I've been rather quit, and not answering a number of interesting posts. But, I'm using this one to slide back a bit into the conversation. From my view, there are a number of interlocking questions. Indeed one of the posts I should answer is Richard Baker's post on Kant and science that is more than a month old.
Richard, if you are following this thread, I'd like you to know that I am rather vexed with that post. Not because it was rude: It was polite as always Not because you asked bad questions: you asked extremely good questions Unfortunately, you asked questions that will take hours to properly craft a response and, fortunately, its been a very busy few weeks. So, I'll acknowledge that I owe you a good post (others too but you are the best example) and reply here. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, July 13, 2002 10:24 AM Subject: Re: Religion and ethics (was- Re: humour etc) > On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 09:59:51AM -0500, Robert Seeberger wrote: > > > There is no incompatability between belief in a Deity and belief in Science > > Science is not about belief, it is about experiment. The test of all > knowledge is experiment. Science does not ask for faith or belief. If > you want to test some theory or piece of knowledge, you design and > perform an experiment. Science has delibrately limited its sphere to modeling observations. It makes models that fit those observations. Historically, a great deal of ontological significance has been attributed to the elements of those models. As a practical matter, we live as though tables, chairs, books, etc. have existance independant of ourselves. But, we have also lived in a world where free will, minds, love, good, evil also existed apart from human opinions. The nature of reality has been questioned for thousands of years. From the "shadows on the wall" arguements of Plato to the logical positivism of the 20th century, there have been a number of different takes on reality. Science is agnostic with respect to these opinions. First rate scientists have a wide variety of metaphysical opinions. One thing that we learned in the last century is that the experimental observations of science do not lend support to realism the way many people would think. People who have been on the list for a while have seen my writings on QM and metaphysics. Without going into detail on that now, let me just say that it is telling that the leading "realistic" interpretation of QM is the MWI worldview, which has an infinity of universes created every split second. All but one of these universes are as undetectable as those pink unicorns. My personal preference is for Copenhagen; which I see as basically a Kantian view of reality. Real measurable values, like the spin of an electron, only exists when forced into an eignenstate by measurement. And, there are models of observation that describe observations equally well, are basically equally simple, but have different "realities" associated with them. For example, is each electron "really" surrounded by a cloud of electron/positron pairs flashing into and out of existence? Is the bare charge of the electron just the right infinity so that, after the effect of these pairs is calculated, the results are the observed finite values? Dan M.
