“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.
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.
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.
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."
