{"id":799,"date":"2015-12-16T22:07:01","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T03:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=799"},"modified":"2015-12-16T22:07:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T03:07:01","slug":"what-makes-anyone-think-physics-is-not-a-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=799","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Anyone Think Physics is Not a Religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[I am sure this is not original, on so many levels, but my fingers are compelled to try to capture these thoughts. Forgive me.]<\/p>\n<p>At a fundamental level physicists appear to be deeply religious. Their Articles of Faith are something like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is order,<\/li>\n<li>This order can be understood by us,<\/li>\n<li>It is predictive, has temporal properties, and likely practical implications,<\/li>\n<li>(Might be isotropic).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Snide remarks aside, there is a deep faith here: What<em> I <\/em>do in my little life doesn&#8217;t seem to have a great and deep order to it, why should the far larger universe constrain itself to being so precisely ordered that we can make exact equations about it? Why couldn&#8217;t the universe be capricious and random and arbitrary and I&#8217;ll-do-this-here and I&#8217;ll-do-that-there? I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>But physicists have this deep faith that they will understand if they only keep looking, that there is a fundamental order to the universe, that there is a simplicity under all these chaotic details we see when we look about.<\/p>\n<p>As the world I see certainly has a lot of confusion in it, isn&#8217;t this a religious perspective by physicists? More creeping Secular Humanism? Isn&#8217;t it just another religion?<\/p>\n<p>No.<\/p>\n<p>The difference between the faith of a physicist and that of a religious person is that the physicist wants data what will displace his\/er faith. The physicist wants observations that will explain the mechanisms of why we see what we see&#8211;even if they are mind-bending and paradoxical&#8211;the physicist wants to expose his\/er faith and dispel mystery.<\/p>\n<p>The religious person wants faith, wants to hold on to mystery.<\/p>\n<p>If I might get all meta: The physicist has faith that there will always be plenty mystery; that there is no risk in explaining things.<\/p>\n<p>-kb<\/p>\n<p>\u00a92015 Kent Borg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[I am sure this is not original, on so many levels, but my fingers are compelled to try to capture these thoughts. Forgive me.] At a fundamental level physicists appear to be deeply religious. Their Articles of Faith are something like this: There is order, This order can be understood by us, It is predictive, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}