\u201cThinking about divided America: Our complex land is getting more secular AND more religious\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
David Berlinski (Ph.D., Princeton), a self-described \u201csecular Jew\u201d who is a resident of Paris, is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, a former fellow at the Institut des Haute \u00c9tudes Scientifiques in Paris, and the author of numerous articles and books on mathematics, logic, and the sciences, including (but not limited to)\u00a0The Rise of Differential Topology<\/em> (1990), A Tour of the Calculus<\/em> (1996), The Advent of the Algorithm<\/em> (2000), Newton\u2019s Gift<\/em> (2000), The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky<\/em> (2003), A Short History of Mathematics<\/em> (2004), The Devil\u2019s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions<\/em> (2008), and\u00a0The King of Infinite Space : Euclid and His Elements<\/em> (2013).\u00a0 I quote here from an anthology of some of his shorter pieces that was edited by the Orthodox Jewish American writer David Klinghoffer under the title of\u00a0<\/span>The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays<\/em> (Seattle: Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute, 2009):<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are now four great physical theories: Newton\u2019s mechanics, of course, Clerk Maxwell\u2019s theory of the electromagnetic field, Einstein\u2019s theories of special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.\u00a0 Each is fundamental.\u00a0 The laws of nature that they express are so compressed and therefore so vatic that they may be written down in no more than half a page.\u00a0 They are extraordinary in their quantitative precision, theory and experiment agreeing in both general relativity and quantum mechanics to something like 13 decimal places.\u00a0 And they are unique.\u00a0 Where the Newtonian revolution has been extended, it has been extended in essentially Newton\u2019s terms: A scientific theory must be mathematical; and it must appeal to theoretical structures very far from experience.\u00a0 To the extent that there are sciences that go beyond the great physical theories, they have without exception been parasitic.\u00a0 What we understand of biology we understand in terms of its chemistry; what we do not understand in these terms, we do not understand.\u00a0 (12)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the tide of time, there have been only four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics; Clerk Maxwell\u2019s theory of electromagnetism; Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity; and quantum mechanics.\u00a0 They stand in history like the staring stone statues on Easter Island, blank-eyed and monumental.<\/span><\/p>\nEach theory is embedded in a continuous mathematical representation of the world; each succeeds in amalgamating far-flung processes and properties into a single, remarkably compressed affirmation, a tight intellectual knot.\u00a0 The supreme expression of each theory is a single mathematical law, one expressed as an equation: a statement in which something that is unknown is specified by contingencies arranged in a certain way.\u00a0 And each of the great theories contains far more than it states, the laws of nature fantastically compressed, as if they were quite literally messages from a timeless intellect.\u00a0 (25)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the sciences are identified with the four physical theories, then it is plain that most of what we<\/em> know, from contract law to the history of the Roman empire, has nothing to do with science at all.\u00a0 The claim that \u201cthe sciences exhaust<\/em> what can be known,\u201d to take the obvious example, is neither an assumption nor a conclusion of any physical theory.\u00a0 (13)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 My column for this week in the Deseret News: \u00a0 \u201cHow the Annunciation and the birth of Jesus are referred to in the Quran: I offer my own translations of Christmas-related passages from a book that will be far less familiar to many\u201d \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Here, newly appeared on the website of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3937,3034,12533,7203,2517,19616,5454,19613,3043,8043,66,2950,1369,183,15855,3037,1769,2971,82,15397,171,117],"class_list":["post-89378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adam","tag-annunciation","tag-baby","tag-birth","tag-christmas","tag-conception","tag-david-berlinski","tag-eve","tag-gabriel","tag-infant","tag-islam","tag-islamic","tag-jesus","tag-koran","tag-koranic","tag-mary","tag-muslim","tag-nativity","tag-quran","tag-quranic","tag-reductionism","tag-scientism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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