| Player1x3 said: I beleive you have no evidence to say that they were closet atheists. They clearly believed in higher power or in some form of God. As for the rest of the post my only point was that a person can believe in God and follow science, and even be a great scientist himself. |
Well, I will drop this point because it would need some pretty lengthy (by internet debate standard) research into contradictions in their writing. Plus, you are talking about scientists while i was more broad and thinking about thinkers in general (including philosophers) where there is more work on religion to discern the difference between teir express belief (in their extended writing) and their stated beliefs (what they claim to believe).
Also, claiming to believe in a higher power in a world that puts unbelievers to death is hardly proof of such a belief. After all a lot of politicians claim to be anti-gay when they are gay themselves and we are not even threatening to kill them for it anymore either.
As for the rest of your post, I agree. I even cited Newton as such a one. However I do not believe that you can be a great scientist strictly because of religion. You can be a great scientist independently from your religious belief (like Newton with his work on optic, mathematic and gravity) when your research does not intersect with your belief and I could even imagine (but know no evidence of) a scientist being great despite his belief; i.e. finding through experimentation that at least one of his religious belief is false but espousing it despite his belief*; but I have a hard time imagining a scientist that becomes great beacuse of his religious belief. If that was the case, the proponents of intelligent design would be good scientists instead of the quacks that they are and devout muslim scientists would be leading in many fields of science as many muslims are fond to claim that the koran is a science book.
It might have happened centuries ago, when science knew much less so there was less risk of your theory contradicting your belief, but nowadays it seems highly unlikely.
* Copernicus would be an excellent candidate for that case as the prevailing religious belief concerning cosmology for that time was for geocentrism, so he probably believed it at some point in his life before finding evidence against it and changing his belief to heliocentrism.
"I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it"
