David Grinspoon si'r blaa:
Jeg har lagt et uddrag af det jeg synes er det essentielle og relevante i denne sammenhæng, men hele teksten kan læses
herAmong the enticing mysteries that reside on the complex boundary between science and spirituality are these: Why do we seem to have free will? How is this consistent with the physical universe as we understand it? Is it just a comforting illusion? Despite observations that seem to support the "cosmological principle" that Earth has no special place in the universe, could consciousness itself, and human consciousness in particular, hold a special place? Might consciousness be an integral, essential part of our universe rather than an accidental byproduct of certain physical processes on Earth? Where do moral principles come from? Is science really "value neutral?" Should it be? What responsibility does the scientific community have in general for the evil done by certain scientists working for narrow nationalistic or material motives? Does the objective, materialist, reductionist philosophy that has been so essential to our scientific understanding of the world also placed subtle, hidden constraints on our ability to view an essential wholeness? Why is mathematics so astonishingly effective at describing so much about our universe? Why does Earth, and even the universe, seem so perfectly suited for life? Why should there be a universe in which people can clearly conceive of these questions, but not perceive an answer?
We scientists can pretend that these enigmas don't exist or that the success of our method has made them obsolete or irrelevant, but neither approach will gain science any respect or admirers. Indeed, if we are going to accuse others of preferring easy answers to hard scientific truths, we had better be sure that we ourselves are not avoiding any difficult questions raised by our way of understanding the world. Not that religion necessarily provides any definitive answers. For the more skeptical among us, it may never do so. But there is value in asking, rephrasing, and refining. And there is a big difference between having the courage to publicly ponder while coming up short, and refusing to even admit the validity of the questions. In fact, some of these questions have been addressed by science, at least in part. Darwinian biology, complexity theory, and the Gaia hypothesis demonstrate that the world seems to be a perfect home for life because life and the world are inseparable, having grown up together under the combined influence of natural selection and self-organization. On another level, the anthropic cosmological principle argues that our universe seems ideally tuned for carbon-based life because, out of an ensemble of many possible universes, we can only find ourselves in one with the right physical laws to produce such life. Recent theories of chaotic inflation posit that we may actually live in just such an ensemble of many "universes," a "multiverse" in which tiny quantum fluctuations near the beginning of time caused whole universes, of which ours is merely one, to bubble out of the void with entirely different manifestations of physical law. Does the fact that our realm of the multiverse seems so ideally suited for us imply luck, design, or the power of natural selection? I favor the last but I do not regard the question as absurd.
[ 20 December 2002: Besked ændret af: JEL ]