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Originally Posted by twistedmosaic
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.
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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.
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No, I kind of mean open-minded, in the sense that a lot of scientists react just as you're describing: I will believe in your paradigm as soon as it is proven within my paradigm by the parameters of my paradigm. The trouble (if I may be forgiven for using the word) with a lot of scientists is that they maintain that there is only one paradigm in which to interact with the universe: the scientific, rational, logical paradigm. They are open-minded to anything expressible or provable within that paradigm.
What I mean is that a scientist has to be open-minded to the notion that there are potentially other paradigms in which to interact with the universe, that work differently, and offer different answers. The questions asked to those paradigms may overlap with those posed in the scientific, but they are not entirely the identical set, and they bring their answers by slightly different rules.
I have known a number of scientists who work that way. They simply understand that they are not trying to do quite the same things in the lab as they are in the synagogue, nor is their Torah a science textbook, or their science textbook a Torah.
But ultimately, with all due respect, to say that science would be delighted if anyone offered laboratory proof of God is just as fundamentalist as the televangelist saying that he will "believe in" evolution as soon as Jesus Christ tells him to.
It is, ultimately, apples and oranges. Science and religion can coexist, they can even overlap from time to time. But they cannot occupy the same paradigmatic space, not any more than we can demand that painting and music operate by each other's rules, or expect to critique cooking for its literary faults, or poetry for its lack of nutrition.