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- Bruce on Ode to a Cat
- Aslandad on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
Tag Archives: Reason
Robert Jastrow on Science and Reason
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians, and plumjam from the JREF forum, who have been sitting there for centuries.
There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, there is no first cause…
This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control…
Consider the…