I am a scientist and also a religious person. Both seek for truth, yet in different ways. The problem is that too many scientists abuse scientific method and cloud conclusions with personal adherence to theories and hypotheses, often due to having personally invested time or to sources of income. Some problems, like the earth’s climate, are so massive, involving so many variables, that the application of scientific method is unlikely to yield indisputable conclusions on a broad scale. If the application of experimentation and observation are unable to establish a hypothesis as true, it remains a hypothesis. True science calls hypotheses what they are and does not easily label them “truth”.
This is a very interesting subject, and I watched a video yesterday that touched on it. It’s on Youtube, a video by David Albert, professor of Philosophy and Physics at Columbia, and author of a couple books, one of which is “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” which I read years ago but lost...
Anyways, by the end of the video (a video in 3 parts) he speculates about what is the purpose of things. He says basically “What happens if/when we have a TOE (theory of everything) and I am able to use it to explain whatever - how a person voted, why they like a certain kind of food, whatever. WHAT THEN is the purpose of believing in something like a soul?
In a way, he’s answering his own question without realizing it.
If a theory of everything can explain everything, but they still don’t know the purpose of a soul, then the theory would seem to be deficient. The belief or actual existence of a soul would be by itself something that was OUTSIDE the bounds of a simple theory based on mechanics, no matter how complex those mechanics are.
Now on the surface here it sounds like we have a contradiction. But we know mathematically, that there are certain theorems that are simply unprovable. We know they are either right or wrong, but we also know that there is no way to prove which using mathematics.
I would ask a question along the lines of “Does that fact in some manner operate like religious faith? If we believe the theorem is right, does that somehow make it so, even though it is still unprovable through normal modes?”
Anyways it’s a very interesting subject. Parts of the universe are known. Parts are unknown. And some of the unknown is knowable. But some of the unknown, we can NEVER know. No matter what we do or believe.
Pinging all FR’s resident metaphysical experts!