From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Thu Mar 28 2002 - 15:51:24 MST
> Behalf Of Damien Broderick
> Subject: Freeman Dyson on John Polkinghorne on science & future
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15220
> The New York Review of Books
> March 28, 2002
> Review
> Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight
> By Freeman J. Dyson
> The God of Hope and the End of the World
> by John Polkinghorne
If Dyson's captured the book well, then Polkinghorne saddens me.....it seems
that extropians don't own the copyright on eschaton reification.....
"Since the world described by science is doomed to end in futility, the true
end of the world must be a transition to another world that is beyond the
reach of science".
>From jaded observation to cloying panacea in one sentence. Is this a symptom
of a sort of chronic 'awe deficit' or 'reverence deficit' syndrome so
visible in many of the religious when it comes to things scientific?
Following Newton and Bacon, it seems, physicist John Archibald Wheeler
wrote:
"We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our
island grows, so does the shore of ignorance."
Wheeler's Beach, I call it. The futurist's base camp. Why is it that one
physicist will happily play on Wheeler's Beach, Sci-fi writers put the scuba
gear on and charge off on a jet-ski, and yet another physicist wants to
hide behind a wind-break, deferring their curiousity in the natural a
manufactured unknowable?
A Foghorn Leghorn cartoon analogy (stolen from another email list recently.
Embarassingly, I can remember it well) :
<Blustering rooster Foghorn is attempting to disengage from babysitting his
geeky, brainy nephew. The rooster suggests a game of hide-and-seek, and
hides in a wood-storage box, confident the nephew will never find him there.
Peering from beneath the lid, the rooster enjoys a clear view of the
nephew's futile searching.
Unfazed, the nephew whips out pencil and paper, scribbles some intricate
mathematics, and then carries a large shovel into the yard to a spot where
he's calculated the rooster must be hiding. From the storage-box far away,
the smug rooster watches the nephew push the the shovel's tip into the
ground, heave mightily, and pry up ...... the rooster!
Dumbfounded, the rooster splutters and stammers at the nephew, and then
walks over to look in the wood-storage box. Instead, he stops, ponders, and
walks away, saying, "Y'know, ah better not look. Ah jes' might be in
there." >
By the time Dyson's reached the end, you know that before you pick up
Polkinghorne's book you know you're in for ride on a conveyor belt through
the dusty museum of the deserately faithful. If there were more religious
people like Dyson around, then religion would be a whole lot more
interesting and maybe it would go somewhere useful.
Colin Hales
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