From: gustin@nat2.uia.ac.be (Emmanuel Gustin)
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Organization: U.I.A.
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 21:32:26 GMT

crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:

:      Science is not about everything that is 'true'
:      in this world.  It involves a very restricted subset of all of 
:      the possible 'realities' in this 'world'. Now while I believe that
:      all scientists should obey certain tenets of morality and ethics,
:      that is a belief that is completely independent of science.
: 
:      As for creating moral problems, moral issues are outside of science.
:      Science doesn't create moral problems *within* science.
:      How could they be otherwise, since there seems to be no way to 
:      assign scientific 'value' to morality.  Moral problems come in 
:      the context of societies, and must be solved within that context.

Read what I wrote, not what you think I should have written. I didn't
write that science is about everything that is 'true' in this world; I
wrote that what science considers 'true', is to be considered 'true' in
this world. I didn't write that morality and etics are part of science. I
think that science has important consequences for morality and ethics. I
did not even write that moral issues are 'inside science'. I insist that
they can be *created* by science (Ever heard of genetic engineering?) and
are very much inside religion. 

:      There are any number of religions that could claim that large 
:      elements of what you consider 'reality' are illusory.  Outside of 
:      science, you'd be hard-pressed to defend your 'reality' as any 
:      different from theirs.  Maybe you are living in *their* reality and all 
:      of our physical laws are simply illusions.     

1. But a scientist has to select a religion that accepts physical  
   laws, or create a new religion, or explain his beliefs in a 
   scientifically acceptable 'reality'. And this scientific reality is
   quite hard to ignore even for the non-scientist.

2. Are you saying that the 'reality of science' is not qualitatively different
   from any (other) illusion? Then science is at most some kind of religion.
   Would be nice for you, has one clearly cannot believe in TWO religions
   at the same time.
   One difference is that what you call (obviously with disgust) '*their*
   reality' has to be based on dogmatism, something one TRIES to avoid in
   science.

: >:      Also, 'clearly not true' is in the eye of the beholder.
: >
: >But that is what science is about: gathering knowledge the truth whereof
: >is NOT in the eye of the beholder, but accepted by everybody. 
: 
:      Ohno.  Back to 'science is truth' again. 
: 
:      Since I liked Ben Weiner's words on this topic I'll leave that
:      aspect of it alone.  I will only point out that 'clearly not
:      true' is not restricted to science, and does not necessarily 
:      have a scientific answer. 

Okay, science is not truth itself -- for many reasons. But science
always TRIES to PROVE things, and it often DOES. 

Example: '2+2=5' is 'clearly not true'. This is a scientific question with a
scientific answer, and even religious people have to accept that 2+2=4.
'Did God create the universe?' is not a scientific question, and does not
have a scientific answer, thus everybody is free to have is own opinion on
the latter question. I can imagine that long ago (primitive people often
know only 1, 2 and 3) there was a religion that said, amongst more
important things, that 2+2=5. It obviously disappeared when mathematics
were invented. 

One can be sorry for it, and it of course has lots of disadvantages, but
'general acceptance' is the way science often works. It is not the way
religion works. 
 
:      Show me that the universe was not created ex nihilo
:      4 seconds ago, with the genesis of my response created in my brain.
:      Show me how that can be inconsistent, madness or not.

I like this one. It doesn't matter wether the universe is X billion years
old, or a X billion years old universe has been created '4 seconds ago':
there isn't any difference. In both cases, universe IS X billion years
old. It doesn't make sense to define a time scale outside the universe!

(Who or what would you expect to experience this extra-universal time?
 God? Many religions hold the view that He is not subject to time.)

I know the argument was used by some creationists -- they were just
wasting their precious time.

:      Madness is also in the eye of the beholder.  One civilization spent
:      at least 40 years piling huge blocks atop one another in the largest
:      manmade rockpile on the planet simply to produce a place to bury a 
:      king.  A group of tribes spent untold millenia guarding a small box of
:      religious artifacts, often at the expense of large numbers of their
:      people, their homes and their lives.  This is sheer madness, but
:      these efforts provided cohesion in their societies.  Also, if they 
:      hadn't done such stuff, how much would we know of them?

Can someone supply a (scientific) definition of madness? We are going to
need it. You wrote that doing things for religious reasons is
madness, and I disagree. I stated that saying things that are 
'clearly untrue' is madness. 

:      It is inappropriate to judge theology by the rules of science.

Except when theology enters the realm of science.

E. Gustin
University of Antwerp
gustin@nats.uia.ac.be
Newsgroups: sci.physics