Questions of Truth and Quantum Theory (Religion)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Monday, March 02, 2009, 22:53 (5743 days ago)

The Rev John Polkinghorne was on the Today Programme this morning - http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7918000/7918145.stm - being interviewed by John Humphries about his new book (with Nicholas Beale) called "Questions of Truth". - Some bits I picked up from the conversation: It doesn't offer answers just "responses". Scientific facts are "interpreted facts" and incorporate opinion. Religion is search for truth through "well-motivated" beliefs. The Universe is wonderfully ordered and deeply fruitful. Science involves an "act of faith", committing oneself to a belief that the world is intelligible. Science deals with impersonal experience, whereas personal experience is not reproducible or amenable to repeated experiment. - As I've expressed before I don't consider that science requires any act of faith. How would one make sense of anything by starting with the assumption that it was unintelligible? - There is a website for the book: - http://www.questionsoftruth.org/ - In the Foreword, by Tony Hewish, he gives some account of quantum theory and concludes with what seems to me to be a non-sequitur: "When the most elementary physical things behave this way, we should be prepared to accept religious mysteries such as the existence of God and that God became Man around two thousand years ago." You could just as well use this argument for belief in absolutely anything! - I thought this, and the general question of the relation of quantum theory (which was Polkinghorne's speciality) to religion might be worth a separate thread.

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GPJ