Agnostic Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist at
Dartmouth College, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Although he is not a
theist, he has problems with atheistic extremism:
·
I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with
the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a
statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t
believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.”
Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We
say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against
or for that” … on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make
a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much
against all of the “New Atheist” guys.
However, Gleiser acknowledges the profound and necessary
design he observes regarding our home planet:
·
I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our
situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when
people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’
that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what?
It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets
(and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the
history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is
absolutely amazing…right now what we know is that we have this world, and we
are these amazing molecular machines capable of self-awareness, and all that
makes us very special indeed. And we know for a fact that there will be no
other humans in the universe; there may be some humanoids somewhere out there,
but we are unique products of our single, small planet’s long history. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/
Gleiser reasons that since we and this planet are so
special, we should strive to preserve them. While I appreciate his stance, I
also wonder whether he is connecting the dots of the evidences, which strongly
point in the direction of theism. Besides, Gleiser is opposed to such closure:
·
I don’t want to discourage people from looking
for unified explanations of nature because yes, we need that. A lot of physics
is based on this drive to simplify and bring things together. But on the other
hand, it is the blank statement that there could ever be a theory of everything
that I think is fundamentally wrong from a philosophical perspective. This
whole notion of finality and final ideas is, to me, just an attempt to turn
science into a religious system, which is something I disagree with profoundly.
Gleiser doesn’t seem to realize that his dismissal of finding “finality” in a
“unified explanation” (God) is not a scientific position (or finding) but a
religious one – a product of his own agnosticism. Therefore, he defines
research and science wrongly:
·
…research is not about the final answer, it’s about
the process of discovery.
While science is a “process of discovery,” there is nothing
in science that rejects the possibility of finding a “final answer.” Instead,
the only thing that empowers the search is the hope that there are meaningful answers.
Perhaps Gleiser and others already intuit that the one unifying and satisfying answer
can only be found in a Creator.
No comments:
Post a Comment