So I was doing some light reading on Wikipedia, and I decided to look up a scientist by the name of Paul Dirac. While much of his math is so far above my head I can't even begin to fathom it, I do find certain things he has mentioned to be fairly interesting. Take a moment and read this, I'll wait.
Okay, so I found two comments in that piece pretty funny. The first of which is when he criticizes J. Robert Oppenheimer with the quote, "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." I've never been a fantastic poet, or a poet at all for that matter. Sure I went through phases where I've tried my hand at poetry, but I've never been able to create what I'd call good verse. I think this is probably because of the reasons Dirac points out above. I am first and foremost a scientific thinker. I seek to understand things in a tangible capacity, lest I dismiss them altogether. Poetry exists in a realm of abstracts and concepts. While the subject matter can be something concrete, the way a poet sees this subject is probably the way an occultist sees auras. There's a quality to the world that's imperceptible to the rest of us.
The other section I found humorous was, "God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet." It seemed kind of appropriate that a genius of science who found religion to be fraught with inconsistencies and shortcomings would be marked as the prophet of non-religion by Wolfgang Pauli. If we are to really declare an absence of God in all certitude then we must be prophets of nothingness.
I think science is a mandatory opposite to religion. Some will say that religion and science do not really conflict, but rather tell the same story from two different angles. Take the Adam and Eve story for example. The statement that there was first "one" man from which a second being was "created" (i.e. Eve) sounds an awful lot like the understanding of single celled organisms procreating via binary fission. To elaborate somewhat, there's a concept known as heat death in which the entirety of the Universe is perpetually trying to balance out the temperature of everything. As more of the Universe is cold than hot, and heat dissipates through space so readily, surely the mean temperature of the Universe is meant to be quite chilling. This entropic force that seeks to balance out the world appears to me similar in nature to the conflict in belief between religion and science. They're perpetual forces that seem driven by nature itself to achieve some sort of equilibrium. There's suppose to be (in some theories) an equal number of antimatter particles in the Universe for the amount of matter there is. It's currently not known if this is true, and current observations tend to towards an asymmetry, but the point I'm trying to make is that when matter and antimatter collide, the resulting annihilation is very violent and destructive.
Isn't this often the case when matters of religion are confronted with heresy? And what greater heresy could there be than "there is no God". Should the world ever become wholly divided upon this subject, and war were to break out it would be as devastating an event as man could ever unleash upon itself.
I kind of lost track of what I was talking about, are sort of began to rant there.
I personally feel that science is the perfect tool for understanding the physical world we're in. However, it is not yet equipped (nor does it claim to be) to explain or understand the non-physical world, or the possible reality outside life and the universe. Some have taken science's inability to comment on these things as proof of their non-existence, while others accept it simply as an area of knowledge that science has little or no place in yet. Hard to explain, and some just understand it, but when we live in a world of our 5 senses, it becomes harder and harder to accept that there could be anything beyond it that may end up affecting us...
ReplyDeleteI personally have the fear that if I disregard anything "possible" that science can't comment on, I risk missing out on a kind of real truth, and for some reason, this form of conscious "atheism" of the non-physical scares me.
I got as far as magnetic monopoles, but the positron itself should have earned him a Nobel Prize. Prophets of Nothingness is an intriguing concept---Jean Paul Sartre might have donned that attire, and he did say that it took absolute courage to put both hands around the notion of atheism and then to really embrace it was yet another step. There have certainly been scientific philospophers who have embraced God, as there appears to be a fundamental limit to what man is able to understand. And maybe all of the above is poetry--just has to be collected into stanzas,some short, some long.
ReplyDeletePutting faith in an unknown, unexplainable, and unimaginable entity is about as easy as believing fully that "the universe began with a random explosion".
ReplyDeleteThe difference is, and the simple fact of the matter is, that a scientist always, always, always doubts until proven.
Do not presume that you can use science in your world if you don't know how to use it.