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Permalink Reply by Eli on October 6, 2008 at 10:56am

People are great at suspension of disbelief, it's why Horror movies are successful a the box-office. Some people take it a step further and throw this into their real lives and continue to persist that their religion is "true" their holy book "perfect" despite any evidence to the contrary.

Most scientists that are religious that I hear speak fall into one of the following four categories:
1.) Compartmentalized mind - those who somehow fence off the religion from their work.
2.) Bad scientists - Those whose methodology has been compromised by their religious beliefs, or those who attribute the blocks in their understanding to the supernatural.
3.) Non-conflicting field - Those scientists who work in field that would never run up against religion, although some of these I would hesitate to call "scientists" such as mathematicians.
4.) Deliberate deceivers - Discovery institute hacks who *KNOW* they're doing it wrong but are trying to promote thier agenda and using their degrees merely to add weight to their arguments.

Permalink Reply by Donald Boos on October 14, 2008 at 11:56am

These are all good points. I was referring to to the chemists I worked with who were good scientists and not deceivers. Another point, in the field of Physics, god made the rainbow as a promise not to destroy the earth by flooding. In other words refraction of light did not occur previously. This is an example of primitive people trying to explain something they did not understand, like evolution. No. 4 is an example of how faith trumps known facts. Even mathematics is contradicted by the bible, but I know of no mathematician who insists that Pi is 3.

Permalink Reply by D.O.S on November 5, 2009 at 10:59am

Another possible reason/explanation is Cognitive Disonance. There have been some interesting studies on it. Don't recall names off the top of me head but I could probably find a few if you're interested in exploring the concept.