13th Century French Bible
“In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy.” – Nicholas of Cusa (click here for article)

QUOTES

Bertrand Russell
The law of causality is a relic of a bygone age.

Charles Sanders Peirce
To be logical men should not be selfish.

Albert Einstein
Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Deanna Rubin
Our mathematical universe: every person a number
Infinitely different, yet all created equal

Madelaine L’Engle
Comparing our lives to a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

Arthur I. Miller
Metaphors and models of scientific thought

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Some noble work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

Robert Root-Bernstein
Problem generation is far more critical to innovation than problem solution.

John D. Patton
Certain key members of a field find themselves in contact with problems that have high growth potential.

Edward Rothstein
Reason has its limits. Its own processes negotiate a precipice.

David C. Gooding
Computer-based simulation methods may turn out to be a representational turning point for the sciences, enabling a new way of thinking.

Kevin Kelly
If the theory of digital physics holds up, movement, energy, gravity, dark matter, and antimatter can all be explained by elaborate programs of 1/0 decisions.

Ludwig Boltzmann
All our ideas and concepts are only internal pictures. (1899)

BOOKS

The Concept of Physical Law,
by Norman Swartz

Human beings can choose (some of) the world's physical laws. We do this simply by choosing to do what we do. (Full text online)

Every Schoolboy Knows (from Mind and Nature)
A list of presuppositions, some familiar, some strange to readers whose thinking has been protected from the harsh notion that some propositions are simply wrong.

A Primer on Determinism (excerpts)
by John Earman

Determinism and Free Will: why thinking about these controversies is like banging your head against the wall.

The Tao of Physics
by Fritjof Capra

An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. (complete text pdf)

ARTICLES

Taking Science on Faith
by Paul Davies

Both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws. (full text online)

Chance, Necessity, and Chaos
by William Sims Bainbridge

A new school of thought in science regards natural processes as a combination of chance and necessity, with the former holding priority over the latter.
A section of: New Religions, Science, and Secularization

A Neo-Humean Perspective: Laws as Regularities
by Norman Swartz

There is orderliness is Nature. That's the way Nature is. There are no secret, sublime, mystical laws forcing Nature to be that way.

Is God Mathematician?
by Claes Johnson

Questioning the quasi-religious position of mathematics in contemporary culture and education.

Charles Sanders Peirce
There is no doubt that language evolves, and Peirce made foundational contributions to the theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols.

"Every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones." Every symbol is, in its origin, either an image of the idea signified, or a reminiscence of some original occurrence, person or thing, connected with its meaning, or it is a metaphor.

"A regular progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol. The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them. The Index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The Symbol [ground] is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind [interpretant], without which no such connection would exist."
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers II, Elements of Logic, 2.222

Tychism
A thesis proposed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce that holds that absolute chance, or indeterminism, is a real factor operative in the universe.

VIDEOS

The Cave
An Adaptation of Plato’s Allegory in Clay

The Religion of Science: Worshiping at the Altar of Truth
Evolutionary Biologist David Sloan Wilson discusses science as religion.

The End Of A Physics Worldview
by Stuart Kauffman

Life bubbles forth in a natural magic beyond the confines of entailing law, beyond mathematization, free to become the world Kantian wholes co-create with one another. And we may become re-enchanted and find a way beyond modernity.

Ian Hacking on The Mathematical Animal‬
“Who is this human who creates mathematics? What sort of organism are we, who create mathematics and in a few places, and in a few times, make it an integral part of the life of the species?”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
by Alex Gendler

An animated retelling of Plato's allegory.

LINKS

Stochasticism: A Profound Knowledge
Stochasticism provides a way of understanding both science and religion as two sides of a common human conception.

Michael McIntyre's home page
The ideas of Cambridge atmospheric scientist Michael McIntyre, Emeritus Professor, Centre for Atmospheric Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, with reference to “the unimaginably large number of ways for complex systems to go wrong.”

Anekāntavāda
One of the most important and fundamental doctrines of Jainism, Anekāntavāda refers to the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth.

Centre for Reasoning
Multi-disciplinary research relating to reasoning, inference and method.

Evidence and Causality in the Sciences
A conference examine the relation between causality and evidence. This involves questions about the foundations of the sciences, e.g. what is evidence and how does it contribute to causal knowledge?

Conferences on Causality in the Sciences
Past and upcoming conferences, with information on publications.