Sir

Larson and Witham (Nature 394, 313; 1998) address the controversial topic of religious belief. They quote Leuba, who attributed higher levels of disbelief and doubt to “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience”, and Atkins, who states “You can clearly be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge”. Both opinions discredit religious scientists.

The essence of science, and moreover of the human mind, makes the process of acquiring knowledge infinite. Take matter as a simple example. The earliest attempts to define it divided matter into simple categories, then abstraction grew, and the concept of the atom was developed. We could not be content with indivisible entities, so we discovered protons, neutrons and electrons. We then began the search for subatomic particles. And so it continues, with no end in sight.

It is always tempting to ask new questions, which means that scientists are ultimately faced with a huge number of unanswered questions, and with the fact that each answer will probably create more doubts than it will solve. It is like floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: we can move a bit towards the edge, but we know that we will never reach it. This mysterious immensity is what makes science so fascinating.

Once we realize that it is impossible to answer all the questions, there are two options: to accept this fact or to attribute the ‘answer’ to an almighty being — a God. Whichever option we choose does not make any difference to the quality of our research or to our fascination for life's mysteries. As long as we are still looking for the truth, we are on the right track.