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A person can be a scientist and religious.

I've been a computer programmer for over 25 years.

As a child, I was very smart and did very well in school. I remember thinking that I would be able to, through science, find out how to live forever before I died. It seemed so obvious to me that it was possible.

THAT'S PRIDE. Of course, with the rush of things in adult life, I didn't think about it for many years. It's one of the things I remembered when I was converted to Christ a few years ago.

Yes, a person can be a scientist and be "religious". But being "religious" does not necessarily mean one is saved - as one can profess Christ and outwardly be a Christian, but inwardly such a religious person may actually not have saving faith. It's very tempting for people to believe only in what they see and not believe in what they can't see with their own eyes, not believe in the miracles recounted in the Bible. This "believing" in the Bible as a fable leads us to invent our own ideas about morality instead of accepting and submitting to the moral laws given in the Bible - because we've already started to be selective about what we believe from the Bible. Our Biblical hermeneutics (interpretation) should be based on logic and truth - seeking an honest interpretation of Scripture. Which clearly involves looking at the context of a passage to determine whether or not it is a "parable" or a poetic image, or whether it's a historical account (which basically always conveys much more meaning - even though it is a historical account - which makes the Bible so amazingly beautiful).

So can I be a computer programmer or scientist and be a true believer ? Absolutely yes - because the Bible is TRUTH. And a scientist or technical type should be pursuing TRUTH as well.

Being a programming troubleshooter has given me a greatly useful perspective (I've always sought the truth, even as a child I specifically consciously sought the truth and loved the idea of seeking truth, even though I was completely ignorant of Scripture and a professing Christian out of tradition but not yet converted to Christ). The troubleshooting perspective that works is simple: do not think you "know" something that you don't really know; don't have preconceived ideas about what is wrong with the software application. For example, if I've prejudiced myself into thinking that the problem is database performance, I go off on trying to improve it. But if the problem is not database performance at all, but my program's logic, I'll obviously never fix my performance problem. Such a confusing situation can happen quite simply: if we are calling the database more often than we need to, i.e., keep retreiving the same values over and over instead of retaining them in our program. While each database retrieval may be relatively quick as database retrievals go, if we do the simple quick database retrieval thousands of times - the time used in total can be large enough that our software application responds to the user very slowly. The database is performing as designed; we're simply calling it thousands of times when we don't need to.

So we should approach the Bible: without our preconceptions of good and evil, right and wrong. We should let the Bible be our guide, not our own preconceptions.

We may find certain parts of the Bible beyond our comprehension: how did God cause the flood, etc. If we take those parts and "edit them out" in our mind by writing them off as poetic or "parables", we wind up missing the basis for much other Biblical doctrine, thus missing out on a deeper, more accurate understanding of much of Scripture.