I don't know when this became the default assumption, but it is an incredibly stupid one. Apparently the moment I say I'm Pagan, I'm expected to explain why I don't believe in evolution, why I don't trust doctors, why I don't understand neuroscience, or why I apparently think prayer can replace a fucking MRI. None of those things follow from believing in gods. Yet the internet seems remarkably committed to pretending they do.

There is this bizarre idea that science and religion occupy opposite ends of some imaginary spectrum: science is rational, religion is irrational; science requires evidence, religion requires faith; therefore you must choose. If you accept one, you're apparently obligated to reject the other. I've somehow managed to miss the memo, because I've been fascinated by science for most of my life while also being religious.

More importantly, I don't think being religious requires me to become scientifically illiterate. I can believe in gods and still accept evolution. I can pray and still take medication. I can have a spiritual understanding of the world while also being fascinated by neuroscience and demanding evidence when somebody makes a claim about the physical world. These aren't contradictions unless you start with the assumption that they have to be.

And that's the part that annoys me. The argument isn't actually "religion and science are incompatible." It's usually "I have defined religion and science as opposites, therefore anyone who doesn't pick my side must be inconsistent." Human beings are considerably more complicated than that.

The internet seems to have invented a binary

There are absolutely religious people who are anti-science. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Creationism exists. People reject evolution because of literal interpretations of religious texts. People refuse medical treatment because they believe prayer should be enough. Those things happen, and I think they're wrong.

But there's a rather large difference between saying "some religious people are anti-science" and saying "religion is inherently anti-science". Religion is a ridiculously broad category. It isn't just fundamentalist Christianity. There are completely different traditions with completely different ideas about gods, nature, humanity, scripture, ritual and what any of it is supposed to mean. Even within Christianity, people have been arguing about this stuff for centuries.

The National Academies' material on evolution is actually a pretty good example of the distinction. It lays out the evidence for evolution as overwhelming while also discussing science and religion as different ways of understanding the world rather than automatically treating them as enemies.

I don't have a problem with evolution because I'm Pagan. Evolution happened. Biology is real, genetics is real, natural selection is real and the fossil record is real. None of that has caused my religion to spontaneously combust.

I don't think science proves my religion

I also don't think science is supposed to prove my religion. I'm not sitting here waiting for a scientist to publish a paper saying, "Good news everyone, we've detected a god, which, honestly, can either be a wonderful situation or some Lovecraftian horrors beyond human comprehension." I'm not expecting somebody to find a divine intervention receptor in the brain, and I'm not expecting a particle physicist to discover a previously unknown fundamental force called "goddess".

And I'm certainly not expecting a scientist to discover Selene with a telescope.

That last one is particularly funny because Selene is literally the Moon. We've already discovered the Moon. We've photographed it, mapped it, landed people on it, sent ridiculous numbers of spacecraft to it and brought pieces of it back to Earth. NASA has a rather comprehensive overview of the Moon, including the fact that the Apollo missions returned hundreds of kilograms of lunar samples.

I can look at the Moon and understand it through astronomy while also believing that Selene is a goddess. Those aren't two competing explanations for the Moon's geology.

My personal theology is that the gods govern their domains, but they didn't create those domains. They didn't create us. I also believe that, at some fundamental level, the various pantheons all exist at once. One possibility is that some of the names humanity has given to gods are actually names for the same divine beings viewed through different cultures. Selene and Luna are an obvious example for me: two traditions describing a lunar goddess under different names, rather than necessarily two completely separate beings who just happen to have extremely similar domains. The same kind of comparison can be made between Hermes and Mercury, Aphrodite and Venus, or Ares and Mars.

I'm not claiming those pairings are scientifically proven identities, or even that every ancient worshipper would have understood them that way. I'm talking about how I personally make sense of a world where multiple pantheons can coexist. Maybe the gods have different names because humans are very good at putting labels on things. Maybe there are genuinely different beings who overlap. Maybe some are aspects of the same underlying deity. Maybe reality is simply considerably stranger than our brains are equipped to comprehend. I don't pretend to know exactly how it works.

Honestly, imagine trying to monitor an entire universe, potentially infinite multiverses, as a single individual. No wonder there are multiple pantheons. I wouldn't be surprised if the divine equivalent of an IT department had a truly horrifying ticket queue.

That still doesn't turn mythology into an alternative explanation for geology or cosmology. I can believe Selene is the goddess of the Moon while also being perfectly happy for astronomers to explain the Moon's formation, orbit, composition and geology. I'm not trying to replace astronomy with mythology.

