Slashdot Mirror
Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?
mlimber writes "The NYTimes science section has up an interesting article discussing the nature of scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to the editorial page. It asks, 'Are [laws of nature] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?' The current article proceeds to survey different views on the matter. The author seems to be poking fun at himself by quoting Richard Feynman's epigram, 'Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.'"
OK now this is dumb. The AC's post (he was obviously going for "funny") is only flamebait if athiesm itself is a religion calling for holy war against all Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bhuddists, Hindus, and other nonbelievers; er, I mean, well you know what I mean.
If mention of religion offends your athiestic sensibilities your faith in the nonexistance of God must be weak indeed. If you can't stand someone making fun of your religion then your faith in God must be equally weak.
If Mr. Coward were to have said "God" instead of "the Bible" I would have to agree with him and if you want to know why, I wrote two articles several years ago at K5 explaining where my spiritual beliefs come from. Gecko Poker is about some strange wierdness I witnessed while in Thailand when I was in the USAF ("The bhuddist priests do things that make Kwai Chaing Cane look like a clumsy dork."), and Death about the time I died an an auto accident.
You can choose to believe that elephants exist or you can choose to believe that the photos are Gimped, but once you see an elephant nobody is going to convince you that there are no such things.
The article itself is flamebait if you ask me. I can understand completely why the parent poster chose to remain anonymous in this nest of athiests who whistle past the graveyard.
As I said in Bloody Sunday, thank God for the athiests!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This sort of article passes as interesting? It's a second-rate hash of the philosophy of science that doesn't even "faith in science" trap that everyone falls into.
It's unfortunate that so many people (like the readers of Slashdot, even) are so misinformed about what scientific laws are and what they mean.
Newton stated that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force ... inversely proportional to the square of the separation of the two objects.
Why the square? Why not the cube? Or to the power 2.5? Or 2.1? Or 1.937591537?
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
For that matter, why would a human construct (the mathematics of inverse square proportion) even apply to anything in the universe? Human brains are merely the accumulation of random mutations.
There is no reason whatsoever that any product of random mutation should provide any coherent insight into the universe.
Unless, perhaps, the intelligence which formed the universe is the same intelligence which informs our consciousness. And that our brains are not merely the products of random mutations.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.