In today’s episode, two scientists with different spiritual worldviews explore this question: How can science and spirituality co-exist?
You’ll hear from Praveen Sethupathy, a genomics professor at Cornell, and Michael Hecht, a chemistry professor at Princeton. In this conversation, they explore what science and spirituality can learn from one another and how they experience wonder in their research.
This virtual forum was held at Princeton in May 2021. Thank you to the forums team for making this event possible.
Science is a set of tools that we use to explore the natural world; religion is the opportunity to worship the one who gave us those tools.
I've actually found that there are a lot of shared values between my experience in science and my experience as a Christian. One of those shared values is a sense of awe and joy in discovery.
Religion and our experiences in faith-based worldviews can inform science as well — perhaps not so much in the empirical methods that are used to gather data but in our interpretation of the observations that we make.
Science isn't about being passive. It's about taking action to explore. It's about taking action to discover new things, to expand boundaries. And it's the same way with my faith tradition and many others as well — that faith without works is dead.
