Can scientists and intelligent people believe in God?

Recently, an Internet newsgroup posed the questions, "Can a scientist believe in God and, more generally, "Is a high IQ compatible with religious belief?" While the many in the newsgroup believed science and high intelligence are not compatible with a belief in God, Stephen M. Barr believes the answer to both questions is a resounding yes!

Barr is a particle physicist and professor at Bartol Research Institute, University of Delaware, who specializes in unified field theory, CP violation theories, quark and lepton origins, extra space-time dimensions, and the interface between particle physics and cosmology.

Barr has written an intriguing book entitled, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith in which he proposes that modern physics requires an Observer to actualize the Universe into existence.

How?

The equations in modern physics yield probabilities. Ultimately, probabilities must be actualized to have meaning. As a crude example, the result of a coin toss is 50% heads or tails. Even though the probability of ten heads appearing in, say, twenty tosses can be computed, until someone actually observes the outcome, the result of the coin toss is never actualized - it remains only a possibility.

Similarly, quantum equations can make predictions about particle energy states, but until an observer (a scientist) makes a measurement, atoms, electrons and their constituents exist as as mists or clouds of possibilities simultaneously existing everywhere. Scientists refer to the cloud of possibilities as quantum superposition and the act of actualizing a specific result from the cloud of possibilities as quantum decoherence.

Barr seems to propose the Universe actualized from the result on an initial immaterial Mind.

Perhaps, after reading Barr's book, I'll use the word Observer as the originating quantum decoherent agent that untangled the initial quantum states to produce the macroscopic Universe .

Given Barr's credentials and obvious profession, the answer to the first question is, "Duh. Of course a scientist can believe in God."

But what about the claim that high IQs are incompatible with religious belief? To put it nicely, poppycock!

Dr. Francis Collins the intellectually gifted director of the National Human Genome Research Institute not only believes in God, he is a Christian!

In fact, Collins has also written a book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in which he describes his journey from atheist to Christianity. In it, he writes, "...the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship."

Moreover in an interview with Belief.Net, Collins explains that God is not threatened by our scientific adventures nor is science threatened by God, but, rather, it is enhanced.

Look, we all need to be intellectually honest and admit that belief in God is not the result of blind faith, lack of evidence, or low intelligence and the characterizations of believers given by newsgroup posters, Dawkins, Hitchens and others of their ilk are simply hyperbolic caricatures. Even Richard Feynman, in my mind, one of humanity's greatest scientists, said, "many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way"

Belief in God boils down to a choice and for many, intelligent, rational people, belief in God is not only cogent, it is the most rational choice.