Some people really do make science and religion fight

This is where I think criticism is completely fair. If somebody tells me evolution didn't happen because their interpretation of scripture says it didn't, I'm going to believe the evidence. If somebody tells me I don't need medical treatment because prayer will cure me, I'm going to get the medical treatment.

Prayer isn't a replacement for medicine. That should really not need saying.

Being religious doesn't give me some sort of exemption from reality. If there is good evidence for something, I don't get to dismiss it because I happen to believe in gods. But the reverse is also true. I don't think I need to pretend that every religious belief is a scientific hypothesis just because somebody on the internet has decided that science and religion have to fight.

If I believe something religiously, that doesn't mean I've scientifically demonstrated it. I can just believe it. That seems to be the part people struggle with.

Religious people can, in fact, be scientists

There is a particularly funny problem with the idea that religion and science are inherently incompatible, which is that there have been an awful lot of scientists who were religious.

Georges Lemaître is probably one of my favourite examples because he was a Catholic priest and a physicist who developed what became the Big Bang theory. The Vatican's discussion of Lemaître describes him as both a priest and a scientist and discusses the distinction he made between scientific questions and questions of faith.

There's also Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and is openly Christian. In an NIH interview about faith, science and the human genome, he talks about science as a way of answering questions about the natural universe while recognising that questions about God, meaning and purpose aren't necessarily the same sort of questions.

And this isn't just a handful of famous historical figures. A Pew Research Center survey of scientists who were members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 51% believed in God or some higher power, while 41% said they believed in neither. It's an older survey and it was of AAAS members rather than literally every scientist on Earth, but it still makes the whole "scientists don't believe in religion" thing look rather silly.

Scientists are people. Some are religious, some aren't, some are atheists and some are agnostic. Some probably have opinions about religion that would make the rest of us want to throw something at them. That's how humans work.

Prayer isn't a substitute for medicine

This one is particularly important to me because I have spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time interacting with the medical system. I pray. I also take medication, see doctors, have neurological investigations and have been hospitalised. I've had an absolutely stupid number of appointments.

I've had so many needles in my arms over the years that my veins are apparently completely fed up with the concept. They've been used so much that there are times when medical staff have to use my feet instead. During my latest shunt failure, I genuinely had no morphine at all because the nurses couldn't get a vein. I had brain surgery while effectively raw-dogging the pain because they couldn't get IV access, and it hurt like absolute hell. That's not an abstract philosophical argument for me. I've literally been lying in hospital in agony while people investigated what was happening inside my head. I've had multiple shunt operations, brain surgery, blood tests, cannulas and enough other medical procedures that my veins have basically become a logistical problem.

I would not be alive without modern medicine and neuroscience. So when I say that I trust science and medicine, I'm not saying it because it sounds intellectually respectable. I've had to rely on them.

I can thank my neuroscience teams for keeping me alive without feeling like I've somehow betrayed the gods, and I can thank the gods without pretending the neuroscience teams weren't necessary. I don't have to choose between those things.

I wouldn't have become obsessed with human biology if I hated science

I was intensely interested in human biology as a child. The brain fascinated me, the body fascinated me, diseases fascinated me and medicine fascinated me. I wanted to understand what things did and why things went wrong.

I wouldn't have become intensely hyper-fixated on human biology as a child if I weren't interested in science in the first place.

And that interest didn't disappear. If anything, having my own neurological problems has given me considerably more reason to be interested in neuroscience. I have spent years having conversations with medical professionals about my own brain, my own shunt and what is happening inside my skull. There is something deeply fucking fascinating about that.

It doesn't make me less religious. If anything, it makes the whole "religion versus science" argument seem even more absurd to me. I'm a programmer. I like computers, biology, neuroscience and understanding how things work. And I'm also Pagan. Apparently the internet has decided these are supposed to be incompatible.

Science is a method, not something I have to use to explain absolutely everything

I trust science because it works. You have a question, you form a hypothesis, you gather evidence, you test it, you try to reproduce the result and you change your mind when the evidence says you're wrong. That's a pretty good way of figuring out how the physical world works.

I don't see why that means I have to turn every question about my existence into a scientific experiment. There are questions about meaning, purpose, personal experience and spirituality that aren't necessarily settled by measuring something in a laboratory in the same way that you can measure the mass of an object or sequence a genome.

But I'm also not going to make the opposite mistake and say, "Science hasn't answered this, therefore my religious explanation is scientifically proven." That would be fucking stupid. If I don't have scientific evidence for something, I don't have scientific evidence for it. I can still believe it. Those aren't the same statement.

