When Science and Religion Collide or Why Einstein Wasn't an Atheist

But for Carl Feit, an Orthodox Jew and professor of biology at Yeshiva University, science is itself a spiritual practice. Invoking Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish philosopher, physician, scientist, and rabbi, Feit says that "the best way to develop a love and appreciation for God is by studying the works of his hand. There are certain blessings that a religious Jew makes every day. Some of them have to do with the fact that the sun rises and sets regularly, that all of the stars travel in their right orbits, and that all of our physiological functions work appropriately. With my knowledge of human physiology, I have a very different, and I think enhanced, appreciation when I make that blessing in the morning."

Brian Cantwell Smith, a renegade computer scientist and philosopher who recently left Stanford for Indiana University, agrees that religion and science are not entirely separable. Smith (who says he "probably" doesn't believe in God) quotes his father, theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who told him that to be religious is "to find the world significant."

The younger Smith explains: "It is not an etymological accident that 'significance,' in English, means 'importance.' From what I can tell from having studied intentional systems, 'truth' and other values cannot, in fact, be wholly pulled apart." The problem, he says, is that while science has always taken truth seriously, it has traditionally left values of beauty and goodness pretty much untouched. However, Smith sees the current work being done in mathematics, computer science, philosophy, and cognitive science as increasingly shedding light on the relationships between beauty, goodness, and truth in a way that may lead to a reintegration of these three values, thanks to a rigorous "study of significance."

Smith says: "One of my most basic metaphysical commitments is that truth, beauty, and goodness are not completely separable. Just as the physicists claim that gravity, charge, mass, etc., weren't separate in the first moments of the universe, I don't think God made the world with truth, beauty, and goodness fully separated out, either. In fact, I think the idea that they are independent is our idea -- and not necessarily the greatest idea, at that. You can see this in modern software design. Whether programs work well, whether they're beautiful, and whether they're right in practice -- these things aren't all that separable."

According to Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at the Medical College of Virginia and an Anglican priest, "There's a large degree of identity between the love of God and the love of truth. And the same kind of rules and passions that we bring to the issue of loving God, the scientist embodies in his passion for truth.

"What keeps the scientist working long hours into the night?" asks Eaves. "Well, maybe there's a truth out there that will be beautiful when we find it."

Carl Feit concurs. "I think that fundamentally the impetus for the two quests is the same," says Feit. "Religion and science are two ways of looking at the world, and each helps guide our search for understanding. Profoundly religious people are asking the same questions as profound scientists: Who are we? And what are we? What's the purpose? What's the end? Where did we come from? And where are we going? We have this need, this desire, this drive, to understand ourselves and the world that we live in."

Gordy Slack is the associate editor of California Wild, a natural history magazine.