Many atheists are of the opinion that you cannot be a good scientist if you are deluded by religious faith.
Let’s put the kibosh to that opinion by relating the religious beliefs of eminent scientists. In the early history of science, great scientists—Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Pascal—all had a deep religious faith. But suppose the atheist responds, “That was then, this is now; we know more now to justify that believing in God is a delusion.” My response to this canard is to cite the theistic credo of present day eminent scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners.
Most of these seem to be in the “hard” sciences, physics and chemistry, rather than in biology or medical sciences. If any of you readers have ideas about the reason why physicists are more likely to be theists than are biologists, I’d like to hear them.

Most of the information given below is drawn from “Cosmos, Bios and Theos,” by Henry Margenau, a Yale mathematical physicist, and Roy Varghese. Not all of the scientists listed in the book believe in some specific religion, or even a personal God. Many are deistic, believing in a Creator, but not necessarily a God immanent in the universe.

Professor D.H.R. Barton*** (Nobel Prize for Chemistry, conformational analysis in organic chemistry, Texas A&M University): “God is Truth. There is no incompatibility between science and religion. Both are seeking the same truth.”

Faithful America, a Christian advocacy group that often champions liberal causes, has filed an ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General William Barr, claiming he violated his oath to defend religious liberty for all Americans in a recent speech at Notre Dame University’s law school.
The complaint, filed last week (Oct. 24) with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, objected to Barr’s saying at an appearance at the invitation-only event that religion “gives us the right rules to live by” and that the generation that founded the United States were Christians who “believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man.”..


Officials at Faithful America interpreted Barr’s speech as disproportionately focused on Christianity. After Barr’s remarks, an online petition launched by the group to “investigate William Barr’s toxic Christian nationalism” accrued signatures from almost 14,000 people.
Faithful America’s complaint is not the only criticism Barr’s speech has elicited. C. Colt Anderson, a Roman Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, declared to The Guardian after reading the speech that the attorney general represents a “threat to democracy.” National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters derided the speech as “ridiculously stupid.”..


The group also pointed to Barr’s attack on “militant secularists,” as well as his assertion that “no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion,” which it argued amounted to “an inappropriate favoritism to religion over nonreligion.”

In a medical system premised on profits and ability to pay, racial disparity presents in ability to afford the high cost of premiums, deductibles and co-pays that disproportionately discourages African Americans from getting needed medical care.

A research study on a commercial computer program used to allocate health care resources on predicted future health care costs provided a window on the ongoing pervasive impact of structural racism in our nation’s health care system.
Moreover, the research published in Science magazine reinforced how structural racism persists throughout society, including disparities in income, housing and other social and economic factors, and the impact that has on disparities in health.
The study focuses on an algorithm used by health systems, insurers, and practitioners to predict which patients with complex medical needs should receive extra medical care. The ostensible goal is to slash costs by suggesting those patients receive “high risk management” at less expensive primary care levels...

Far more is needed as well to redress the type of structural racism exposed in this study. Medicare for All, that guarantees no one is denied care based on how much they pay, where they live, or their race, gender, or nationality, would be a huge step forward in reducing the national stain of racial disparities in health.

Fifty years ago, many observers of American religion assumed that secularization would gradually wash traditional Christianity away. Twenty years ago, Christianity looked surprisingly resilient, and so the smart thinking changed: Maybe there was an American exception to secularizing trends, or maybe a secularized Europe was the exception and the modernity-equals-secularization thesis was altogether wrong.
Now the wheel has turned again, and the new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anticlericalists and the regretfully unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it’s gone....



Lukewarm Christianity may be declining much more dramatically than intense religiosity.....

The waning of Christianity may be still as much a baby-boomer story as a millennial one....

There’s a strong case that any crisis facing Christian institutions is a more Catholic crisis than a Protestant one. …

Trump got no bump from the Baghdadi raid, and he failed to change the news coverage, which snapped back to impeachment.

It was clear that Trump was trying to use the Baghdadi raid to distract from impeachment. The president began his stunt with his cryptic Saturday night tweet about something big happening. The suspense lasted less than an hour as reports came in quickly that it was a raid on the ISIS leader. Trump’s White House then announced that the president would be addressing the country at 9 AM on Sunday morning.

After news broke last week (Oct. 17) that Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings had died, many were quick to note that one of the last things the longstanding critic of the Trump administration — and key figure in an ongoing impeachment inquiry — did in his hospital bed was sign subpoenas.
But when Bishop Walter Thomas stood before the hundreds of churchgoers and dignitaries who packed the pews of New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, on Friday (Oct. 25) for Cummings’ funeral, he insisted the legislator’s “last official act of the Kingdom of God” was something else.
“His last act takes place today, when men and women from every aspect of life, from those who run corporations, those who stand in hallowed halls, those who sit with robes behind benches, those who pass legislation … have all made their way to the place he came every Sunday morning,” said Thomas, speaking from the pulpit of a church Cummings attended for nearly 40 years. “His last act … is that he wanted you to know why he came to church.”