NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/sci/physics/18308

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-08 | 6.9 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 5 Nov 92 05:24:11 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mike Collins) writes:
> I may be wrong, but it seems to me that atheism is a refusal to
>believe in the relatively concrete and highly personified god(s)
>which prevails in conventional religions.

You are not using the term in the sense that it is usually meant. Atheism
is the rejection of the existence of any meaningful God at all, and this
is more than failure to believe in God, which is agnosticism.

>Atheism opens the door
>to many questions about the natural world and our relationship
>to it.

These questions are still around for believers in most religions. In
particular, in any of the highly populated religions, you will find
a range of theological opinion as to the role of humans in the universe.

>I agree, science and religion are fundamentally different. The kernal
>of science is scepticism, everything is open to scrutiny, even the
>process of science itself. In this sense it is infinitely extensible.
>The kernal of religion, however, seems to be faith. It adds an element
>of rigidity which prevents it from evolving in the face of new
>knowledge. science is about questions, while religion is about answers.

Religion for grown-ups is about questions, and the 'answers' are expressions
of _trust_ as much as faith. The ability to trust information of your
fellow humans without having first hand access to the observation is common
to religion and science. Another parallel is the interpretation step which
follows the original data - just as physicists can now look back at Young's
decisive experiment for light waves and still believe in photons, there
can be syntheses of faith, which likewise require expanding language. You
will not be very satisfied with religion if you take it to be rote recital
of ancient truth, any more than you would want to do physics that way.

>religion seems to fill a deep-seated need in the majority of people
>to feel "loved" in an infinite, and unknown universe. most people
>need the knowledge that there is some higher conscienseness which
>is somehow taking care of business. science doesn't do that.

Not all religions do this. In particular, Christianity is not always
the most comfortable of doctrines. In fact most religions I know of
are as much stick as carrot.

>science will not tell you how to live in a whole of uncertainty.
>religion will. but the must be a way to mutate science into an
>equally extensible spirituality. one that is based on equality
>and respect, and above all a profound reverence for the natural
>world. you don't find this in modern religions. they seem to
>have degenerated into simple crowd control.

Not every religion equips one to cope with uncertainty. In fact many require
you to adopt (or attempt to adopt) an unconditional premise before you can
start to understand how your to act. There does not need to be any way to
reformulate science to replace religious belief, but should you succeed, I
would expect that it would be in a personal way, (just like any other true
instance of religion). You seem to be groping for 'secular humanism' which
is a fine religion, but it is not the same as science. True secular humanism
(as opposed to the TV preacher's straw man) requires more starting ingredients
than just physics. You might profitably check out Einstein's version of
Spinoza, (God immanent in the natural world) or Schrodinger's nearby variant
(we all participate in free will despite the laws of physics because we
are all God). Both of these premises get you equality and respect for the
natural world, and cannot be too uncomfortable for the physicist.

At some point you may hit upon the idea that you want some real battle-tested
theories about the role of humanity in the universe, and this is where you
may find it profitable to have those old religions to draw upon, even if
you decide to filter the vocabulary a bit. It is not likely that Oppenheimer
read the Vedic scripts as pure mental gymnastics and then expressed himself
in those terms after the bomb test, but it is not likely that he was anything
close to believing the literal truth of them. Is it likely that he felt that
there was _no_ truth in them?

I think one focus of the atheist physicists' trouble with God is pointed at by
Bernard D'Epagnat's _Reality and the Physicist_:

    ...in Dante's time the idea of educated people had God was much less
    that of creator, or of a 'watchmaker' (though of course this idea was
    abroad, it was not at the forefront)  than that of final cause....
    And it was not until after Galileo that the spread of the mechanistic
    view of reality made such an idea paradoxical; thenceforth thinkers
    had to be content with a conception previously held, ... namely that
    of God as creator.

It's quite easy to get around this idea either way: you can still view God
as a final cause mediated by the laws by which the universe conducts itself,
just as much as you can view these laws as vacating the requirement for God.
Laplace quite clearly disposed of God in his universe, but Einstein and
Schrodinger in particular accepted a direct connection between the laws of
physics and their notions of God. It is not possible to regard either position
as childish or simplistic.

You are effectively removed from any scientific anchorage for your belief
since what it is clear you are doing is making choices about the words which
are appropriate to regard as 'true' in reference to 'reality'. You are in
particular choosing to believe something about the laws of physics which
no amount of experimentation will decide. It is no surprise that there are
a lot of agnostics out there. But this is far from saying that the question
is meaningless. It most certainly makes a difference which alternative
obtains, and it is a difference which may well be observable, but it doesn't
seem to be observable in any way that people can agree on.

What does seem pretty clear (to me) is that it is possible to cause a lot
of unnecessary pain and trouble by trying to subvert science or religion
to what are effectively political causes. I hope we can learn from the
example of Nazism that politics masquerading as science is no less evil
than the slightly more established horror, politics masquerading as religion.
For every Josef Mengele you can find a Jim Jones - and given enough time,
I expect the reverse will be soon true (but one has to admit that religion has a
bit of a head start).

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt