I know I am not a scientist. I know in a crowd like this a lot of you have forgotten way more about many branches of science than I will ever know, so I just want to ask for grace. Science has great prestige in our day, so this is a really important question. Are there any other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge?
A lot of us remember in school learning about something called the scientific method. Because science has made such amazing progress in certain fields like medicine or technology, some people claim this scientific method, or empirical verification, is the only way to reliable knowledge. That would mean, by the way, there is no such thing as moral knowledge or spiritual knowledge or personal knowledge. This view that the only knowledge that counts comes from the scientific method is sometimes called scientism.
Not science, but scientism. There is a guy named Sir John Polkinghorne. He is a Cambridge physicist and an Anglican priest. He has a really helpful illustration. One person is talking about non-personal causes, mechanical forces. The other answer talks in terms of a person and purpose and intention. See, science involves a method that is enormously useful to investigate large chunks of reality, but it is not the only way to know truth.
Human life is of great value. It is wrong to live for selfish greed. That is true. That is moral truth. A society that is unable to recognize the existence of moral truth is headed for serious problems. By the way, scientism itself as an ideology, which is rampant in our day, could never be proven or established by the scientific method. Is science the only way to reliably know something? Then they think they have to choose between the Bible and truth.
We have to do better than that. This idea also is quite rampant in our day. This is from a guy in the field of science who teaches at Cornell University. His name is William Provine. Consider the claims he makes in this statement:.
There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead… There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.
Those are not the kinds of claims that get studied or written about in those kinds of journals. None of those questions fall in that discipline or are investigated by those methods.
The idea of statements like this is that somehow science, by showing us how immense the size and the age of the universe is, has shown us that little tiny human beings do not have unique dignity or value or worth in ways that faith has taught. We did not discover that contrast. People have been thinking about that one for a long time. Precisely the same contrast was the object of real serious reflection a long time ago. We get so arrogant about ourselves. I think people are huge.
I think the earth is huge and the sun and the moon and the stars are tiny, so we win. They have this capacity to learn and create. They have the weight that comes with being a moral agent, being able to make decisions and be responsible for them, being able to care for creation. If significance were measured by size, whales would be the most important creatures on the planet. Any worldview or system of thought that cannot account for the inescapable weight, dignity, and value of human beings must simply be found wanting by any sane, rational evaluation.
You have to decide what you think about that. Any worldview, any system of thought, that cannot account for the inescapable weight, dignity, and value of a human being must simply be found wanting by any sane, rational evaluation. This is from a guy named Curtis White. Curtis White is not a believer, but he has written a fascinating book. It is critiquing this whole notion of scientism, that the scientific method can tell us everything there is to know about existence.
There is a very similar book by philosopher Thomas Nagel at Princeton. Again, not a believer but critiquing the same idea. Curtis White in his book quotes Jim Watson. Nothing more. Can anybody? Can Jim Watson? Curtis White in this book goes on to point out that while Jim Watson claimed that human life is nothing more than jiggling atoms, he did not seem to think his accomplishments were nothing more than jiggling atoms.
The story of how he fought and struggled and did a bunch of stuff to get the recognition of a Nobel Prize is actually quite interesting, as White spells it out. Mark Alpert is an internationally bestselling author of science thrillers. Follow him at www. Follow Mark Alpert on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options.
Discover World-Changing Science. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Read More Previous. The properties of A and B are not independent of each other — they are entangled — even if located in separate laboratories on separate planets. So if you measure the spin of A and you find it to be positive. Imagine a friend measured the spin of B at exactly the same time that you measured A. In order for the principle of conservation to work, she must find the spin of B to be negative.
In other words, information about spin state was transferred between the two sub-particles instantly. Such transfer of quantum information apparently happens faster than the speed of light. So there is something faster than the speed of light after all: quantum information.
Even many universes at the same time? I have this image of God keeping galaxy-sized plates spinning while juggling planet-sized balls — tossing bits of information from one teetering universe to another, to keep everything in motion.
Fortunately, God can multitask — keeping the fabric of space and time in operation. All that is required is a little faith. Has this essay come close to answering the questions posed?
I suspect not: if you believe in God as I do , then the idea of God being bound by the laws of physics is nonsense, because God can do everything, even travel faster than light.
This is indeed where science and religion differ. Science requires proof, religious belief requires faith. Our views of God, physics or anything else ultimately depends on perspective. Nor is it a cosmology textbook.
No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions theconversation. Feild, STScI. Same deal for asteroids. Yes, a solar system without a Jupiter-like planet would have many more asteroids, but without a Jupiter-like planet, would their orbits ever get perturbed to fling them into the inner solar system? Would it make extinction events more common, or rarer?
The evidence that we need a Jupiter for life is specious at best, just like the evidence that we need to be at this location in our galaxy is also sparse. And finally, we did come along relatively early, but the ingredients for stars and solar systems like our own were present in large abundances in galaxies many billions of years before our own star system formed.
The conditions that we need for life to arise, to the best we can measure, seem to exist all over the galaxy, and hence probably all over the Universe as well. Potentially habitable worlds may be possible around a large variety of stars.
How rare or common are these conditions elsewhere in the Universe? So the worlds are there, around stars, in the right places! In addition to that, we need them to have the right ingredients to bring about complex life. What about those building blocks; how likely are they to be there? Organic molecules are found in star forming regions, stellar remnants and interstellar gas, all Humphreys University of Minnesota. Believe it or not, these heavy elements — assembled into complex molecules — are unavoidable by this point in the Universe.
Enough stars have lived and died that all the elements of the periodic table exist in fairly high abundances all throughout the galaxy. But are they assembled correctly? Taking a look towards the heart of our own galaxy is molecular cloud Sagittarius B, shown at the top of this page. Organic molecules found throughout the Universe, particularly towards the galactic center. Like ethyl formate left and n-propyl cyanide right , the former of which is responsible for the smell of raspberries!
So with tens of billions of chances in our galaxy alone, and the building blocks already in place, you might think — as Fermi did — that the odds of intelligent life arising many times in our own galaxy is inevitable. But first, we need to make life from non-life. This is no small feat, and is one of the greatest puzzles around for natural scientists in all disciplines: the problem of abiogenesis.
At some point, this happened for us, whether it happened in space, in the oceans, or in the atmosphere, it happened, as evidenced by our very planet, and its distinctive diversity of life.
0コメント