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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (84665)	9/15/2008 10:54:23 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541122

I was referring to the kind of faith that can move mountains, the expectation kind. And apparently, expectations are a major factor in quantum experiments.

To: neolib who wrote (84665)	9/16/2008 9:11:32 AM
From: biotech_bull	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541122

Neolib, Thank you for the thoughtful post. And I'm not trying to defend the nonsense that many perpetrate in the name of religion. But I think you mischaracterize faith with the qualification "that despite contrary evidence". I think the ancients recognized that logic, rational thought and science (rudimentary as it was) were not upto the task of explaining Nature. What led them to this conclusion may have been irrational numbers, the inability to find the exact ratio of a diameter to the circumference of a circle or the chicken/egg question or the solar system and the Cosmos or their recognition of Chaos and fractals etc. The ones that recognized and understood "tried" to explain the inexplicable and one ends up with a lot parables and myths that leave one incredulous. Faith and religion was and IS ultimately an attempt to reconcile the unknowable with the power, benevolence and beauty of nature. One can look down on Faith only if one believes everything is knowable, explicable and quantifiable by standard scientific methods despite....the contrary evidence. If one gets into the newer avenues of science like Complexity or Systems Biology they are predicated on the fact that the whole is more than the sum of its parts i.e they will not add up if one used conventional science - a tacit admission of the unknowable How do you see anything remotely like faith in quantum mechanics? Quantum physics represents the unknowable, the unpredictable and the paradoxical duality and confirms that beneath the macroscopic reality there is a deeper structure that's inexplicable but possesses awesome power and beauty - sounds awful lot like the thesis behind Faith and most religions BB P.S And the most succinct explanation of Quantum mechanics is of course from Yogi Berra : 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it!' <g>