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The Religious Dimensions of Modern Physics
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11796 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
2,353 Words |
| Author
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Roy Abraham Varghese
Roy Abraham Varghese is the editor of Truth, an
international, interdisciplinary journal of Christian thought.
He resides in Dallas, Texas. |
Henry Margenau is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy Emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books on physics and philosophy of science, including Foundations of Physics (1936), The Nature of Physical Reality (1950, 1977), Ethics and Science (1964), and Einstein's Space and Van Gogh's Sky (1983). - Ed.
What relevance do you think modern science has for the religious view of reality, in general, and for theism, in particular?
Well, I'II try to present them. Modern science has changed in many ways and in a manner which makes religious beliefs much more tolerable than any kind of science did before. The novelties in modern science are, first of all, neglect of the materialistic aspects of the world. We can no longer say that an electron is a particle or that it is a wave. You have to say that it's quite different from any of these. It cannot be described as a particle, as a thing. It can only be described as a probability field and so forth. In other words, science has now taken on many characteristics of the mind. Reality has become as abstract as anything else in the world. So some of the notions of science are certainly no more contradictory to old-style materialism than is the notion of God. That might be one way of putting it.
Mechanism is dead except in a very limited domain.
What would you say were the most significant developments in modern science that led to the death of mechanism?
Quantum mechanics and relativity theory. In relativity theory materialistic things change their size even with motion. The mechanists would never have believed that. In quantum mechanics there is no mechanism at all. Heisenberg's principle had an enormous effect on this and Heisenberg, of course, was one man who acknowledged this. I knew him very well.
How far do you see Einstein's work as having affected this transition from mechanism to a more open view?
Well, they've opened our eyes immensely. They've shown us that what we believed to be a fact, an incontrovertible fact, namely the existence of three-dimensional space which can never change and so forth, to be false. We need four-dimensional space now in order to
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