Are there any highly-regarded scientists/mathematician-type folk who identify themselves as religious or spiritual?

Francis Collins, the director of the NIH. He also led the Human Genome Project. He considers himself an evangelical Christian.

Found this on google…

I’ve known a couple of high powered scientists who are deeply religious but don’t tell their empiricist peers for fear of ridicule and of losing credibility. Nobody very famous and I wouldn’t tell on them anyway! :-P

Ken Miller

Well Charles Darwin was, in fact, it was his beliefs that hindered the publication of Origin for many years, now he was a man who had the decency and integrity to suffer the conflict of two belief systems without dogmatically eradicating the other merely for the sake of a peaceful soul.

Our very own mattbrowne.

@harple

Thanks – that was cool.

Einstein is a classic example – of course, I wonder how accurate we can be when we say that people who lived in times where it was perhaps punishable or otherwise dangerous to claim there was no God (Galileo is a famous indicator – excommunicated for his findings which indicated a conflict with Christian dogma without even saying anything about his faith). Are those examples helpful in the end?

erm… I think David Chalmers is pretty scientific and he certainly comes across as pretty spiritual…

You guys are awesome!

I know of a few books that astrophysicists and other sciencey people have written on the idea of God – you can probably find them in the Science section of Barnes and Noble.

Albert Eienstein believed in God.

Although they are not yet-renowned, I have a bunch of young Orthodox Jewish friends who are mathematicians, physicists, etc. They all got their PhD’s from MIT and Harvard and I imagine that at least some of them will gain renown as they grow into their respective fields. (Actually, I have no way of knowing if they are renowned or not, since I am in a totally different academic discipline).

Yes. There are plenty of religious very well respected Mathematicians. Alex Lubotzky and Hillel Furstenberg are two that I personally know and can remember off the top of my head.

P.S. Go to any Math/CS conference on combinatorics that is held on a Friday late afternoon. Watch for how many people exit the conference room for Sabbath.

Can you be more specific on what you mean when you say “spiritual” and “religious”?Are you referring to those you believe in a personal God(like Christian) or are you referring just to those who believe in a higher being?
If you’re referring to those who believe in a higher being than every agnostic scientist falls into this category and there are lots of agnostic in science.But being an agnostic is far from being spiritual because you believe there’s a higher being who just set the initial conditions of the Universe but that’s it you don’t believe he interferes anymore with it after he started it so an agnostic is not the kind of guy who worries for his afterlife(because he doesn’t believe in one),says prayers asking God to help him in any way.
In my opinion agnostic shouldn’t be the scientist you’re looking for @SundayKittens I think you’re searching for Christians and other like religions.
I don’t know any religious scientist,all I know is that there are very few such scientist at the top of the scientific hierarchy because the most of them are atheist or agnostics.

This article about Einstein and God might help here. There’s a difference, I think, between the personal, involved God that many religions preach about, and the distant, Deist, impersonal, “God is the Universe” sort of stuff that Einstein seemed to groove to.