Sojourner Magazine just ran an article about Nobel laureate William Phillips called The Cold Reaches of Heaven. Phillips is a Christian, and he has something interesting to say about the relationship between science and religion:
“I’m not an anomaly,” he says emphatically. “In fact, I would say that if you were to ask, the majority of physicists would answer that they believe in God in one form or another. Maybe not in exactly the same way that I do, because I believe in a personal God, but God in one form or another.”
in a later section he comments:
“If I want to know how the universe went through its stages of development, I ask observational astronomy and theoretical cosmology,” says Phillips. “If I want to know why are we here, why is there a universe in the first place, or what is the nature of my relationship to my Creator, I turn to the Bible. But when I study cosmology as a science, when I study physics, one of the things that I learn is that there are very clear, beautifully simple laws that describe almost everything that I observe. I see that kind of simplicity and beauty, and I think, this is a put-up job, this didn’t happen by chance.” Phillips laughs.
“That’s a way in which science informs my faith. I don’t want to compartmentalize them, but I am clear that there are questions that are well-posed to science and questions that are well-posed to religion. But they’re not completely separate entities.”
FYI: I’ve updated our list of famous scientists who are Christian with a link to the article.