I believe in God, but also believe in the virtues of science. Wonder what that makes me.
Probably similar to most theists out there.
I think that it's foolishness to set up "science" and "religion" as cage-match opponents in some intellectual battle to the death.
Most of the iconic figures in the evolution of science were theists. The relationship between science and religion is historically complex. For example, the idea that 'laws of nature' even exist was pretty obviously suggested by religious belief in divine creation and a divine law-giver who initially laid down all the rules.
It's only comparatively recently that many scientists have opted for atheism. And even today, many/most scientists have some kind of religious beliefs, whether ostensibly theist or not. (It's true that scientists are less likely than the general public to say that they have religious beliefs, but that doesn't exclude the many, perhaps the majority, who do.)
I don't believe that there's anything in science that necessitates that scientific practitioners be atheists. Science is methodologically naturalistic by its nature, meaning that it seeks natural answers for questions about the natural world. But science steers away from might be called metaphysics, the questions of what does and doesn't truly exist, including what may or may not exist in addition to physical matter. (Mathematical and logical structures? Physical laws? Supernatural powers of whatever sort?) Science just answers questions about how the physical reality around us is observed to behave and how different parts of it appear to correlate with each other. (Though recently we have been seeing theoretical physicists like Krauss and Tegmark trying to creep into the metaphysicians' turf.)
And not only is science limited as to scope by its own methodological naturalism. Science also encounters difficulties when it is asked to justify many of its methodological procedures such as experimental confirmation, inference to the best explanation or its faith in and physics' reliance on mathematics. Just explaining what scientific explanations
are is challenging. What is a scientific explanation telling us, what is it doing? (This is the philosopher of science's turf.)
Justifying why we believe this or that particular thing, and then justifying why we believe whatever we produce as an answer to that first question, and then justifying why... is a skeptical movement that can't be continued forever. We either have to halt with something that's accepted without further justification, or else resort to circular reasoning.
Personally, I think that science is on stronger philosophical ground in this regard than theism. I accept science and most emphatically am not a religious theist. Although I do think that the traditional arguments of natural theology have some force -- Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did the universe's order come from? -- and so on. But like Thomas Huxley before me, I see those kind of questions as leading more towards metaphysical agnosticism than towards religious theism (or towards atheism). They point us towards the vast territory that still remains unknown...
But despite science being much more plausible in my mind than ancient Hebrew myth as a way of coming to terms with what we observe happening around us, science still seems to me to float in the air without satisfactory foundational justification for whatever it is that it's doing.
Turtles all the way down... It's the human condition.
