Monday, October 18, 2004

The fundamental (not fundamentalist) 'why'


Evolution and Religion Can Coexist, Scientists Say (By Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News)

    "Even as science progresses in its reductionist fashion, moving towards deeper, simpler, and more elegant understandings of particles and forces, there will still remain a 'why' at the end as to why the ultimate rules are the way they are," said Ted Sargent, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Toronto.

    "This is where many people will find God, and the fact of having a final unanswerable 'why' will not go away, even if the 'why' gets more and more fundamental as we progress," he said. More here

NanoBot Backgrounder
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NanoKabbalah in Salon on my birthday: Coincidence?
NanoKabbalah Jihad

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the other hand, one could look at the continuing progress of scientific knowledge generation and conclude that, wherever we look closely, we see that the hand of God is absent.

One definition of insanity is to continue repeating a given behaviour in the forlorn expectation that the result will change. The search for God's presence in a fundamental "Why" at the constantly receding ends of science has the flavor of this type of insanity.

On the other hand, one can come to the realization that, since the hand of God has not been seen despite thousands of years of ever-more-refined searching for it, it is most probably not present in the universe.

Sane minds give up the God fantasy and mature to a level transcending wish fulfilment.

Howard Lovy said...

Your statement makes sense only in the context of its underlying assumptions, that:

1. God is an entity separate from nature or the universe as a whole for which evidence is waiting to be found (a smoking "hand"?);

2. The search for God is synonymous with the search for evidence of an omnipotent being with a booming Charlton Heston-like voice who was the major player in ancient tribal warfare, rather than a quest for the true nature and origin of the universe using the crude tools of our limited senses and primitive instruments;

3. 'Sane minds' have an answer.

Howard

Anonymous said...

Hold on to your fantasies, Howard. You need them.

Howard Lovy said...

Oh, if you only knew, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous. If you only knew ...

Howard

Joseph said...

It's easy to identify a fundamentalist at work.

First, Mr. Anonymous emitted a canned supposedly-irrefutable argument and then was unable to come up with a coherent response when someone refuted it anyway.