The Priest-Physicist Who Would Marry Science to Religion

[nullnor]

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/14-priest-physicist-would-marry-science-religion/article_print

i like this author. i've read some really interesting stuff from him before. the article was free but now the print button works, assuming there's interest.

When he describes his line of work, John Polkinghorne jests, he encounters “more suspicion than a vegetarian butcher.” For the particle physicist turned Anglican priest, dissonance comes with the territory...Polkinghorne himself joined Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann in research that led to the discovery of the quark, the building block of atoms. But in 1979, after 25 years in the trenches, Polkinghorne decided that his best days in physics were behind him. “I felt I had done my bit for the subject, and I’d go do something else,” he says. That is when he left his academic position to be ordained...“I started with the statement that I believe that God acts in the world, but he is not a show-off conjurer who violates the same laws of nature that he made,” he says. “My question was, Is there a way of describing God’s actions that is consistent with science?”

edit: hit the print button if you want the full article.

[nullnor]

the thing that bothered me about this is the habit we have of attributing the unexplained to a higher force. are we just repeating our past mistakes? questions and answers.. just because a question doesn't have one doesn't mean the question isn't right. a question can be right even if it doesn't have an answer. would you rather have the right question to a wrong answer or a right answer to a wrong one?

for millions of years we've been coming up empty. but just because we do doesn't mean you should abandon the original question. and with advances in our efforts, it means we should try harder. we've gone from saying the cycles of the moon is the result of a god, to saying the uncertainty principle of quantum physics is. that is progress. and the best questions are always the oldest ones because they are the most rewarding. it is possible to arrive back where you started, even millions of years later, only this time smarter and with more evidence

anyways, in the coming years your going to see a real revolution in quantum physics. you're going to see a lot of things. i even imagine with the discover of the higgs boson we'll be able to manipulate gravity and space. but it will be done with quantum mechanics. which we haven't done much with in the last 100 years. yet today is different. it's become much more practical to use nowadays. there is no unified grand theory to discover. there is no need to keep trying to combine relativity with it. there is only one theory and it's quantum. as it slowly becomes more applicable to the macroscopic world we live in.

'here is the thing about the future. every time you look at, it changes, because you looked at it, and that changes everything else'.

[nullnor]

[nullnor]

i was born one. and your not worth it... lol numerology

[B-Fly]

I dunno, nullie. My feeling remains that religion is better reserved for the metaphysical questions, whereas it is almost always a mistake, shortcut or cop-out to apply it to the physical questions. In that sense, I think religion and science/physics can certainly co-exist, but believe they should co-exist with a metaphorical wall of separation between them.

[Steve]

I dunno, nullie. My feeling remains that religion is better reserved for the metaphysical questions, whereas it is almost always a mistake, shortcut or cop-out to apply it to the physical questions. In that sense, I think religion and science/physics can certainly co-exist, but believe they should co-exist with a metaphorical wall of separation between them.

Metaphoric Wall would be a good name for a band.

(Yes, I left the al off of metaphoric - sounded better that way.)

[Gregg]

Metaphoric Wall would be a good name for a band.

(Yes, I left the al off of metaphoric - sounded better that way.)

umm...it was meta physical, not meta phorical

[Steve]

umm...it was meta physical, not meta phorical

umm..B typed metaphorical. Check post #5 or my quote of his original post in post #6. Check the last sentence, G!

[Kevin Seitzer]

That man never meta-fork he didn't like.

[johnnya24]

That man never meta-fork he didn't like.

If there's any pun to be had, you can bet your life KS will be there.

[Gregg]

umm..B typed metaphorical. Check post #5 or my quote of his original post in post #6. Check the last sentence, G!

Oh yeah....well....um...uh....your not the boss of me...