As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
We're plugged in 24 hours a day now. We're all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not. And if we can't unplug from that machine, eventually we're going to become mindless.
I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
The deep question is: Why does nature embody so much symmetry? We do not know the full answer to this question. However, we have some partial answers. Symmetry leads to economy, and nature, like human beings, seems to prefer economy. If we think of nature as a vast ongoing experiment, constantly trying out different possibilities of design, then those designs that cost the least energy or that require the fewest different parts to come together at the right time will take precedence, just as the principle of natural selection says that organisms with the best ability to survive will dominate over time. One physical principle that governs nature over and over is the βenergy principleβ: nature evolves to minimize energy.
A Presbyterian minister recently said to me that science and religion share a sense of wonder. I agree.
At the present time... we certainly do not know all the laws of nature, and it is a good bet that most of our current formulations of those laws will be revised in the future. Yet the great majority of scientists believe that a complete and final set of laws governing all physical phenomena exists, and that we are making continual progress toward discovery of those laws.
