Einstein and Newton both had faith (in some sort of Creator/Being). So have many great scientists.
So?
There's no shortage of opinions out there... plenty of which disagree with your assessment. I.e., faith doesn't have to exclude "reality" (and/or all the awesomeness and/or all the majesty you wax so poetically about). Why do you continuously polarize the two?
Because I come from a reality-based approach to understanding the physical universe; I do not believe that comforting myths have value over truth.
When you look at the world of faith, you see the same things repeated over and over again. People invent all sorts of stories, with not a tiny shred of evidence to support them, which other people accept as truth on faith. These stories inevitably describe a physical universe wich is smaller and simpler than the reality. How many times has a faith-based system said "Oh, my God, we were wrong! The universe is even older, even larger, even grander than we thought!"?
When you look to inventing belief systems without any physical evidence to support them, you find that human imagination is rather feeble. If all these faiths are true, how come they all describe such small worlds? How come no prophet or seer has ever received a vision from god that tells him that the universe is incomprehensibly huge and incomprehensibly fine-grained and billions of years old?
No, prophets and seers tell us of tiny worlds, with the stars mere pinpricks in the sky rather than entire suns in their own right. Prophets and seers tell us that the world (75% of which is covered with water) was invented specifically for man (who has no gills).
It's sad, really, to be so insecure as to have to believe all these nonsense stories in order to feel good about ourselves. It's sad, it blinds us to the truth, and it makes us petty and evil. People are altogether too eager to kill one another over who has the best imaginary friend; what, in all that, is the value of believing stories without any reason to suppose they are true?
They're only mutually exclusive in one's mind, if one chooses to *believe* that. You do have a "religion" apparently: it's called Scientology perhaps? No? So, what do you call this agenda/mission then?
Um...reality?
And please don't throw the Bible at me... i'm not even talking about that. (if that's the source of this hang-up, find someone else to pummel). Check out
"The Tao of Physics" maybe...
Capra is better able than me to express the [inevitable] union from both perspectives.
BWAH ha ha ha!
*gasp* *gasp*
Hee hee hee! Stop, you're killing me! The Tao of Physics, that completely discredited old rag that is the laughingstock of real physicists, that feeble and desperate attempt to do some incredibly creative metaphoric interpretation of Hindu superstition in order to try to convince people that, no, it really really looks like a layperson's flawed understanding of quantum mechanics? That book that has become the foundation of a whole truckload of New Age superstitious twaddle that tries to convince us that "quantum physics" is responsible for everything from Tantric sex "energy manipulations" to ESP? Are you KIDDING me? I'm surprised you haven't mentioned "What the Bleep do We Know" (which tells us, among other things, that water has the magical ability to absorb "energy vibrations" from human emotions and even read written Japanese).
Still, I do think there's a valuable point lurking in there.
I think it's interesting that people will, on the one hand, try to claim that we can know truth through faith without looking at evidence, and on the other hand, somewhere deep inside will still try to act like rationalists. That's why we see the faithful clutching desperately for science to justify their faith.
It's not just books like The Tao of Physics or twaddle like What The Bleep Do We Know. Look in any religious book store and you will find entire sections filled with so-called "scientific proofs" that this or that faith is "real." You'll see books that try to "prove" that Jesus is the Messiah or that Mohammad talked to some god or other.
Even faiths in things like young-earth creationism try to wrap themselves up in the language and dressing of science. They long for the legitimacy of science, because on some level they seem aware that science is a tool that has had, and continues to have, success at exploring and understanding the nature of the physical world that faith has never matched.
How many times have we had a faith-based, supernatural explanation for some part of the physical world, and then replaced it with a natural explanation? Many, which is why faith has to be anti-intellectual.
How many times have we had a natural explanation for some part of the physical world, and then replaced it with a faith-based, supernatural explanation? Um...exactly never.
