“When board members and administrators from Baylor University and the Baylor College of Medicine were recently engaged in conversation about the possibility of strengthening ties between the two institutions, some suggested that the faith component of Baylor University’s mission would negatively affect the quality of the scholarship for which the Baylor College of Medicine is so well known. As scientists and people of faith, we were troubled by reports in the media that characterized serious scientific research and a faith commitment as incompatible. We believe we speak for thousands of accomplished scientists when we say that this is a false dichotomy that reflects an ill-informed understanding of the way many of us perceive the wonder, mystery, and revelation of God,” a group of Baylor University professors tells the Houston Chronicle.
“Having religious convictions does not preclude us from exploring the universe, advancing human health, or discovering solutions to the environmental issues that plague us—including in the Houston area, where Baylor University researchers are studying water pollution near the Ship Channel to understand how cancer-causing dioxins and furans spread between terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Similarly, the science content of our curricula is no different from that offered in science departments at other major universities. The research faculty at Baylor University embraces the scientific method and the tenets of evolution to explain what we observe in the natural world.”

“There is absolutely no problem in having empathy and being objective,” Jane Goodall tells New Scientist. “Empathy helps us gain an understanding at a different level that you can then test in a rigorous scientific way.”

“I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label children with the opinions of their parents. Nobody minds labeling a child an English child or a French child or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was mad if I started talking about a postmodernist child or a Keynesian child or a monetarist child or a liberal child or a conservative child. And yet the whole of our society, quite happily, buys into the idea that you can talk about a Catholic child or a Protestant child or a Muslim child or a Hindu child,” Richard Dawkins tells the BBC’s Daily Politics. “That’s surely got to be wrong—to assume that a child will automatically inherit the opinions of its parents about the universe, the cosmos, and morality. This must be something that should be rectified.”

“It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It is a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson said during a recent talk at Duke University.
“So you can think of science as a religion, and a devotion to something that you can easily regard as miraculous: the big bang, out of a single singularity, out of a geometrical point of infinite mass, that has an inflationary period where at 10^-33 seconds after the beginning of everything suddenly there was an expansion of 10³⁰ time. This is our current explanation of our universe. If that’s not sounding miraculous to you, I don’t know what would sound miraculous.”