surprised. I personally have had my faith strengthened by my scientific endeavors. The more I learned about stats, probability, science, logic, and human nature, the more devout I became.
There IS a sense of wonder that one gets when looking carefully at the world and at humanity. And it is utterly irrational and contrary to the known facts to chalk that all up to random action. It simply won’t work. Plus, there is a beauty aspect of the whole thing that hardly seems random. Sometimes, no matter how hard-bitten you are, you just get overcome by the beauty of what you are seeing.
Research shows that far from diminishing spiritual longing, science may actually awaken it. For many scientists, the lab is not just a place of logic, but a portal to wonder and a deeper search for meaning.
The idea that science and spirituality are incompatible is a relatively recent one. In past ages, people doing science thought they were engaged in a sort of theology, seeing how God worked. Posing science as contrary to spirituality is a new thing–it was not there originally.
Yet many scientists “see no tension whatsoever between spiritual experience and scientific inquiry,” said Kanwal. “Scientific pursuit is a way to ground our human experiences in a natural order that pervades the universe we live in.”