God, Philosophy, Physics & The NY Times
God, philosophy and physics are three of my favorite subjects. So much so that they run through many of my thrillers, especially:
- Perfect Killer (God and the quantum physics and philosophy of consciousness), and
- Die By Wire (God, the philosophy of evil, and the physics of a .50 caliber BMG slug launched by heroine Mira Longbow).
And so, this article in today’s New York Times captured my attention: Physicists, Stop the Churlishness
A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.
Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. “Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,” Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science. It is noteworthy that the “moronic” philosopher who kicked up the recent shindy by dismissing the physicist’s book himself holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.
The article, which is very much worth reading in its entirety goes on in that vein for a bit before noting that,
Today the world of physics is in many ways conceptually unsettled. Will physicists ever find an interpretation of quantum mechanics that makes sense? Is “quantum entanglement” logically consistent with special relativity? Is string theory empirically meaningful? How are time and entropy related? Can the constants of physics be explained by appeal to an unobservable “multiverse”? Philosophers have in recent decades produced sophisticated and illuminating work on all these questions. It would be a pity if physicists were to ignore it.
Perfect Killer, more than any other of my books, wrestles with the physics/philosophy struggle, but then adds God to the dimension.
Physicists hate the idea of God. It’s so very fashionable to claim everlasting faith in atheism. Today’s philosophers have conformed to this fashion and have given up thinking about God, or evil.
But God lurks like a crazy aunt in the attic, out of sight but whispering in the quiet moments of doubt or wonder that philosophers and physicists will never come out of the closet about.
Sure, I over-wrote both Perfect Killer and Die By Wire because thrillers are about life and death … and so are God, philosophy and physics.
But, then, I’m not much for the lastest fashions. Hell, my favorite outfit is a plain gray Hanes tee-shirt from Walmart and a pair of cargo shorts from Cabelas.
Read the whole article: Physicists, Stop the Churlishness.
