someone said that reality is something that you can’t get rid of however hard you try.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick

Within the local horizon, absolute truth is approximately what some agree that it actually is, even as others that agree that it’s actually not.

Mostly it’s populist truth here, after the actual science is offered by learned peers with personal agendas.

They make me money. We don’t have to agree on anything else.

I disagree with Peter Coles. Indigenous religous fundamentalism in the US is anymore a very minor concern of mine.

I’m more inclined to concern over the cultism of fellow atheists; increasingly ever more indistinguishable from organized anarchists.

It’s interesting to observe that recent winners of this prize – John Barrow (my PhD supervisor, in fact), George Ellis, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne and Martin Rees all established their scientific reputations working in the United Kingdom. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think over here religious fundamentalism is far less prominent than in the United States, and religion plays a much smaller part in our political and cultural life. It took centuries of strife to get to this position, of course, but this does seem to have led to more reasoned dialogue between believers and non-believers.

I think that science and religion are basically orthogonal activities and there’s nothing to be gained by setting them in opposition. Sean’s post conveys the impression that the Templeton Foundation is some kind of evil conspiracy. I don’t see it that way at all. My own lack of belief does not diminish my respect for, and indeed interest in, the faith expressed by others. Dialogue is always better than conflict.

P.S. If there’s anyone from the Templeton Foundation reading this, please make next year’s cheque out to “Professor Peter Coles”.

“The possibility that we are creations of some supreme, or super-being, blurs the boundary between physics and idealist philosophy.”

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rees03/rees_print.html

He recently said also that Stephen Hawking was theologically/philosophically naive so I think this keeps other options on the table apart from the universe being meaningless.
Although he is not traditionally religious, perhaps his comments above about “some supreme, or super-being” aren’t actually religious at all but fit in with physics somehow.

I am also quite interested in the fact that he has used the concept of the Ouroboros in one of his talks as has his colleague Prof. Bernard Carr, the cosmologist, who is trying presently to bridge the gap between mind and matter in his own studies.

To conveniently disentangle the different constituents of reality (e.g. the elementary particles on one side and human behavior on the other) and call one part “the reality” and the other “delusion”, is simply negation. Last time I checked, humans are part of the Universe (.. or the multiverse for the loonies..) Honest scientist do not do so (and also do not call the others cretins without prior investigations.) Thanks for reminding the name of P. Dick – that quote makes my point even stronger.

Nevertheless, I sympathise with you Americans that have to live with neo-cons, creationists and a million others weirdos. I then understand some of your naive new-atheism as a natural reaction to those crazy people carrying the cross and the gun with the same hand. Well, you will mature eventually..

Btw, S.Weinberg does not really understand QM better than anyone ( just ask M. Veltman about it), but even if he did, we all make mistakes when we try to talk about things we dont practice. He would better keep calculating (wrongly, I am afraid..) the tensor perturbations and leave philosophical issues for the professionals.

About the “Religion vs. Science” thing…*chuckle* On my boilerplate of my blog, I have a quote by the great American writer Tom Robbins. It says:

“…the notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual vigor and spiritual fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E.M. Forster on their bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass. Not to worry. As long as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with them in a spirit of approfondement–if I may borrow that marvelous French word that translates roughly as “playing easily in the deep”–and in so doing they will occasionally bring to realization Kafka’s belief that “a novel should be an ax for the frozen seas around us.”

There will always be people who forget that life is a ride, that we’re all here to play well with others, that get so stuck in their own worldview that they believe the furrows on their brows are real and their anxious sweats are true. I see religion as art; there are lots of things that are irrational and not based on evidence; I believe we need the irrational to help keep sane (poetry, koans, asthetics, etc etc).

Einstein had it right and people should stop following the minority of people who have lost sight of their sense of play and gotten all solemn.

(in fact, I think one of the reasons for all this fundamentalist hurt going on around the world IS because of a lack of humour/too much solemnity — so many people getting hurt and dying for a non-existent punchline)

It is utterly unfair to critisise Martin for his honest Victorian agnosticisim which compared to the Talibanistic (and naive, lets be honest) new-atheism of people like Dawkins sounds almost pro-religion.

Just compare Martin with Steven (Hawking). Martin is super-moderate and serious. People who know the Cambridge intellectia well (like me and perhaps Mark Trodden who took Part III with me), know that most people laugh with Steven’s (Hawkings) moving circus and his convenient endorsements of various scientific garbage (the latest being notable the multiverse and new-atheism) just because it pays them their coffee and cookies (50.000 pounds I am told!).

..and if I am allowed an educated comment here: someone said that reality is something that you can’t get rid of however hard you try. The human thirst for religion and belief in something transcendental is one such very real thing – much more real that extra dimensions, the multiverse and Lorentz by your “aether” – dear Sean. I am afraid you are in negation all this time. Remember, it is reality we are after; and belief in human beings is certainly part of our reality!

(btw the “aether” thing could be an interesting phenomenological idea if it could be consistently combined with compactification since it changes the spacing of KK modes and hence modifies the effective potential i.e. it is not simply a theta-function anymore and perhaps could relax the size of extra dimensions – I had a student looking at it but did not go very far..)

Anyhoo. For what its worth, I think I have discovered I am an “accomodationist”. I was most impressed by Martin’s pragmatic point that if you tell people “God or Darwin ! You must choose !” then they might well choose God. Then you’ve blown it.”

Not everyone reads the same blogs!

I don’t agree with this argument. First, the fundamentalist mind rarely, if ever, would see accomodation as an option. Also, fundamentalists who change their mind (though there aren’t many of them) usually don’t become accomodationists but atheists. Second, why not just say “Darwin”, “science has no need of the God hypothesis” etc? Most accomodationists have probably heard this and still choose to be accomodationists. Third, it can be used to justify anything: Talking to an Islamic extremist immigrant, say, one could make the argument that he should refrain from killing people but could still beat his wives, say, since if we offer the alternatives “respect all our laws, or respect none of them” he might choose to respect none of them. Stuff like this has actually happened, in that courts have been more lenient with religiously motivated crime out of fear of alienating the defendants completely.

“My confusion is this: when I look around the world, I see countries where such things are valued tending toward demographic extinction.”

If you are referring to the fact that, speaking very generally, the birth rate tends to be lower in more civilised countries, then clearly the answer has to be to civilise the uncivilised countries, not to increase the birthrate where it has decreased, otherwise Malthus’s Law will kill us all end the end. (There are a variety of reasons why the birthrate is lower in more civilised countries. Of course, in some cases it is too low, but that can and should be corrected.) I once heard someone from a civilised country make a similar comment then I asked how many children he had, to which he had to reply “none”. Practice what you preach! I’m doing my part with 2 children from 2 wives and a third (child, not wife) on the way!

Anyhoo. For what its worth, I think I have discovered I am an “accomodationist”. I was most impressed by Martin’s pragmatic point that if you tell people “God or Darwin ! You must choose !” then they might well choose God. Then you’ve blown it.