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Friday, September 07, 2007

Science and religion: memorize this concept

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.


By Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007), who died today, although her website hasn't mentioned it yet.

HT to Rod Dreher who links to the New Republic blog The Plank.

I LOVE this concept! Of course there is mental tension when thinking about science. Everybody who takes a physics class, even at an introductory level, runs across the mind-bender questions like "Astronaut Bob is flying away from Astronaut Adam at 80% of the speed of light. They fire at each other. Who dies first?" But does the atheist say that the unseeable but reasonable supposition that light is a wave and a particle means that scientists are deluded folk with magic invisible particles helping them see?

God rest her soul. Even on the day of her death, she was teaching me.

2 comments:

Roz said...

I'm going to miss her. Her Wrinkle in Time was one of the happiest discoveries of my 6th grade year. I still use the term "tesseract" that I learned there, simply because there's no good English equivalent -- or wasn't until the invention of "hyperlink".

Therese Z said...

I don't think I've ever read it. I'd better go do that right now if only in gratitude for her filling an empty slot in my Evangelism toolbox...

 

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