From: terry@aslws01.asl.dl.nec.com (Terry Bollinger)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Religion & Physics Don't Mix (?)
Date: 15 Oct 92 14:16:20 GMT
Organization: NEC America, Inc Irving TX

Hi folks,

In article <1992Oct15.001959.4312@sierra.com>
ande@sierra.com (Ande Rychter) writes:

> Religion and physics are two opposites.  The effect of physics on religion
> is that of water on fire.  (The effect of religion on physics is the same.)

I actually prefer not mixing these topics in a group such as this, but this
one is just too outrageous to let by.  Are you actually proposing that there
is no historical basis for ties between the religions of physicists (whether
Western or Eastern) and their enthusiasm and/or development of physics?  If
so, you really should read a bit more about the actual lives of a lot of
some pretty famous physicists before making such assertions.

As a specific instance, you really should check a bit closer into the
beliefs of Isaac Newton and how that reflected upon his development of
physics.  Back in those days the consistency of the universe was still
pretty much an unproven assumption.  I'd say that there is a pretty fair
argument that folks like Newton derived their belief in a "clockwork
universe" (one that could be analyzed and decomposed like a machine)
largely from his monotheistic Christian beliefs that the universe was
explicitly and consciously created.

If I recall the mathematician correctly, I believe it was Lagrange who
was so intrigued by his own results that he used them as an argument
for the existence of God.  Not exactly a diametric separation there!

Similar arguments could probably be made for the impressive mathematical
progress of the old Islamic empires, who were very much of the "its
orderly because Allah built it" ilk.

Finally, a lot of the QM types of this century very definitely have
strong religious beliefs, often of an Eastern flavor.  I once saw an
intriguing book entitled (I believe) "The Quantum Philosophers," and
it was full of very interesting musings by the founders of QM. (I might
note that Richard Feynman was *not* listed -- he is a good example of
the pro side of keeping religion and physics separate, I think.)

Whether you like it or not, it's a bit hard to make absolute separations
between physics and religious or at least philosophical tentants, because
physics relies on certain assumptions that are not readily provable in
the experimental sense.  Is the universe absolutely consistent in its
laws at all locations?  That seems like a trivial "given" to us nowadays,
but it certainly wasn't a few hundred years ago.  Is it consistent in
time -- that is, can you *prove* that the whole thing wasn't just made
"ex nihilo" (or whatever) five seconds ago, complete with all of our
memories of a non-existent past, by a supreme being with a with a
profoundly perverse sense of humor?  It's easy to say "of course not,
Occam's razor tells us that's silly," but if I was able to program a
fully intelligent construction in my computer and create a virtual
world around it, would it still sound so totally silly to assert that
our assumptions of the nature of the universe are sometimes on rather
shaky ground?

You have to have certain assumptions about the way things work to make
problems tractable.  Historically, I don't think it's too far fetched
to say that many folks derived their "basic sanity" assumptions as much
from their religious beliefs and backgrounds as from their experiments.

				Cheers,
				Terry Bollinger
Newsgroups: sci.physics