> As an aside, although Einstein did not espouse a religion, he was a very
> spiritual person. He said "I want to know the mind of God. The rest is
> all details." He also understood that good science is a blending of
> emotion and intellect. "The most beautiful experience we can have is
> mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of
> true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder,
> no longer marvel, is dead." From this perspective, the science presented
> in the definition which started this thread, is dead, lifeless. It leaves
> out the mystery and the wonder entirely.
>
You should read/hear Dawkins. Ofcourse such the amazement won't get into
the scientific papers, but you can see it in the popularising
literature. Without the curiosity and imagination scientists don't
get far - nobody would disagree with that - and it is all there
in biomolecular science, medicine, astronomy, particle
physics etc - there is no bits without wierd and wonderful stuff.
Reality is as much fascinating than any man-made mystery can be.
> It is false to see spirituality as irrational. It is direct experience of
> the natural world.
>
> It is not self-delusion, it is seeing and observing in a different way.
>
> It is also a rational response to the limits of science to describe the world.
>
It is not consistent with reality, therefore it cannot be
and observation of it, at most it is the observation of
the human psyche. And you have to have self-delusion to deny reality
and to accept imaginary "reality".
The rational response is: "we don't have enough data yet, let's
collect some more before we make up our mind".
> Einstein was not a hypocrite when he made his statement about wanting to
> know the mind of God. For one thing he understood what Goedel understood,
> that a rational system that explains everything is a logical, mathematical
> possibility, for any rational system contains at least one element which is
> not explained within the system. That is Goedel's Theorem. Put
> intuitively, it means that to describe any system you must be able to stand
> outside it. But standing outside it, you are not defined by the system.
> Russell and Whitehead's theory of classes leads to the same result.
> Logically, a class cannot contain itself. For example, the concept of a
> set of chairs is logically different from the chairs themselves. That is
> why you cannot conceive of a class of all classes. And seeing as
> classification is the basis of science, it is logically impossible for
> science to describe all of nature - for to do that it would have to define
> and describe the class of all classes. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Prinicple
> says much the same thing - you cannot observe both the momentum and the
> position of a particle. You can clearly observe one or the other or a
> fuzzy combination, but not both clearly. There is thus an irreducible veil
> of ignorance that science cannot lift. For Einstein, Whitehead and
> Heisenberg, logically what lay behind that veil, was God - the unexplained
> and unexplainable cause of order in the universe. They came to this
> position because rationally they could reach no other conclusion, all
> rational explanations being exhausted.
>
>
Einstein used kind metaphors. he was not relegious, we just had a
thread on this on skeptic, do I have to relocate all that stuff?
The uncertainty principle works on quantum states of particles,
and has nothing to do with the frame of reference we have to
work in our reality. You cannot build a philosophy on it.
It doesn't mean we cannot approximate our reality better and better
all the time, we know we can, lots of our science works very well
indeed.
Just because we cannot yet explain something, or because some stuff we
can only work out in possibilities, doesn't mean there is a god
lurking about. Use Occam's rasor - if there is no evidence for a god,
why should we invent one just to conveniently fill the gaps
of our ignorance? Bit lazy, init?
We are alone, and that should make us more responsible
for that brief moment we have a chance to enjoy our
wonderful universe, to get to know it and make it
better for everybody else.
It is just an incredibly lucky coincidence that we are here -
an unusually long break without any deadly gamma-ray
explosion or something similar. Do the best you can.
Life is more interesting and free and human/e without god.
> >Common, the earth does look flat. People find it a tod
> >more easy to believe it's roundness, when the circumnavigation
> >becomes commonplace.
>
> The very cardinal who prosecuted Galileo fully understood what Galileo was
> saying. He accepted the Copernican system. Galileo was threatened with
> imprisonment, not because the Church did not agree intellectually with what
> he was saying, but because he would not keep quiet while it figured out how
> to integrate it into traditional teaching without losing control. The
> notion that the Church silenced him out of superstition etc is a myth
> Galileo created which has been exploded by the history of science.
>
Hm. The pope just now found time to accept evolution.
Perhaps we should have waited a bit longer... Working out how to
fit religions created by thousands years old philosophies that relied
on thousands years old "urban legends" ain't easy.
> Information got round in those days
> >even slower then now...
>
> Not so. The mail wasn't so much slower than the British Post Office of
> today. People like Kepler and Galileo wrote to one another all the time.
> People travelled a great deal. The universities spread ideas around. The
> Royal Society was established to routinize the informal correspondence and
> conversations which had always gone on.
> >
and 90+ percent of the population was illiterate and never left their
village.
> >But yes, people need the evidence and a bit of motivation
> >to go for new ideas. However, at some point the evidence becomes
> >so ovepowering, that the new idea becomes just another fact of life.
>
> No - the view of the history of science is that it is not so much the
> accumulation of evidence as that a new metaphor emerges and the people who
> cling to the old die out. It is also a generational thing. Dirac,
> Heisenberg and Bohr were young men, Einstein was middle aged.
>
Postmodernist paradigm talk. Sounds good, like memetics, but it is
at best in the metaphore category. There is a describable reality,
we are living in it, taking all the science that described it for us
so far, granted. When there is enough data, somebody comes along
sooner or later to draw the conclusions.
> >not if it implies that it's some sort of static natural law that we can't do
> >anything about.
>
> a) If it is going to happen, it is going to happen and your making a
> statement like this isn't going to stop it;
>
> b) All the alternatives I have seen, whether they come from statistical
> dynamics, or chaos theory or the new generation of catholic mystics, or
> anywhere else, see the world as a dynamic place where science and mysticism
> are complements.
> >
I yet to see any mysticism to describe any piece of reality.
Eva (sorry if I tread on your soul, chear up, it doesn't exist)
> Mike
>
>
>
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