Science And Religion -- Thoughts Along The Way

2012-02-05T09:00:00.007-05:00

Would that the God-mocking and the God-fearing
put away their noisy cap pistols and their toy cannon
and have a picnic in the park.
Baseball and beer to work out tensions;
later a marshmallow roast and story telling;

Later still, gaze quietly at the stars,
talk the night thru of nature's delights.
No whys, no wishes, no convictions,
just wonder, deep, honest, naked wonder.
If only the poets would come!
---After The Cosmic Riddle: How Rocks and Stars Became Flesh and Blood, Washington Post, 1984)
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I’m not frightened by doubt, I don’t need to know why I’m here.
---Richard Feynman, physicist
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2012-01-15T09:00:00.017-05:00

The delights of love come with stings and smarts. Unbidden hurts accompany nostalgia, desire, and yearning; awkward helplessness, foolish murmurings and sudden tears confuse lovers, silence friends, and try the holy patience of God.

No one believes that a triangle knows it is a trilateral whose angles add up to one straight angle, nor an apple tree that it is kin to the rose, or that a bluebird knows the wave length of the color blue, or that a blue dolphin wonders why there are clouds in the sky.
Unbelievers most surely take a leap of faith with their belief that a slightly larger, possibly more complex, knot of neural linkages can know all this and far more; and frighteningly exotic, knows that it knows and endlessly declares that it knows in a dazzling circus of transcendent constructs: the elegant equations of electromagnetism, the captivating delights of storytelling, and the soothing intricacies of music for starters.
–--after C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, Ch.5

A primitive leap of faith: everybody is somewhere.
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We are in the position of a man provided with a bunch of keys and who, having to open several doors in succession, always hits on the right key after the first or second trial. He begins to wonder if there is some coordination between keys and doors. For example, the success of geometry, differential equations, and group theory, all so different.
Eugene Wigner, physicist

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2012-01-01T09:00:00.027-05:00

Fidgeting electrons have not the fullness of being,
Bread is more than curls of connected atoms,
Edges of existence are for man, not God.

In the entertaining and engagingly detailed book, QED, Richard Feynman explains the physics of light by a clever “ridiculously simple” artifice. He brushes off the question of existence, the how and why of the “absurd” behavior of light that is observed and measured to extreme accuracy. His excuse for this failure, strewn about in the Introduction, qualifies him as a theologian for unbelievers! He would likely have taken such a remark as a savory jest.

So much is above and beyond the busy work of those who search, sort, and quantify, who relate, reform, and reduce, but cannot see beyond brute sense experience.
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Without God, everything is possible. Dostoyevsky
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2011-12-18T09:00:00.006-05:00

Grace is the seed of glory.

Searching to understand existence apart from some venerated scripture is to sail without a compass upon the immense sea of human speculation captive and captivated by the fruits of science.

Some Christian scripture scholars have a disturbing agenda. They would make Christianity largely a religion of ideas drawn from events much embellished in the telling, something of a God centered Confucianism hopefully more acceptable to the contemporary intellect.
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God sometime answers prayers, he never answers questions.
Jewish saying

What child is this resting under a star, a lesser nova attended by wise men?
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2011-12-04T09:00:00.006-05:00

Love steeped in foreverness is sacred, an unconditional attachment to the beloved that is steadfast in caring, sacrifice, appreciation, and communion.

The Hebrews were not seriously captivated by the wonders of nature. Looking up, looking out, looking in they simply declared God made it all.

Many earnest attendants of nature, sayers of the past or temple builders of today, do not know a maker, do not look up from the feast they experience with eyes, ears, hands, and bustling minds. Chock full of fanciful stuff and things with so many connections and patterns to be discovered, it is quite enough for them.
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It is light from elsewhere that reveals beauty, nourishes innocence.
O blessed light from without, fill expectant hearts.
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2011-11-20T09:00:00.005-05:00

The caress and peace of culture often restrain vision.

It all just happened by blind trial and error, from protons to proteins, from ants to Aunt Bonnie’s poetry. This faith statement is as far from common sense as any belief of the Hebrews and Christians, any of the rich tapestry of Oriental religions, or the excesses of pagan myths for that matter.

Passive secularism, well established in our pluralistic society, has become aggressive and hostile with a mind set immersed in the belief that truth is unknowable and in fact does not exist. Moral and religious beliefs, in particular, are outmoded myths with no right to regulate cultural mores or even to be seriously heard in public. Cultural boundaries are provisional and generally suspect, most especially when rooted in the Hebrew-Christian heritage of Western Civilization. These confinements from the past must yield to rational enhancements of individual freedom.
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The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg, physicist
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2011-11-06T09:00:00.005-05:00

The plow in Spring opens the fresh earth and lays it bare for the seed that disappears into it. Easter comes and remembrance of an empty tomb declares that the marvel of seed and death are joined.

Every high priest needs a rebellious heckler: Astrophysicist Carl Sagan poses and preaches eloquently from a patch of principles so narrow, so unaware of the great sea of human discourse on existence that it is hard to believe he is honest.

Is it possible that ultimately mathematics is neither a sufficient nor a necessary descriptor of physical reality? After all, it is of limited use elsewhere.
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The witchery of paltry things obscures what is right and the whirl of desire
transforms the innocent mind.
Wisdom, 4, 7-14
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2011-10-16T09:00:00.010-04:00

Intellectuals are much drawn to tendentious frames of reference. Still, they are probably as important for civilization as plumbers.

Primitive affirmation: Everything Is Faith.

Is it because beauty is so fragile, and more so my thoughts when I see it, that I am so often disturbed by coarseness, by indecency, by impropriety--–and always hovering close by the reductionist sprawl of science? The shrinks would say something else, but so what, they never did know or care much about beauty.
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Believers: proclaim truth to children of this age captive and captivated by the grand carnival of science. Leave a taste for prayer when you quit the stage.

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2011-10-02T09:00:00.004-04:00

Dying to self is not fatal.

Some early giants of physics did wrestle with ontology, the nature of being, but could not admit they were into metaphysics, for them a bastard term, a pseudo field of study.

In the high, awkward airs of epistemology one hears. “only that which knows itself can define itself; that which does not know itself cannot know it is not.” It is more colorful to ask, "whose to know if whos are not, if whos are not?"
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Lord, open our eyes and mind to the wonders you have set before us and within us, above us and beyond us, that we may dance and pray at the same time.
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2011-09-18T09:00:00.003-04:00

The Arts should have but one purpose, beauty.

Evil, a given of God's unfathomable gamble of freedom, comes with the power to envelope the innocent, the beautiful, the helpless. Is this a necessary dimension of infinite love?

Disturbed by the arbitrary hooks and eyes of classical valence theory in chemistry, Heisenberg raised the uncertainty relation of early quantum mechanics into a principle of nature. The outcry was properly fierce. At stake was the conclusion that the details of atomic processes are fundamentally inaccessible to empirical science.
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Who surrounds in boundless deeps
The impatient island of the mind,
Who in clouds of silence keeps
Caring watch for humankind?

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