In a previous blog post, I gave a "mathematical motivation for believing in God". I actually tried to show how even mathematicians believed in something that does not exist in reality, and formed the field of complex numbers. In this post I would give a few more such examples to hammer home the point that there is nothing unscientific about belief.
I have watched quite a few debates between atheist academics and religious leaders. The atheists usually show how illogical certain religious practices are and how improbable some mythological stories are. On the other hand the believers keep reminding us that science doesn't have an answer to all questions. Both of them do have a fair point. Science in fact still can't answer a lot of questions about universe. But that doesn't make science useless. Many religious practices and stories are in fact illogical. But that doesn't make belief in God unscientific.
You may have heard that marine biologists believe that there are thousands of undiscovered species in the ocean. They 'believe' this. But this is still science. There is no way to prove this. If you embark upon proving it you end up discovering the species. Remember the belief is about "undiscovered species". Belief is a scientific concept. If you are not sure about what the reality is, you believe something. In fact, that's the meaning of 'belief'. People believe in God. And yes there's no way to show God exist or God doesn't exist. If there was a way, we would "know" whether God exists or doesn't exist.
Just to give another example of use of 'belief' in science and to relate to the image I used above, 'belief spaces' are used in robot localization. When we don't know where exactly a robot is, we maintain a belief about its position, and continually update the belief according to sensor readings and the motion model. Notice that belief here is inherently related to probability. We believe the robot is at a certain position if its probability of being there is the highest. This seems logical. Even in the case of the marine biologists example, the reason we believe there are undiscovered species is because we know how many species we have already found in the ocean we have explored and we know how much of the ocean is still unexplored, and using this information we can come up with an estimate of how many species might still be undiscovered.
Many religious beliefs don't follow any such logic. And hence the battle between science and religion still rages on. But the important takeaway is that scientists and academics shouldn't oppose religious people because they "believe", but because they are "illogical". (Wow that will offend a lot of people!!) From all the debates I have seen, I have never seen an academic make a point against the "belief in God" in general. They usually falsify some attributes that religions associate with God and they talk about the predictions religions made about the universe before science could prove them wrong. Basically they just falsify the terribly illogical definitions and attributions and representations of God that were manufactured by religions.
So is there a more scientific definition of God? Is there something that we can scientifically attribute to God? Yes there is. I'll just give two examples:
One, God can still be thought of as the creator of the universe. Maybe it was God who sparked the Big-Bang. Or maybe God is the manifestation of the singular source of Energy that the universe was before the Big-Bang (by the way that's exactly how the Rig Veda describes God. I think it's fairly scientific to believe that the universe is a simulation created by someone whom we can lovingly or respectfully call 'God'.
Two, God can be thought of as someone who can control the outcome of random processes, i.e. the processes which are random for us are deterministic for God. Creation of planet Earth and the solar system was due to some random collision of astronomical objects. Or maybe God carefully determined the trajectories of all astronomical objects in order to form the Solar System as we know it. Life evolved on Earth through mutation, which we think of as a random process. But maybe God carefully determined which cells to change and how to change them. Actually this belief that God controls the output of random processes is not new at all, and even thos who aren't deeply religious do believe this. This is why we 'pray' to God for a safe journey although we have carefully planned the entire itenerary, and we 'pray' to God for a succesful interview even though we are well-prepared for it. We pray because we undertand the risks of unfortunate random events and we believe that God somehow has control over these random events.