Life is strange.
Almost three centuries ago, the Enlightenment held out the promise that man, equipped with 'Reason,' and with 'Science,' could know, and control all that is and will be.
Now...science has advanced to the point where, like theology....it relies on faith and conjecture rather than experiments and final truth.
Some iriony, huh?
1. Once upon a time, and even now, the most common argument presented is that somehow, science represents a higher level than religion because it is based on fixed, testable laws rather than faith and/or belief. This argument fails once proceeds beyond junior high school level science.
a. Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces.
Newton's laws of motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. Classical, or Newtonian physics, assumed that an objective world exists, and that we can observe and measure without essentially changing same. But, at the subatomic level, the laws of Newtonian physics do not apply: it is impossible to observe reality without changing it.
3. For example, the centerpiece of classical physics was the theory of motion: if we know where an object is, and we know its velocity (speed and direction), we can plot its course. By extension, if the same could be known for every particle in the universe, and the forces acting on them, we could predict the entire future of the universe! The implication is that every event is completely determined.
4. But, on the quantum level, we cannot know position and velocity at the same time: the very process of observing particles changes their position. Therefore, complete determinism is impossible. Unless we form a theory that states that every possible permutation of laws exists at once!
a. In a search for epistemological truth, some physicists have actually suggested that all things, all laws, are possible at the same time. The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiversecomposed of mostly independent parallel universes. Everett's Relative-State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
5. No better indication of the lack of certainty in science can be testified to than this: Whenever the physicist penetrates to the atomic or electric level in his analysis, he finds things acting in a way for which he can assign no cause this means nothing more or less than that the law of cause and effect must be given up.
Percy Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist, p. 93. (Bridgman won the Nobel Prize in Physics)
6. So, at this level of science, one finds that the attempts of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, to direct the world via reason, and science, fall short. Perhaps such attempts to replace religion were too hasty. Rationality was not the hallowed path to truth as the Enlightenment had claimed!
a. Again? Science now admits it doesnt have answers and must proceed based on faith. Guess what else proceeds based on faith?
7. In classical physics, the world was ordered, not by the faithfulness of a personal God but by inexorable natural laws. Nothing was outside of natures fixed order.
a. The protest by theologians had been dismissed as merely anti-scientific. Gone is the image of the universe as a machine determined by mathematical laws.
8. As Arthur Koestler said, Since the Renaissance, the Ultimate Cause had gradually shifted from the heavens to the atomic nucleus. Now, physics could no longer be used to rule out biblical accounts, or a belief in God.
And, if science proceeds, by the intuitive rather than the rational, how is it different from theology?
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
Almost three centuries ago, the Enlightenment held out the promise that man, equipped with 'Reason,' and with 'Science,' could know, and control all that is and will be.
Now...science has advanced to the point where, like theology....it relies on faith and conjecture rather than experiments and final truth.
Some iriony, huh?
1. Once upon a time, and even now, the most common argument presented is that somehow, science represents a higher level than religion because it is based on fixed, testable laws rather than faith and/or belief. This argument fails once proceeds beyond junior high school level science.
a. Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces.
Newton's laws of motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. Classical, or Newtonian physics, assumed that an objective world exists, and that we can observe and measure without essentially changing same. But, at the subatomic level, the laws of Newtonian physics do not apply: it is impossible to observe reality without changing it.
3. For example, the centerpiece of classical physics was the theory of motion: if we know where an object is, and we know its velocity (speed and direction), we can plot its course. By extension, if the same could be known for every particle in the universe, and the forces acting on them, we could predict the entire future of the universe! The implication is that every event is completely determined.
4. But, on the quantum level, we cannot know position and velocity at the same time: the very process of observing particles changes their position. Therefore, complete determinism is impossible. Unless we form a theory that states that every possible permutation of laws exists at once!
a. In a search for epistemological truth, some physicists have actually suggested that all things, all laws, are possible at the same time. The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiversecomposed of mostly independent parallel universes. Everett's Relative-State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
5. No better indication of the lack of certainty in science can be testified to than this: Whenever the physicist penetrates to the atomic or electric level in his analysis, he finds things acting in a way for which he can assign no cause this means nothing more or less than that the law of cause and effect must be given up.
Percy Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist, p. 93. (Bridgman won the Nobel Prize in Physics)
6. So, at this level of science, one finds that the attempts of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, to direct the world via reason, and science, fall short. Perhaps such attempts to replace religion were too hasty. Rationality was not the hallowed path to truth as the Enlightenment had claimed!
a. Again? Science now admits it doesnt have answers and must proceed based on faith. Guess what else proceeds based on faith?
7. In classical physics, the world was ordered, not by the faithfulness of a personal God but by inexorable natural laws. Nothing was outside of natures fixed order.
a. The protest by theologians had been dismissed as merely anti-scientific. Gone is the image of the universe as a machine determined by mathematical laws.
8. As Arthur Koestler said, Since the Renaissance, the Ultimate Cause had gradually shifted from the heavens to the atomic nucleus. Now, physics could no longer be used to rule out biblical accounts, or a belief in God.
And, if science proceeds, by the intuitive rather than the rational, how is it different from theology?
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
