accept this) so any claim of there not being a god is a faith, just as much as theism (or the belief in god).
So if we want to claim that a scientist must base everything on physical evidence then the best we could come up with is agnosticism (e.g. saying there is not enough physical evidence to prove the existence or non existence of a god). So the logical end of scientific belief, as atheists explain scientific belief, is not atheism but agnosticism. I don’t really agree with this either but the argument put forward by atheists (if you accept is as being true) can at best only bring you to being an agnostic not an atheist.
However, we then have to explore what constitutes knowledge of something. How can we know anything? Some people will respond that our senses tell us what exists and what doesn’t (e.g. only anything physical is real). Yet how do we then explain things like thought, love, beauty, etc. Some people say it is just chemicals reacting in the body but that is not enough because we experience more than a chemical reaction. We can also appeal to logic and say that the only things we can know about with our senses is the physical world but this does not prove that there is nothing that is non-physical, e.g. metaphysics and god.
It seems to me narrow and closed thinking to insist that the only things you can know exist are those things you can physically experience.
Then we can come back to the word “experience”. You will find that the majority of Christians will be able to talk about encounters with God – times that they have experienced the presence of God. Of course they don’t mean they have physically touched him but that they have felt his presence. I have experienced this for myself and find that I can no more deny the existence of God anymore than I could deny the existence of my brothers.
Some will talk about weak atheism (person who does not have a belief that one or more deities or gods exist) as opposed to strong atheism (person who believes that no god exists) but I think this is a red-herring. Some want to claim to be weak atheists (presumably because it sounds better in certain circles) when they are really agnostic.
Others will talk about ‘improbabilities’ trying to use philosophical/mathematical terms to try and persuade us they are taking a higher thinking approach to things when what they really mean is that they have chosen not to believe (which is a much a faith as choosing to believe – neither can claim intellectual authority). Of course I don’t accept the improbability argument anyway because I believe the evidence points to there most probably being a god and I’m in good intellectual company here (take a look at this article).
Anyway I’m getting off the point. The point is that just because you are a thinking person doesn’t mean you must automatically be an atheist – this is a simple lie that atheists have tried hard to push and the gullible have fallen for.
It is that statistically there are more atheists in the scientific community than in the general population. The most obvious explanation for this is culture not intelligence.
Take a look at the following sites where the statistics are discussed. They are mostly from the USA but they are still valid in this discussion because not all scientists are British, of course.
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/why_are_scientists_atheists.html
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/050811_scientists_god.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_n4_v57/ai_19582381/
