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Okeymaker comments on Some famous scientists who believed in a god - Less Wrong
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I see you mention Rene Descartes. He believed in the existence of souls, and, taking that hypothesis seriously, he concluded there has to be a way for the soul to send signals to the body. He went looking for an organ that might fulfil this purpose, and concluded that it is the pineal gland.
This conclusion is false, the true function of the pineal gland is known today, but it illustrates a point : the old theistic scientists tended to take religion seriously, they viewed it as a valid scientific hypothesis whose implications in the real world could be studied. In that sense, they were wholly unlike modern-day theists who all too often seek refuge in unfalsifyability.
You are right :) I was amused when I first heard about his theories regarding the soul. We have to remember though, that he was philosopher and not a real doctor or a scientist in the modern meaning. Besides, not all old theistic scientists based their science on religious premises.
Very true. They would hardly have made much progress if they did!
Many tried to do it though. Another example is Isaac Newton, who tried to extract scientific information from the bible.
My point here is not that their conclusions were wrong, but that their attitude towards religion was a scientific one, an attitude rarely seen in today's theists.
I don´t fully agree though. There many scientists today whom are also theists. What do you base that last sentence on? As for Newton trying to extract information from the bible, as far as I remember this was in his senior years when he started with numerology. He kept this obscure hobby quite secret and separated from his scientific work as far as I know.
To someone who truly takes a certain religion seriously as a scientific hypothesis, attempting to extract non-obvious information from that religion's holy book is scientific work! The book was supposedly written by, or inspired by, an omnipotent being. How could they not expect to find important clues in there?
The complete and utter lack of modern theistic scientists looking for a soul-body communication organ, to name just one example.
People such as Francis Collins, who claimed to have converted to christianity after seeing a three-part frozen waterfall, which he interpreted as a sign of the holy trinity? Even though 3 is a significant number in more religions than I can be bothered to count ? No, such people are not worth mentioning in a serious discussion of this subject.
Why did you mention him then? Why not mention Erwin Schrödinger or Heisenberg for example?
He is the only well-known example of a modern theistic scientist that I can think of.
Both are dead, and I am not familiar with their thoughts on religion.
I looked up Schrödinger on wikipedia, and there it is : "Despite being raised in a religious household, he called himself an atheist.".
He was agnostic most part of his life. But you are right that at one point in his life he openly declared himself an atheist. I remembered wrong. Heisenberg at the other hand was openly a theist. If you can only think of Francis Collins, maybe you shouldn´t base all your beliefs on just one person?
Wikipedia on Schrödinger:
I did say the only relatively well-known one, not the only one. Would you prefer if I used as an example Frank Tipler or Immanuel Velikovsky, both of whom make up exceedingly implausible hypotheses to fit their religious worldview, and are widely considered pseudoscientist because of that? Or Marcus Ross, who misrepresented his views on the age of the earth in order to get a paleontology phd?
No, today's good theistic scientists, to the extent that they still exist, are precisely those who have stopped to take religion seriously as a scientific hypothesis.
Being interested in religion does not a theist make. Nor does merely acknowledging the possibility of an unspecified creator entity, the simulation hypothesis is not theism.
That is extremely obvious and something of the first thing I said in this article is that you mustn´t make a religious belief into a premise for science. Of course you can´t mix up scientific work with religion.
Probably because they have been dead for forty for fifty years.
The best example still living might be Robert Aumann, though his science is less central (economics) than anyone on your list. Find a well known modern scientist who is doing impressive work and believes in any reasonably traditional sense of God! It's not interesting to show a bunch of people who believed in God when >99% of the rest of their society did.