Posted on 03/16/2009 4:29:12 PM PDT by GOPGuide
Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million),
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D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr.
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Third view
Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.
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Unconventional 'God' So what is it, really, that is veiled? At times d'Espagnat calls it a Being or Independent Reality or even "a great, hypercosmic God". It is a holistic, non-material realm that lies outside of space and time, but upon which we impose the categories of space and time and localisation via the mysterious Kantian categories of our minds.
"Independent Reality plays, in a way, the role of God – or 'Substance' – of Spinoza," d'Espagnat writes. Einstein believed in Spinoza's God, which he equated with nature itself, but he always held this "God" to be entirely knowable. D'Espagnat's veiled God, on the other hand, is partially – but still fundamentally – unknowable. And for precisely this reason, it would be nonsensical to paint it with the figure of a personal God or attribute to it specific concerns or commandments.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Cue ‘Q’?
ping for later
I was just having fun! No yelling intended! I just love this stuff.
bookmarking for later . . .
Thanks for the ping . . . good topic!
You'll get hit both ways then.
You are right. Well thought and well said.
My pleasure!
But, he started out as Jehovah. He made himself known at a time and place and to a people first.
To someone who has encountered a personal God, a personal God makes perfect sense. To someone who has looked into the biblical model of what it means to really love others, commandments makes sense for they help teach us what love is and is not.
Cheers!
That happens to me all the time. I come up with the best ideas and then I find out some degreed type gets all the credit.
There aughta be a law!
Moreover, if our current reality, let’s call it mortality, is just a temporary state, then we cannot truly rely upon the “laws” we’ve experienced to describe all the available information in the cosmos.
That is there is a cosmos, whose laws are unknown to us, governing our cosmos which is temporary.
An analogy would be trying to understand juggling by just noting a nanosecond of the balls trip upwards. We’d miss a big part of the act, no?
What a great name. Is it really Johnjoe?
It would take a hillbilly to lead science out of the painted corner, no?
Isn’t the argument against evolution one of first causes? How does the inanimate, non-biological become animate and biological?
Or how does the stone come to life?
Great point. This has limited our ability to “discover” or uncover science for a long time. Breakthroughs come when someone can relate it out, no?
How do you resolve it? Is it possible to investigate/analyze/understand the indescribable?
I didn’t realize that God was into baubles.
You are on to it. Time is the issue.
Yet, if time is the issue and the final anomaly is discoverable only at death, the results of which cannot be reported, then what?
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