I did something more or less stupid this past week: I engaged with the troll people in YouTube comments.
To be fair, it was a vlogbrothers' video, and that community tends to be more or less reasonable. Imagine my dismay to find out they actually weren't! On this topic anyway.
If you have seen the video or haven't, it doesn't really matter for my discussion. John Green discussed how most people, religious or not, are essentially nihilists that in some way or another are looking to create meaning in their lives and the lives of others. I expect that most of us can agree with this statement. He also pointed out, that to him, the existence of a higher power itself was much less important than the question "How can I make my life worthwhile?" I agree wholeheartedly with this point.
Before we can go any further with my own experience, I'll briefly get into my own world view. I am not religious, nor was my upbringing. I was baptized Roman Catholic and I did attend Catholic school up until I went to university, but largely that experience helped me lose my somewhat lackadaisical faith. I distinctly remember the day that I realized I didn't believe in a Catholic god: we were discussing the afterlife in Religion class, and my own view is that souls may go elsewhere or they may be reincarnated if whatever lesson they were meant to learn wasn't totally learned. I was told in no uncertain terms that this was wrong and against the faith. Because I have a tiny bit of a problem being told what to do, I decided screw you guys, if you can't accommodate me, I'll find someone else who can. I flirted with the concept of Hinduism and Buddhism for a while, but after taking a World Religions course, I came to the understanding that all religions teach essentially the same morals, and they should all be respected.
Despite being more spiritual or even secular than religious, I still have an immense amount of respect for other people's faiths. Just because organized religion doesn't work for me, doesn't mean it isn't valuable to someone else. I have a lot of friends who are religious, and a lot of friends who aren't.
Now, back to why I decided to feed the trolls. Based on the video and others that are similar, the Greens have never expressed that they were religious or not. People have been trying to figure this out forever (although I can't see why -- it has no bearing on the content they put out) and have more or less concluded that they aren't religious. Someone even said, in the comments, that "they are not religious. They are smart men."
I'm sorry, but that's too far. Intelligence (and the pursuit of scientific knowledge) and faith are not mutually exclusive. You can't say that people who believe in a higher power are stupid and behind the times. There are plenty of famous scientists who were religious and made huge efforts forward. Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Sir Francis Bacon, Gottfried Liebniz and Michael Faraday were all religious men, just to name a few! Sir Isaac Newton is the father of classical physics and calculus (well, him and Leibniz on the calculus front). A good chunk of what we know today is due to Newton's contributions. To say that religious people are unable to contribute to the scientific world is untrue, unfair and incredibly ignorant.
The reason some people may think that science and religion have to be juxtaposed with each other is that the ordinary, perfectly reasonable religious people do not automatically come to mind. We tend to think of religious fundamentalists and those insane New Earth Creationists before we think of any of my teachers from when I was in Catholic school. Fundamentalists are not a good representation of the religious population (doubly so for Islamic jihadists - a lot of what they're doing goes against the Qu'ran, or so I've been told. Not being a Qu'ranic scholar myself, I can't say).
Science and religion do not need to be mutually exclusive at all. There is only so much that science is currently able to explain. I believe the universe was created by way of a big bang, but something had to set it off. I don't know what, but quite frankly I don't care. Like John Green said, that isn't the important question.
