Thursday, July 24, 2008

Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?

As I've mentioned a few times on here, I seldom want to highlight a non-published paper on arXiv because, well, it is not published and that some time we get rather dubious stuff being uploaded there.

Still, now and then, there are rather interesting preprints and articles that either have been submitted for publication and in the review process, or articles that are just plain fun to read. And once in a while, you get something that is quite provocative and no-less entertaining to read. This is one such article.

Richard MacKenzie of the University of Montreal has written a rather thought-provoking and lengthy article as a rebuttal to a talk given by Lawrence Krauss. In it, he is disputing Krauss's assertion that:

Faith is not the enemy.
Ignorance is the enemy.

MacKenzie argued that the reverse is more valid, that Ignorance is an opportunity to educate by starting from a clean slate, while Faith requires more effort to correct what has already been accepted. He made further discussion on the idea of scientists who also accept the validity of religious faith.

You just have to read it and see if this doesn't perk up your interest. :)

Zz.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like the sound of the Krauss comment. I'm just writing up my blog on precisely this topic from a conference last week at Cambridge...Cormac