Newsgroup: it.scienza.biologia
Titolo: La Nuova Convergenza Scienza e Fede

www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12
"La Scienza senza Religione è zoppa, La Religione senza Scienza è cieca".
The New Convergence
By Gregg Easterbrook
The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the
universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance." So
pronounced the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod in his
1970 treatise Chance and Necessity, which maintained that God had been
utterly refuted by science. The divine is fiction, faith is hokum, existence
is a matter of heartless probability - and this wasn't just speculation,
Monod maintained, but proven. The essay, which had tremendous influence on
the intellectual world, seemed to conclude a millennia-old debate. Theology
was in retreat, unable to explain away Darwin's observations; intellectual
approval was flowing to thinkers such as the Nobel-winning physicist Steven
Weinberg, who in 1977 pronounced, "The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." In 1981, the National
Academy of Sciences declared, "Religion and science are separate and
mutually exclusive realms of human thought." Case closed.
And now reopened. In recent years, Allan Sandage, one of the world's leading
astronomers, has declared that the big bang can be understood only as a
"miracle." Charles Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist and coinventor of the
laser, has said that discoveries of physics "seem to reflect intelligence at
work in natural law." Biologist Christian de Duve, also a Nobel winner,
points out that science argues neither for nor against the existence of a
deity: "There is no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by
science." And biologist Francis Collins, director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute, insists that "a lot of scientists really don't
know what they are missing by not exploring their spiritual feelings."
Ever so gingerly, science has been backing away from its case-closed
attitude toward the transcendent unknown. Conferences that bring together
theologians and physicists are hot, recently taking place at Harvard, the
Smithsonian, and other big-deal institutions. The American Association for
the Advancement of Science now sponsors a "Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and
Religion." Science luminaries who in the '70s shrugged at faith as
gobbledygook - including E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould and
Carl Sagan - have endorsed some form of reconciliation between science and
religion.
Why the renewed scientific interest in spiritual thinking? One reason is the
cyclical nature of intellectual fashions. In philosophy, metaphysics is
making a comeback after decades ruled by positivism and analytical theory of
language. These restrained, empirically based ideas have run their course;
now the pendulum is swinging toward the grand vision of metaphysics -
someday, surely, to swing away again. Similarly in science, the pure
materialistic view that reigned through the 20th century, holding that
everything has a natural explanation, couldn't keep other viewpoints at bay
forever. The age-old notion that there is more to existence than meets the
eye suddenly looks like fresh thinking again.
Meanwhile, decades of inconclusive inquiry have left the
science-has-all-the-answers script in tatters. As recently as the '70s,
intellectuals assumed that hard science was on track to resolve the two
Really Big Questions: why life exists and how the universe began. What's
more, both Really Big Answers were assumed to involve strictly deterministic
forces. But things haven't worked out that way. Instead, the more scientists
have learned, the more mysterious the Really Big Questions have become.
Perhaps someday researchers will find wholly natural explanations for life
and the cosmos. For the moment, though, discoveries about these two subjects
are inspiring awe and wonder, and many scientists are reaching out to
spiritual thinkers to help them comprehend what they're learning. And as the
era of biotechnology dawns, scientists realize they're stepping into
territory best navigated with the aid of philosophers and theologians. We
are entering the greatest era of science-religion fusion since the
Enlightenment last attempted to reconcile the two, three centuries ago.
Look up into the night sky and scan for the edge of the cosmos. You won't
find it - nobody has yet. Instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope's
deep-field scanner have detected at least 50 billion galaxies, and every
time the equipment is improved, more galaxies farther away come into focus.
Space may be infinite - not merely vast, but infinite - encompassing an
infinite number of galaxies with an infinite number of stars.
All this stuff - enough to form 50 billion galaxies, maybe fantastically
more - is thought to have emerged roughly 14 billion years ago in less than
a second, from a point with no physical dimensions. Set aside the many
competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out
of nothing. It is this realization - that something transcendent started it
all - which has hard-science types such as Sandage using terms like
"miracle."
Initially, scientists found the big bang's miraculous implications
off-putting. When, in 1927, Catholic abbé and astronomer Georges Lemaître
first hypothesized that existence began with the detonation of a "primordial
atom" of infinite density, the idea was ridiculed as a transparent ploy to
place Genesis on technical grounding. But Lemaître enclosed a testable
prediction - that if there had been a bang, the galaxies would be rushing
away from one another. This idea, too, was ridiculed, until Edwin Hubble
stunned the scientific world by presenting evidence of cosmic expansion.
From Hubble's 1929 discovery on, science has taken big bang thinking
seriously.
In 1965, another sort of big bang echo - the cosmic background radiation -
was discovered. Soon, it was assumed, cosmologists would be able to say,
"Here's how everything happened, steps one, two, and three." Today
cosmologists do think they know a fair amount about steps two and three -
what the incipient cosmos was like in the instant after the genesis, how
matter and energy later separated and formed the first galaxies. But as for
step one, no dice. Nobody knows beyond foggy conjecture what caused the big
bang, what (if anything) was present before that event, or how there could
have been a prior condition in which nothing existed.
Explanations of how the mass of an entire universe could pop out of a void
are especially unsatisfying. Experiments announced in July this year by the
Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York measured properties of subatomic
particles known as muons, finding that they behave as though influenced by
other particles that seem to have materialized from nothingness. But no
object larger than the tiniest subatomic particle has been observed to do
this - and these "virtual" particles are volatile entities that exist for
less than a second, while the big bang made a universe that is superbly
stable, perhaps even permanent.