I don't need to pretend my religious beliefs have passed a scientific test that they were never designed to undergo.

I'm literally a programmer

This is probably the part that makes the whole argument especially funny to me. I spend a significant amount of my life dealing with evidence. Something breaks, I look at the logs. I reproduce the bug. I work out what I think is happening. I change something. I test it. If I was wrong, I go back and figure out why I was wrong.

I don't decide that the computer has been possessed. I don't pray for the compiler to change its mind. I fix the fucking code.

There is no point at which my religious beliefs suddenly require me to abandon debugging and start making shit up. My brain does not stop understanding evidence because I believe in gods.

Religious experience and psychosis are not the same thing

This is another area where the internet manages to flatten something complicated into a stupid binary. Religious belief is not automatically psychosis.

Psychosis is real. It can involve hallucinations, delusions and losing contact with reality. The National Institute of Mental Health's explanation of psychosis describes things like hallucinations and delusions, including beliefs that ordinary events contain special messages or that someone has an unusually significant relationship with a powerful figure.

Religion can absolutely become part of psychosis. Someone can believe they're specially chosen by a god for some extraordinary mission, start interpreting completely ordinary events as secret divine messages, hear a voice during psychosis and believe it's a god speaking directly to them, or refuse necessary medical treatment because they believe prayer will cure them. That stuff exists, and it can also be incredibly dangerous.

But that doesn't mean religion itself is psychosis.

I came to my faith during a psychotic episode, yes, but I don't regard that psychosis as divine revelation. I had to spend months afterwards separating the actual experience from the meaning I had attached to it and working out what I genuinely believed.

That matters because I've also experienced psychosis in a completely different way. I've had an episode where I saw myself as bloodied and without eyes, apparently by my own hand. I don't look back on that and think the gods were sending me a message. It was a hallucination.

My most recent psychotic episode was in November 2025. My shunt didn't catastrophically fail until April 2026. It was a very slow process, with my brain essentially being squeezed from the inside out over a period of months before things finally reached the point where the shunt failure became undeniable. Sometimes there really is a neurological explanation sitting right there.

That doesn't mean every spiritual experience is secretly a neurological disorder. It means the brain is capable of doing some extremely weird things, and if someone is religious, their existing religious framework can become part of how they interpret those experiences. Psychosis can wear religious clothing.

That distinction matters. I can believe in gods while also understanding that my brain is a physical organ and that neurological problems can seriously affect perception, cognition and experience. Those things are not mutually exclusive either.

The internet really loves a binary

Science or religion. Atheist or believer. Rational or irrational. Evidence or faith.

Apparently we're only allowed to be one thing at a time.

Actual human beings don't work like that. Religious people can believe stupid things. Atheists can believe stupid things. Scientists can be wrong. Religious people can be scientists. Scientists can be religious. People can be both deeply interested in evidence and deeply spiritual.

The existence of religious people who reject science does not magically turn every religious person into an anti-science idiot. And the existence of scientists who are atheists doesn't mean atheism is a requirement for doing science.

These really aren't difficult distinctions.

I'm not asking anyone to believe what I believe

I'm not asking a physicist to prove the gods exist. I'm not asking an atheist to pray. I'm not asking a laboratory to validate my rituals. I'm not asking neuroscience to discover some supernatural mechanism hiding in my brain.

I just don't want people to assume that because I believe in gods, I've therefore stopped believing in reality. I'm not going to reject evolution because I'm Pagan. I'm not going to stop listening to doctors because I pray. I'm not going to throw away neuroscience because I believe in gods. I'm not going to pretend my religious beliefs make scientific explanations false.

And I'm not going to pretend that something is scientifically proven just because I believe it.

I don't need science to certify my religion. I need science to do science, and I need religion to be allowed to be religion without being dragged into a fight with a microscope every time somebody mentions it.

I can study biology, be fascinated by neuroscience, spend years dealing with doctors and hospitals and needles and brain surgery, trust the people who keep my brain functioning, and write software and debug it using evidence. I can look at the Moon and understand what astronomy tells me about it, and I can still believe that Selene is there.

I can thank my doctors and thank the gods. I don't see why I have to pick one.

I'm not particularly interested in convincing anyone else to believe what I believe. I just want people to stop assuming that I must have abandoned science because I believe in gods. It's a remarkably irritating assumption, especially when my entire life gives me quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Apparently that's controversial on the internet.

I genuinely don't understand why.