Reasons to do pure science all pretty much fall into four categories. Either the activity or the products of pure science are valuable for their consequences or intrinsically. So you might say that doing pure science is, like dancing, an expression of what it means to be human (activity, intrinsic) or that pure science produces knowledge that can lead to unexpected applications (products, consequences). Saying that pure science is valuable because it glorifies God and God expects it of us does not fit into this schema.
Talking about religion as a legitimate motivation for scientists may give us something that’s hard to get in other ways: a deontological argument for doing pure science. What evidence there is (for example this survey of Fellows of the Royal Society) suggests that scientists today are much more likely to be atheists than the general population. What if that’s not because religious folks don’t want to do science, but rather because the culture of science disproportionately turns them away?
We don’t propose to turn all of science into a religious practice, but rather to get out of the way of scientists and potential scientists who want this for themselves. Historically, religion and science have not been at odds (we recommend the works of Lawrence Principe on this point) and by treating religion as taboo we may be doing science a disservice. Who might we have excluded if we had enforced today’s culture earlier1? Who might we let in if we make science more accepting of religious motivations?
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One can easily find 1000 years of quotations from great scientists spanning the Islamic and Christian scientific traditions about how religion was a core motivation for their work, but we find this excerpt from a letter by James Clerk Maxwell* to be particularly emblematic of our view that personal religious belief should be welcome in science.
I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself…
*Quoted in STANLEY M. By design: James Clerk Maxwell and the evangelical unification of science. The British Journal for the History of Science. 2012;45(1):57-73. doi:10.1017/S0007087410001548
My favorite controversial metascientist is Bruce Charlton, we basically moved from claiming science requires truth, to claiming truth requires metaphysical commitments, to claiming Christianity was the only adequate metaphysical foundation for science...
I find his writing from 2000 to around 2015 be quite thought-provoking, although I don't try to engage with any of his more recent work
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987706002428
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/motivation-in-science-understanding_11.html
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/07/science-truth-and-revelation.html
Some spiritual people often say spiritualism lies beyond the current horizons of science.
Consider two iconic events (or legends) that triggered groundbreaking scientific principles, and examine the interplay between the "Hand of God" and the "Hand of Science" in each:
1) Newton and the falling apple
Atheist science: The apple fell because the stem ripened and severed. Newton sitting underneath was pure statistical probability: a coincidence of space and time.
Total religion: God directed that exact drop at that exact millisecond, having crafted Newton’s mind specifically to decode the laws of the universe.
2) Archimedes and the water spill
Atheist science: The overflow follows fluid dynamics. Archimedes grasped the principle because his subconscious was actively working through the problem, a natural cognitive reaction.
Total religious: Divine intervention nudged him to notice a routine sight he had witnessed dozens of times before, guiding his intellect toward discovery.
As an old journalistic adage goes, the truth usually sits somewhere in the gray middle.
Scientists work hard and smart to evaluate phenomena across interconnected, testable facets. Yet, can pure materialist science fully explain how the disparate threads of observation, readiness, subconscious processing, and sheer timing converge into a single, elegant principle that stands the test of labs, reality, and time? Beyond mathematical probabilities, scientific models, and biological mechanics that describe what happens, but often struggle to capture the spark of how insight crystallizes?