----- Original Message ----- From: "Nick Arnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 8:25 PM Subject: RE: A Problem For Conservatives
> > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > > Behalf Of Robert Seeberger > > ... > > > xponent > > More Than You Wanted To Know Maru > > And less, too! (Since I was asking about his talks on science and > religion...) > More that you didnt want to know: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Townes/townes-con0.html Something you *are* looking for: http://www.esquire.com/features/learned/011101_mwi_townes.html Excerpt: God is very difficult to define, but I feel his presence. I feel an omnipresence everywhere and something, at the same time, rather personal. In religion, people talk about revelations. In science you find many revelations, too, it's just that people don't talk about them that way. When the idea for the laser came to me, I was sitting on a park bench thinking, Now, why haven't I been able to do this? Suddenly a new idea comes to me, a new creation. Where did it come from? Did God give me this idea? Who knows? I didn't suddenly have a view of God's face, if that's what you mean. In science we just don't talk about it much. You say, Well, I had an idea. In the religious world people talk about revelations. They are not so basically different. http://www.integrityonline19.com/murphy/cfn/townes.htm http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:2020/dynaweb/teiproj/oh/science/townes/@Generic_ _BookTextView/1746 An interview with Townes. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/convergence.html Excerpt: 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. http://www.doesgodexist.org/MarApr01/FaithAndReasonTogetherAgain.html Excerpt: In the words of Charles Townes, the "determinism of the last century was completely overturned by..quantum mechanics..We now believe that the future is not fundamentally determined nor completely predictable." Science now has room, in other words, for that fundamental tenet of religious belief, free will. http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taeso98z.htm Excerpt: Many leading scientists today see no contradiction between religion and its fabled antithesis. Physicist Charles Townes, 1964 co-winner of the Nobel Prize, sees religion and science as "basically the same thing." Townes, who recently outlined his views in an interview with the Washington Post, explains that "both are human creations. In both we use faith, we use assumptions, and we have uncertainties." "I've always based my moral and religious ideas on the idea that there is something out there 'bigger than [man].'" That view, he adds, "is what I base my actions on." Townes believes some scientists take bigger leaps of faith than religious believers: "To get around the anthropic universe without invoking God may force you to extreme speculation about there being billions of universes," which "strikes me as much more freewheeling than any of the church's claims." xponent Better? Maru rob ________________________________ You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
