This is a difficult question, which can cut to the core of an individual's belief system. Below are brief excerpts from interviews with CTT Participants that bear on the question.
We encourage you to express your own answers, see what others have said, and to take our interactive poll.
 |  |
Nancey Murphy
Science can tell us how chemicals bond but only religion can answer the why questions. Why do we have a universe like this at all?
|
 | |
Muzaffar Iqbal
I did science for most of my life and for me, Islam and science deal with the same thing. Though the Islamic religious tradition doesn't deal with the how, it provides answers to why, but it uses the “how” to provide “why.”
|
 | |
Michael Shermer
Here's the deal, there is no conflict between science and religion as long as the God you believe in doesn't do anything.
|
 | |
Erin Schuman
I think I differ from a lot of my scientific colleagues in that I save a place for the soul along with all things spiritual. For me, not everything has to be explained by a molecule or an atom.
|
 | |
Alice Huang
I'm always surprised to hear from people who think that science and religion are opposite each other. That would be comparing apples and oranges-different things.
|
 | |
Bruce Murray
Humans are embarking on an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual evolution from which our descendents will look back, tolerantly I hope, upon our primitive attempts to explain reality with such simplistic concepts as "God" and "Soul" and "Physics."
|
 | |
Terry Sejnowski
Each human has a unique set of experiences that change
the structure of their brain, so unless we can reconstruct every
synapse in the brain it will not be possible to study the details of
that experience. However, we should be able to understand the
principles underlying those changes in the brain and at least
understand the basis of feeling and subjective states.
|
