The best theist Scientists

Discussion in 'Religion' started by davewhite04, Mar 22, 2024.

  1. TheVat Registered Member

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    I was going to guess Frank Wilczek.

    When he is not doing Nobel Prize winning research, he goes in for a sort of updated Spinozan view of God, carrying that forward into a physics which allows a pantheistic view of the world where God and consciousness permeate all matter. Like Collins, he is so accomplished in his field that you tend to listen to him when he takes off in a mystical direction. I found an LA Times interview I saw a couple years back.

    https://www.latimes.com/science/sto...lity-with-theoretical-physicist-frank-wilczek

    I find myself drawn towards his spiritual views.
     
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  3. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    I’m rereading a book on Precambrian life at the moment which often refers to Prof. Simon Conway Morris FRS, of Cambridge, one of the most eminent of our current palaeontologists. I looked him up and it turns out he too is a Christian. Obviously he has no time for creationism (except in the most general sense that he believes the world was created by God, as any Christian does of course.) He did a lot of work on the Burgess Shale fossils, where however he made one blunder, (concerning Hallucigenia.). But he is highly respected, nonetheless.
     
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  5. Pinball1970 Valued Senior Member

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    Also from Cambridge, I have seen this guy in debates.

    https://www.faraday.cam.ac.uk/about/people/dr-robert-asher/
     
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  7. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, I've read his book "Evolution and Belief", which I have often found useful when arguing with creationists on science forums. Particularly useful is his table of "transitional fossils", something that creationists often like to claim have never been found. He lists a couple of hundred. Of course all fossils are transitional really, given that evolution is a continuing process, but his table gives examples of those fossils that show a combination of characteristics shared with both earlier and later ones, thereby demonstrating that transitional changes have taken place.

    I suppose I should have listed Asher as another example but he slipped my mind.
     
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  8. davewhite04 Valued Senior Member

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    In the circles you go.
     
  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    The physicist Freeman Dyson was a non-denominational Christian, but believed in God in a more pantheistic sense:

    https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/07/a-glorious-accident-freeman-dyson/

    "I like to describe [God] as the “world soul” — which was my mother’s phrase — so that we are little bits of the world soul. And so it may well be that we are part of the world’s growth. That’s the kind of world I would like to live in, and as a working hypothesis it seems to me quite reasonable. In detail the world shows no evidence of any sort of conscious design. If there is to be a conscious design, it probably has to be ours."
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2024 at 3:20 AM

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