Is being a scientist compatible with believing in God?

The classics in these attempts are probably "Belief in God in an Age of Science" (Yale UP, 1998) by John Polkinghorne, theoretical physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society and theologian, and "Theology for a Scientific Age" (Fortress Press, 1993) by Arthur Peacocke, biochemist and theologian. And others.

It is probably not a mere coincidence that quantum physics is being used also in attempts to explain the nature of consciousness and free will. Roger Penrose sees free will as the active aspect of consciousness, the passive aspect of which he calls awareness (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Sense of Consciousness, OUP, 1994). As in the case of divine action, the use of counter-intuitive insights from quantum physics in attempts to explain consciousness and free will are controversial and certainly not (yet?) satisfactory. A person, especially a scientist, who wonders how God can act within physical reality without being detected by science as a source of this action, will suspect that there is some intrinsic relation between the three enigmas of conscience, free will and divine action.

Whatever science might conclude about the "nature" of free will, there are reasons beyond science (ethics, jurisdiction) that compel some of us - not only theists - to believe in the reality of free will, and hence find a suitable interpretation of these findings that is compatible with this a priori belief. Similarly, whatever evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (or Penrose's "quantum coherent states with objective reduction") might say about the nature of consciousness, there may be reasons to seek an interpretation of them that does not exclude the possibility of consciousness being more than what science can say about it.

In the same sense, for a scientist who believes in God's interactions, there is a need to find a suitable interpretation of what may be known from science (through established theories), an interpretation that is compatible with this belief. Let me state again the obvious: this need is given by the scientist's faith prior to, and independent of, his/her professional activities as a scientist. It should not be regarded as an argument for the existence of God.

So in all these cases, the problem, or rather challenge, is to find suitable interpretations of scientific facts and theories that are compatible with a priori given worldview requirements, be they shared by theists as well as (some) atheists or by theists alone.

To summarize, it is not true that religion and science contradict each other, only some interpretations of religion and some interpretations of science do. Also, it is not true that religion and science are mutually irrelevant, only "uninterpreted" religion and "uninterpreted" science are.

In other words, conflicts arise only when religion is seen as ersatz-science and/or science as ersatz-religion.