Scientists and faith
From PhiloWiki
What about all of the scientists who believe in God?
Christian views
Reasonable minds can differ on just about every issue. There are many brilliant minds in history who found secularism to be their truth. Notable individuals include David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sagan, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Paine, Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Stalin, and many more. These are highly intelligent and accomplished people who looked at the evidence and found it wanting.
While secularists line up with the individuals listed above, Christians line up with Justin Martyr, Origen, Augustine, Anslem, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Blaise Pascal, William Paley, Soren Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, John Woodbridge, Craig Blomberg, Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, John Mcray, Greg Boyd, Ben Witherington, Gary Collins, Donald Carson, Louis Lapides, Alexander Metherell, Peter Kreeft, Karl Barth, William Lane Craig, John Warwick Montgomery, J.P. Moreland, Francis Schaeffer, Michael Behe, Michael Denton, Hugh Ross, Walter Bradley, Norman Geisler, Ravi Zacharias, Fazalle Rana, and many more. Like the atheists listed above, these are all highly intelligent and accomplished people.
The truth is, we are all on a journey in search of meaning.
- Strobel states that the weight of scientific evidence points to God [Case for a Creator, p 77].
- LeaderU.com - Search for "Does God exist?" - there is a list of a dozen debates by William Lane Craig. You can see what both sides have to say there.
- Resources are needed. Feel free to find and add resources.
Secular views
There is plenty of intriguing evidence for God and for the different faiths that reasonable arguments can be made for all. Almost any belief system can be backed up by a list of 'learned' thinkers or scientists, whether Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, secularism, etc.
According to Newsweek in 1987, "By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science..." That would make the support for creation science among those branches of science who deal with the earth and its life forms at about 0.14%.
- "Flew has not changed his mind on the inadequacy of the various philosophical arguments for God, which he very ably covered in his classic work God and Philosophy. For example, he still does not buy into the moral argument, and remains unimpressed by the kalaam cosmological argument. (Lee Strobel in "The Case for a Creator" has a chapter interviewing W. L. Craig. The discussion is focused on the kalam argument... for those who want to see how the argument is presented.) However, he says he is impressed by recent claims that science has discovered evidence for God, although he admits to Carrier that he has not kept up with the scientific critiques of those arguments."
