Re: Science and Religion

[James N Rose <***>]

Judith,

Thank you for describing RR's feelings and ideas re
religion and science.

In respectful juxtaposition, from a paper titled
"Integrity: Getting Past Godel" (Rose, 1995), the first two pghs:

   "We are as much creatures of style as we are of reason.
We have a sense of the Beauty and Harmony of our universe
even in the midst of exploring the most intricate functions
and mathematical connections - elegant being the word most
easily and often applied to the equations which best mirror
the physical events we experience and strive to understand.
In fact, in the same sense that the highest praise we bestow
on prose is that it reads like poetry and on poetry that it
reads like prose, art approaches science even as science
approaches art. And, the way that we holistically embrace
these diverse appreciations is to organize as many aspects
of experience as possible into consistent singular paradigms."

    "Our modern science is firmly based on the language of
mathematics and the conceptual relationships found within it,
spanning from the dawn of human thought, through the ancient
cultures, arriving at the extraordinary and formidable construct
it is today. Some of our cognitions are quite new where as
others were there at the beginning. As George Gamow points out
in "One, two, three . . . infinity" [4] it's quite probable that
even our earliest ancestors at the dawn of human consciousness
had an appreciation and sense of immensity and vastness that
we now associate with sophisticated concepts of infinity.
Most obviously humanity coped with counting the uncountable in
at least two ways. The first led to spiritual speculations,
while the other attempted to wrestle it into manageability
and real world application. Religion was spawned in the first
instance and in the second came computation, geometry and
mathematics: never ending divisibility, and, never ending
inclusion - the immensely minute and the immensely great." ...

<http://www.ceptualinstitute.com/uiu_plus/godel.htm>

[footnote: I submitted this to SFI for publication and
got slammed by a peer reviewer (I often muse that it
was Phil Anderson); but since I've survived my open
challenge of S. Kauffman's approach, he now in retreat,
I can only smile at their rejection back in 1995.  :-) ]


Jamie