I was watching the recent documentary series “Am I Normal?” on television a few weeks ago, which for one episode turned its attention to the issue of religious and spiritual belief. Despite an interesting hour of sensitive interviews with individuals of varying beliefs, including an individual from the Spirit Release Foundation, in the end the programme’s position was quite clear, and was encapsulated by an interview between the psychologist Tanya Byron and the TV presenter Jeremy Vine. Dr. Byron was asking Jeremy Vine about his Christian beliefs, and when Jeremy Vine questioned her about her own beliefs, she replied that she was a scientist and so only believed that which could be presented as a hypothesis and could then be proved by empirical evidence. The programme concluded with that popular but over-simplistic position that it’s either science or religion, and that never the twain shall meet; you are either a hard-headed rationalist scientist or someone who has funny irrational beliefs with no hard evidence.

There seems to be an endemic tendency in our soundbite-loving society to turn complex debates and arguments into these “either-or” presentations; in this case either religious or scientific atheist. Debates on our screens and in our newspapers wheel out extremist individuals who argue that their side is right and the other is wrong and deluded. I watched another typical example recently on TV; a debate with Richard Dawkins acting as the spokesperson for science, and several fairly medieval-minded individuals acting as the spokespersons for religion. This polarisation of a complex issue such as this can seep into the pores of culture, slowly grinding down a nuanced debate about the nature of knowledge, authority and metaphysics into a case of verbal fisticuffs between irrational faith and heartless reason.

The Scientific and Medical Network is a place where such pastiche oversimplification is rejected outright; instead we consider the full range of belief systems that can lead to scientific endeavour. We understand that the wellspring of science – the desire to observe, record, describe and explain the manifest world – can come from many metaphysical sources.

The monotheist scientist was arguably the first kind of scientist, for whether we look at Bacon, Gallileo, Copernicus or Newton, we find convinced theists who felt it was their calling to use their own rationality to observe and ascertain God’s own rational plan in the universe. Theism holds that the universe is rationally constituted by a mind, and it is an entirely natural corollary to search for the rational principles and laws that the lawgiver has put in place. In fact, one could argue that the idea of scientific laws without a lawgiver is quite an odd one. Theism and science, in my opinion, go hand in hand.

What seems to be brushed over in the contemporary discussion of theistic belief and its relation to science is the HUGE variation in forms of theism. The default “naïve” theism involves the worship of a male superbeing who can respond to individual wishes and intervenes in human affairs, who is all powerful and all merciful, but who is to be feared at the same time. You know – the Old Testament figure we all grew up with. But in my experience this is rare form of theism, found only in the most heavy-browed and beady-eyed of believers. A far more common form of theism amongst individuals I have met in my life, both within and outside of scientific communities, is an “apophatic” theism; one in which a person believes in a deity or a divinity about whom nothing can be said, for no words can capture the infinite. The apophatic tradition tends to the view that Wittgenstein encapsulated in his saying “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. It can be seen perhaps as a middle road between agnosticism and a more mainstream theism. This apophatic belief system is found amongst Sufis, Quakers, Kabbalists, Vedantists and many others, all of whom use contemplative practices to find some form of communion with that which is beyond words. Quakers have produced a number of great scientists, including John Dalton, Arthur Eddington and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974.

Deism is another variant of theism. Deists believe in God, but feel that there is neither need for outdated scripture nor faith, and that a belief in God may be derived purely from reason and the observation of nature; they consider that God set the universe in motion with a set of immutable laws but then does not intervene. The proof of God is to be found in the extraordinary harmonies and fine-tuned balance of the universe and nature. What organized religions see as divine revelation and holy books, most deists see as interpretations made by other humans, rather than as authoritative sources. Deists believe that God's greatest gift to humanity is not religion, but the ability to reason. Stephen Hawking’s views are often considered to be deist, and the great Paul Davies also propounds a modern form of deism.

Pantheism is the opposite of deism in many ways; instead of separating God completely from the universe and letting it just tick on, as the deists believe, pantheists see God as utterly imminent within the universe; Nature and God are seen as almost equivalent; spiritual insight thus comes from immersion in this divinity, in which we are all submerged. Spinoza was a well-known pantheist, and Einstein’s views on God are often considered to be pantheist. The commonly cited concept of a “cosmic consciousness” that one finds in contemporary philosopher/scientists such as Peter Russell and Amit Goswami, is also a form of pantheism.

Panentheism subtly differs from pantheism in that is gives God the same all-suffusing nature while retaining a notion of otherness too. It is a belief system which posits that God exists and interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond it as well. One finds this kind of metaphysics in Celtic spirituality.

A final theism is what could be described as incidental theism. In Buddhism, particularly the Mahayana tradition, there are gods in the cosmological scheme, yet such a fact is entirely incidental to spiritual practice. The aim of spiritual practice is not to commune with God or to thank him or her, but rather to find inner clarity, truth and enlightenment. Thus there is a god, but his/its existence is entirely incidental.

There are other forms of Buddhism, particularly those that have been absorbed into Western culture that remove Gods from their cosmological scheme altogether. Here one finds spiritual atheism, a common belief system amongst scientists, in my experience. The scientific spiritual atheist will have found that there is a form of spiritual knowing and being that requires no form of theism. He or she finds that in the practice of meditation, or in nature, or in pursuits such as art and dance, a form of non-verbal knowing can be cultivated in which a sense of connectedness and wholeness is experienced, which brings compassion and love, but not divinity.

The default image of the “scientist” is the secular atheist. This person has decided that what cannot be seen, measured or sensed in some way, or through some instrument, cannot and does not exist. They have come to the conclusion that the apparatus of science, allied with elements of positivist philosophy, is sufficient to know all there is to know about the cosmos. God is a figment of our collective infantile imagination and can be dispensed with. Despite some assertions to the contrary, this is a metaphysical belief system, for statements that there is nothing beyond the material world, and no universal mind, can never be proved nor falsified, for by definition what is not here cannot be proved or disproved by what is here. They are great statements of faith.

What this brief discussion shows is that the territory of spiritual belief and disbelief is fantastically multicoloured, and that if it is reduced to the rather monochrome “God+Faith versus Atheism+Science” polarity, as it is in so many popular debates, it loses all its power and quality, and ends up with two rather caricatured opponents.