From: Bill Taylor (bt4_1284@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Oct 23 2004 - 19:10:09 PDT
Message-ID: <20041024021009.98217.qmail@web50203.mail.yahoo.com> Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 19:10:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill Taylor <bt4_1284@yahoo.com> Subject: Faith and science
A great topic showed up on a list serv of physics teachers I belong to.
It gave me a chance to write my tome on Life and Physics. I hope I get
lots of interesting comments back.
Let's get down to basics. Science doesn't offer truth. Science offers
models of the universe, which give us apparently increasingly-accurate
results. However, the mere fact that our models provide results that are
incereasingly-accurate doesn't mean the models are "true", does it? After
all, the more we know (read: the more accurate our models are) the more
questions we have. And, as someone pointed out, there are some extremely
basic things that we have very poor models for (e.g. gravity, light. And
by the way, what is consciousness, anyway? Does it exist or what?).
The models we have are built upon fundamental characteristics: mass,
length, time, and charge. We can no more "prove" that those things exist
than we can prove that we do. Those four things are our postulates.
So where does this leave us? We have postulates about which we can say
nearly nothing, and a process which leaves us coming apparently closer and
closer to some truth but really all we have are approximations. Then
there is us, seemingly able to understand all this, including to
understand what we do not understand. (At least part of it, anyway.)
This, in my mind, is where faith comes in. At the end of the day, we are
left only with faith that our postulates are true, our models are true and
that our process will consistently lead us to truth. (Do you think we
will eventually have more than just more accurate models?) Thin ice,
indeed.
Now, as for God, which is supposedly where religion starts, here is my
$.02
Whatever created the Universe created it with CHANGE as the paramount
guiding principle. Nothing is static, not even the existence of the
Universe itself. We are not of this moment - we are the product of all
the CHANGE that went before us. More thin ice.
This change is occuring everywhere, but the energy that is causing it
(shall we call it dark energy? HA HA HA!!) is localized nowhere, except
perhaps in our minds. More thin ice.
We have been created (read: evolution) by a Universe which had within it a
creatively-intelligent principle so profound as to create sentinent beings
as one of its manifestations. The Universe proceeded on a path of
continual change until it gave birth to at least one being which can
understand enough to approximate (partially) its creation, reasoning only
from uncertain postulates in a hostile environment.
If we want to call this
creative-principle-which-creates-things-which-themselves-create, God, it's
fine with me. Then again, it seems kind of devilish in a way.
- Bill
=====
Bill Taylor
Drew School
San Francisco
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