The other bit I like is his comment that one does not resolve arguments about ideas, one gets over them.

But he's dead wrong about species...

Posted by John Wilkins at Monday, January 21, 2008 12:49:15

I like the poetry of the comment. While it is entirely unclear to me if the comment that the origin of "large ideas" is entirely non-religious, it sounds very suspicious.

In the time since Galileo, religion has been very anti-scientific in some really important instances. But many scientists have been religious, Galileo included, but also Mendel and Maxwell (perhaps the greatest scientist of the 19th century). If some or all of these claim that their researches were inspired by a desire to, say, "understand God's creation", how does one then deny a possible "independent generation by religion"?

I suppose that the claim is really that there was no scriptual origin and not that the idea was not somehow motivated by a religious emotion.

Or have I misunderstood Professor Dewey?

Posted by Bob Riehemann at Monday, January 21, 2008 22:34:37

I believe it can be argued that though many say they are trying to "understand God's creation", the offer of such is purely a shield to allow them to conduct their research in private.

Or at least with a bit less scrutiny.

It could also be argued that their faith was weak, resulting in the desire to learn more, making their motivation "less religious" than the higher echelon within the faith would prefer.

I guess it just depends on who you ask.

I would fall on the side that their lack of religion, or lack of religious fervor, sparked the curiousity. I think many of us are a mixture of both the pseudo-religious aspects (due most often to upbringing) and whatever we want to call the opposite...perhaps skepticism.

And the skepticism causes the dive into deeper waters, not the religion.

Posted by Wes Crout at Wednesday, January 23, 2008 08:20:54

I am sorry, but I can't accept your explanation, Wes. Perhaps it's true of Mendel. I don't know much about him. But it doesn't seem to be true of Maxwell from the biographies that I have read. I am thinking along the lines of people who were first introduced to "big" questions through religious training and decide to get serious about it.

I remember first wondering about logic and the kinds of things that can be known by wondering about the ideas of omnipotence and omniscience that were introduced to me in a Catholic grade school. That started me down the (dreaded) road of philosophy via epistemology and logic. (And now I actually like people like Rudy Garns, for goodness sake!)

Your claim seems to be that wondering how religious claims can be true has nothing to do with religion, but rather is just a manifestation of skepticism.

Would you say, for example, that Schrodinger, when wondering how the Balmer series of spectral lines from hydrogen could be explained, was not thinking about and motivated by an interest in physics, but instead he was being "skeptical" of science? (S. developed wave mechanics, which is now used to explain the Balmer series---but there was no adequate explanation earlier.)

This sounds like a radical form of Kuhnism.

Posted by Robert Riehemann at Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:43:28