What Are the Effects of Scientific Knowledge on Religious Beliefs?

[arunma]

This is not my experience. I find that most atheists I come across have started out life with religious upbringings and have turned towards atheism only after being exposed to science.

We must also keep in mind that except for the part about science, this describes most Americans. Anyone who's spent time on an American college campus knows that a large number of the students (a majority in my experience) are atheists, agnostics, or nominal Christians and Jews. Students in virtually every discipline were usually raised in some sort of a religious setting, and then fell away sometime between the middle of high school and freshman year of college. Likewise, those few science students who are religious usually claim that their knowledge of science strengthens their religiosity. It could very well be that there is some interplay between upbringing, personality, and scientific knowledge that causes a person to form a certain worldview as an adult. But if we're trying to formulate a general statement here, it likely isn't as simple as saying that scientific knowledge results in some specific belief system.

For me it was sort of the opposite in a way. I was raised going to bible school, mostly just as a substitute to day care, but then I turned atheist in high school mostly because of science. But then after I matured more and got a more in depth view of the world and of science I have realized that science is shallower than I had thought in high school, as in science barely scratches the surface of the complexities of the universe, especially life.

I am not specific to a religion, I am just open to the idea of "spirituality" so to speak.

Very interesting. My experience is different from yours as well as the others described. I would say that my scientific experience has had very little, if anything, to do with my religiosity. I was actually raised in a non-Christian religion (Hinduism), and then became a conservative Christian in the middle of college. But I can't really say that my knowledge of physics had anything to do with this. In fact, for whatever reason I usually don't derive the sense of awe that many other physicists describe from learning about the fundamental structures of nature. I guess I'm just in it because I like solving problems.