I think for those people who are religious, who have a serious faith in a personal God, and I count myself in those ranks, we should be more vocal about that. We should make a better effort to explain that faith does not require you to check your brains at the door. It doesn't require you to say something isn't true that you have all this data telling you is true. It's hard for me to pinpoint a precise way in which my personal faith has aided my ability to be a scientist. It certainly aids my perspective.
Science has a way of being a real roller-coaster experience.
Most of your experiments fail, most of your hypotheses are wrong. If you get so personally tied up in your own worth coming from the success of your research, you can be pretty down on yourself sometimes. It helps me, certainly, to have a different perspective of who I am, who God is, and sort of the eternal significance of what's going on here. And, therefore, it's easier not to get so completely rattled when something scientifically goes badly, because it often does. And at those wonderful moments where something does go right, the opportunity to see that not only as a scientist, but also as a person of faith, and to feel that kind of blessing, that kind of connection with the creator who knew all of this ahead of time, is one of those aspects of my existence that I wouldn't trade for anything.