{"id":382,"date":"2006-07-11T11:10:32","date_gmt":"2006-07-11T11:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/11\/physicists-in-the-culture-war\/"},"modified":"2006-07-11T11:10:32","modified_gmt":"2006-07-11T11:10:32","slug":"physicists-in-the-culture-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/11\/physicists-in-the-culture-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Physicists in the Culture War"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month’s Physics Today<\/cite> has an article by Murray Peshkin on “Addressing the Public About Science and Religion”<\/a>, that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don’t do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not that he says anything stupid– quite the contrary, his remarks are sensible and moderate. The problem is that, well, his remarks are sensible and moderate, and thus unlikely to please extremists at either end of the debate.<\/p>\n

The key paragraph is probably:<\/p>\n

\n

Science and religion have different assumptions, different rules of inference, and different definitions of truth or reality. The fence that surrounds science is the test by experiment. That fence is both the greatest strength and the most fundamental limitation of science, and it needs to be respected from both sides. Scientists may have opinions about religion, but they cannot honestly invoke the authority of science when they try to apply the logic of science on the other side of the fence. Similarly, creationists and advocates of intelligent design should not pretend to be conducting a scientific argument.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As a science-vs.-religion piece, it’s not a particularly outstanding example of the genre, but it’s a little unusual for Physics Today<\/cite>, and thus probably worth noting.<\/p>\n

(Caveat Lector: If you follow the Physics Today<\/cite> link, you may well be asked to participate in a poll about their web site before you can read the article. Apologies to anyone offended by this, but hey, you can register for a drawing to win an iPod…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month’s Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on “Addressing the Public About Science and Religion”, that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don’t do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not that he… Continue reading Physicists in the Culture War<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,30,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","category-war_on_science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}