Ma la scienza e l'idea religiosa non sono mai andati in contrasto.
E' ad esempio la fede cattolica che e' in contrasto con la scienza...
non l'idea di Dio... :-)
Ancora non lo si "vuol capire"?
Bye
VR
"La fonte principale degli attuali contrasti fra le sfere della 
religione e della scienza si trova nella concezione di un Dio 
personale." 
Albert Einstein. Pensieri di un uomo curioso, 
Oscar Mondadori Ed. 1997, Milano; p. 115. 
***************
La rivincita darwiniana 
sul reverendo Paley:
www.diolaico.it
***************

 
Questa è un'autentica asinata!
La scienza è il contrario della religione.
Stefania

 "La Scienza senza Religione è zoppa, La Religione senza Scienza è cieca".
Anzitutto questo titolo e' malposto. Non entro in merito della seconda 
affermazione, ma la prima e' evidentemente inconsistente.
La scienza non ha in alcun modo bisogno della religione in quanto 
quest'ultima parla un altro linguaggio e non da risposte 
scientificamente accettabili. Non discende nulla da una asserzione 
religiosa, non serve in alcun modo alla scienza se non ad inquinarla.
Semmai si potrebbe dire "Una visione solo scientifica e' zoppa", il che 
e' accettabile quanto soggettivo: a me delle riposte a-scientifiche, 
ovvero dogmatiche e senza riscontro, curiosita' a parte importa meno di 
zero. 
-- 
debrando

 non l'idea di Dio... :-)
E Il Protestantesimo, I testimoni di Geova, L'Induismo, L'Islamismo, Il
Buddismo si????

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Fermi... innanzi tutto cominciamo a mettere nero su bianco che la fede
cattolica e' in contrasto con la scienza... il che e' gia' un
grandissimo passo avanti. E permette di mettere via tutta una serie di
contorcimenti mentali con finalità concordistiche... che sempre e
comunque vengono presi come "default"... mentre non lo sono..
Poi... col buddismo... ce la giochiamo... (ma non lo sostengo... )
mentre gli altri (Protestantesimo, I testimoni di Geova, L'Induismo,
L'Islamismo) stanno "pari pari" come la prima.


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Beh... non mi fate prendere le difese di GF.
La scienza e' si diversa dalla religione... ma quel che e' scritto
sopra... mi tocca ad ammetterlo... specialmente la seconda parte. La
prima non mi sembra azzeccata. Ma e' una battuta quella.


affermazione, ma la prima e' evidentemente inconsistente.
Ecco... mi trovi d'accordo.. e l'hai detto meglio di me.


 superbly> stable
La durata di una fluttuazione quantica dipende dall' energia coinvolta,
più piccola (cioè vicina allo zero) è l'energia, più lunga è la durata.
L'energia dell'universo può (per quanto ne sappiamo oggi) essere nulla
perchè nel calcolo bisogna includere l'energia gravitazionale negativa
dei sistemi legati e quindi l'obiezione non regge.
Vedi per esempio:
Edward P. Tryon "Is the universe a vacuum fluctuation? "
Nature _ 246_  397 ( 1973 ),
un articolo seminale cui ne sono seguiti altri (ma non ho i riferimenti
qui).
Naturalmente (non lo si sottolinea mai abbastanza) in questo meccanismo
non è il _nulla_  che genera la materia, ma il  _vuoto_ (quantico) , che non
è il nulla ma un'entità concreta con precise proprietà fisiche .
bye,
Corrado