Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Sobering thoughts ...

... The limits of materialism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is often said that a battle has raged between science and belief. Where that metaphor falls down is when it conceives of science gaining more and more ground, eventually forcing religion off the map. Instead, a better interpretation would be to say that the emergence of mechanistic science a few centuries back threw the religious worldview into a struggle to accommodate the materialistic metaphysics implicit in it. However, for almost a century now, that materialism has itself been profoundly challenged in physics. The tide is turning again. A richer understanding of the cosmos increasingly seems to be required to understand what we observe, experience and know. Biology is, if you like, going to have to catch up
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