Quote:
Originally Posted by levite
I think it's unfair to say that science and religion cannot co-exist. They can, so long as the scientist is open-minded and the religion is not fundamentalist
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I do not think open minded means what you want it to in this context--all scientists are BY DEFINITION open minded--if they weren't, no sicentific progress would ever be made!
If you went to any good scientist and said "I can prove that prayers to the Christian God have an effect on the physical world, via repeatedly observable criteria A, B, and C", he would be overjoyed, as, regardless of how small the effect you were able to produce, you would have just won him the Nobel prize, and radically altered our understanding of the physical universe in a more significant way than relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory combined.
More on this:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/found-n...-examined.html
Do you mean tolerant? I could see that being the case if it's two people (a religious person and a scientist). I am tolerant of religious beliefs the same way I am tolerant about people talking about being a Vampire (pyre?), or telling me about the attributes of their Pokemon collection or star wars. I try to understand their position, even so far as being able to provide questions about and input into the internal logically consistent structure they've created, but I don't just yell at them "YOU ARE NOT A VAMPIRE/POKEMON MASTER/JEDI. IT IS JUST A FANTASY/VIDEO GAME/ALTERNATE FUTURE HISTORY"--just because I don't believe in them doesn't mean they can't have interesting things to say about their fantasies.
If you are talking about a scientist with religious beliefs, in my case, I could not internally make my understand of science and the physical world jive with my religion--for a long time I just treated them like they were separate things, setting up a mental barrier around religion to exempt it from logical thinking and arguments, but eventually I realized I couldn't honestly believe that they were compatible, and chose rationality over faith in the supernatural.