• Question: are you religious, If so does it affect your work

    Asked by The Emperor to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I’m not religious to be honest but my twin sister (and my mum) are religious. My sister is just finishing her PhD and it didn’t affect her work.

      As a scientist you really don’t want to let any of your beliefs, religious or not, affect your work. Science is supposed to be as unbiased as possible, and you’re looking for facts regardless of what you believe.

      For example, if you believe everything should move towards the sky but nature makes everything fall to the ground (gravity) then you have to go with what nature tells you , regardless of the fact you originally believed things should go up.

      This is one of the hardest things about science because most times you have an idea about what should happen but you need to try to not let those beliefs get in the way of what nature is trying to tell you.

    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I am religious, but it doesn’t really affect my work, no. For me science and religion answer different questions. Science tells us the how, religion tells us the why. So they don’t come into conflict in the work I’m doing.

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I’m not religious, although I was brought up catholic, and I do believe that life is bigger and more awesome than we generally notice. I think science and religion don’t interfere with each other. Unless you literally believe in a bearded man sitting on clouds in the sky or something like that… in that case I’d say science has actually disproven that one. Otherwise, religion is about how we experience life, how we feel about it, how we make decisions in our life. Science is about how things work. For me they go together well. So, if you believe in god, you can say that science explains how that god structured the world. Or if you understand the world through science, you can say that the connections you see between all things could be called god. Or not – as you prefer.
      One aspect where my spiritual beliefs have inspired my science is this: If I had to label myself anything I’d probably be slightly more buddhist than any other religion. As such, I do believe that a lot of what we see as ‘the world around us’ is actually something we make up by thinking about our experiences in a certain way. So I see studying the brain a bit as studying the film projector that shows us our own personal movie of ‘the world around us’.

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