Tag: Einstein
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“The Great Mystery”
“The Great Mystery” rightly says the also great physicist and thinker, Albert Einstein. But there are still too many people who imagine they alone know everything about it. That’s a hubristic folly, that can sometimes discount and even menace the rest of us. A lot more humility, width of receptiveness, and open-mindedness would better serve…
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The Non-Tribal Religion of the Future?
I stopped being a Christian minister forty years ago, and don’t now attend any church, but I’d gladly have listened to the late Bishop John Shelby Spong. And if I were to have my time over again, this is along the lines of what I’d want to say, not that it might be welcomed. Bishop…
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Let’s get ‘Real’ (ii) ‘The Lord of the Dance’
My previous post was about Materialism, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter”. My point was that Materialism, arguably, ‘doesn’t have very much in it’, since matter is made up of atoms that are 99.99% ‘empty space’! The truth of the matter (!) is that…
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Science and Religion (i)
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, published a book entitled, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In it, he challenged the idea that science progresses in a linear fashion by steadily accumulating data arising from ongoing observations, experiments, discoveries and inventions and, in this way, gets ever closer to a knowledge and understanding of…
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Common Sense? III
Let’s say a little more about atoms. The ‘common sense’ view is that they contain protons, neutrons and electrons, all like tiny billiard balls. The protons and neutrons are squeezed into the nucleus, which is like the sun in our solar system, and the electrons that surround the nucleus are like orbiting planets. This is…
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The Obvious, the Enemy, and the True
Let’s remind ourselves of something we occasionally forget. It’s obvious that the ground on which we stand is not moving. It it were, our sense of safety and security would disappear. We’d be clinging on for dear life, to whatever we could grab hold of, in a disorienting mayhem of scary motion. We aren’t, however,…
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William Wordsworth’s God
It seems to me that Wordsworth, in these “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, is describing a kind of experience that lies, for more than a few people, at the root of what could be called ‘a religious sensibility’. Once upon a time, human beings thought the universe was very small – a…
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Religion and Science
Religion and Science need not be seen as opponents. This is especially so if some of the language they use is recognised as being figurative rather than literal. Religious people can only paint ‘pictures’ of their conception and experience of an unseen and indescribable divine realm. Scientists, in exploring the unseen and indescribable sub-atomic realm,…
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A ‘Picture’ of ‘Ultimate Reality’
Gazing up into the night sky can make us wonder what the ‘reality’ behind everything might be. We tend to think about reality in a ‘material’ way, but our scientists have been telling us that matter is made up of what we call ‘atoms’ that are 99.99% ’empty space’! If such an ‘atom’ were the…
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