From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Religion & Physics Don't Mix
Date: 11 Nov 92 20:28:23 GMT
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science

In article <1992Nov10.183906.4904@sierra.com> ande@sierra.com (Ande Rychter) writes:

>I wouldn't try to explain this since I have no idea what the number of 
>religious scientist is, nor do I know of a reputable study of this issue.  
>My own guess (hope) is that the number is small.  I personally consider 
>the phrase "religious scientist" an oxymoron. -AR.

It seems to me that people who make these sweeping statements have no
exposure to any religions other than the most primitive, and also have 
put little thought into serious philosophical issues and little effort
into introspection.

Comments from some noted oxymorons:

WERNER HEISENBERG:

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it
has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the 
religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that
scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it
possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of
an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give
up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been
compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought,
for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

ALBERT EINSTEIN:

But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them,
even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious
feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who ios
entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of 
God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity
and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and the world of 
thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants
to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of
cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development,
e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism,
as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer,
contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of
religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no church whose central teachiongs are based
on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find
men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were,
in many cases, regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes
also as saints.

WOLFGANG PAULI:

I believe, however, that to anyone for whom a narrow rationalism has lost
its persuasiveness, and to whom the charm of a mystical attitude, experiencing
the outer world in its oppressive multiplicity as illusory, is also not
powerful enough, nothing else remains but to expose oneself in one way or
another to these intensified oppositions and their conflicts. Precisely by
doing so, the inquirer can also more or less consciously tread an inner
path toward salvation. Slowly there then emerge internal images, fantasies
or ideas to compensate the outer situation, and which show an approach to
the poles of the antithesis to be possible.

----

refs: Heisenberg 1971, _Physics and Beyond_
      Einstein 1954, _Ideas and Opinions_
      Heisenberg 1974, _Across the Frontiers_, ch. 3: "Wolfgang Pauli's
		Philosophical Outlook"
----

mt
Newsgroups: sci.physics