Can the study of advanced physics and math provide a sense of something greater?

My question is probably phrased poorly, but what I’m asking is if the study of advanced physics leaves any room for any type of religious belief. My guess, based on what a lot of the physicists themselves say, is probably not. Unfortunately for me, I have a touch of the Mulder syndrome, aka “I want to believe.” Let me try and clarify my question and see what you all think.

When I say religious belief. I don’t mean any of the traditional Abrahamic religions, or the Eastern religions like Buddhism or Hinduism. What I’m asking is does physics have any great questions that are not only unanswered, but that are unanswerable using the scientific method? If there are such questions, what would be the proper way to approach them? I’ve posted before in Great Debates about some of these questions, such as the nature of nothingness, where the universe came from, etc. Is there any room at all for any type of religious belief when asking such questions?

Here is the more practical question that I hope to get some advice on. I’m considering taking classes at the local university such as advanced calculus, linear algebra, relativety, cosmology, and quantum physics. Will studying those topics provide someone such as myself with the “I want to believe” outlook any kind of hope? Or would I just be wasting my time and money.

Science and religion are orthogonal. If you try to find God through science, I suspect you will be sorely disappointed.

Math is not really science, though it is often lumped together with science. I don’t think you are going to get closer to God through math unless you delve into some mystical form of numerology, and that’s not really math math, if you know what I mean.

I don’t really know the answer to your questions, but you may want to look into the work of John Polkinghorne.

The study of physics and science generally can lead to doubts about some of the stupider aspects of religion, like young-earth creationism or biblical literalism.

But science has nothing to say about the existence of God, an afterlife, etc. By definition, science can only investigate questions that are falsifiable, and can only draw conclusions that arise from empirical observations. Everything else is left to philosophy, religion, and mathematics (ya rly.)

There are certainly plenty scientists who see empiricism as the only valid way to think about the world, but there is no shortage of accomplished scientists who are also religious, or who are interested in philosophy, or other things that aren’t inherently scientific. And there are also people like me who are not religious but see in scientific or mathematical discovery a kind of awe, wonder, and appreciation for the amazing universe we live in. Whether that counts as “something greater” in your book is for you to decide.

Strictly speaking, applied math is a tool used by science, and especially by physics where it is the essential language in which scientific principles are formulated. There are, however, many areas of mathematics that were originally considered to be abstract only to later be found to have direct application to science, especially functional analysis, spectral theory, and quarternion algebra (among many others).

There are plenty of phenomena that physics as it is currently formulated cannot currently explain or model, and possibly may never be able to describe in a sensible or intuitive way, including the underlying rules of quantum mechanics or the formation of common patterns across broad scales from biological organisms to cosmic structures. However, the reason that we can’t describe them using our science the limitation of our tools and minds, which we apply to try to explain the underlying physics in terms of behaviors and mechanisms that we currently understand. The “wave/particle” duality of quantum mechanics is a great example of this; some people ignorantly suggest that there is a paradox because fundamental particles behave in ways that are both wave-like and as a discrete particle, when in fact they behave the way they do because they are neither strictly a wave or a particle. There is nothing mystical about it except that we are too primitive to fully understand or describe the behavior.

There are a variety of scientists (physicists, cosmologists, biologists, et cetera) who have tried to adopt the language and methods of science to explore mystical or supposedly supernatural phenomena; some like Frank Tipler, Fred Hoyle, and Roger Penrose are even well noted in their particular fields. However, they are left to either advance highly speculative hypotheses that are not falsifiable, or else propose mechanisms for which there is no observational evidence, and thus just end up looking foolish.

There is nothing that innately prevents a scientist from also holding a religious or mystical point of view about supposed phenomena that are beyond the current ability of science to explain or technology to measure, but an honest scientist is always going to have to be willing to revise their beliefs if new data, measurements, or credible mechanisms are proposed to revise formerly mystical phenomena, else they may find themselves in the trap of being disingeneous or outright lying in defense of believe despite objective evidence to the contrary. Most good scientists, however, by dint of personality and training, tend to be skeptical of “because I said so” explanations about gods and magic faries, and thus may find the adoption of dogmatic or literalist religious interpretation to be at odds with a desire to rectify faith with fact.

There is certainly nothing you are going to learn in a university physics course that will reinforced your belief in the religious or supernatural, as such classes shy away from the speculative in favor of practical applications and understanding of the laws of physics as we currently understand them. Although arguements about intrepreations of quantum mechanics get much coverage in the popsci literature, they are covered only very briefly if at all (and then only as historical notes) in actual quantum physics courses because they have no real application to the use of quantum mechanics and offer greater insight only insofar as some interpretations may seem more esthetically pleasing than others. At the final exam, however, the prof wants you to be able to calculate the effects, not speculate on how it might work if you could see beyond the veil of seeming stochastic behavior.

Stranger

Physics does not tell us why things are they way they are, it just tells us that they are a certain way. I studied physics in college and I like to tell my religiously-inclined friends that I am in awe (awestruck, if you will) by just knowing what piddly amount we do know about the universe. I don’t need to see “something greater”-- the universe is great all by itself. And even though there is much we don’t know, it’s amazing how much our puny ape-brains have been able to figure out. Now, that is awesome!!!

Well, you still might not be able to prove a negative.

For me, I retained the sense of wonder (maybe even increased) but reduced (even eliminated) the sense of spirituality or mysticism behind the unknown. Many previously baffling subjects became understood, or at least discoverable, and my confidence in the eventual discoverability of the universe’s laws grew greatly.

Mathematics proves that God exists! From What Is The Name Of This Book? by Raymond Smullyan. ( Full (plain) text / Full text (PDF) including original illustrations )

Lest anyone be inclined to take it seriously, I should point out that this anecdote didn’t actually happen.

It’s strange when you think about it. Scientific people believe in a universe that’s millions of times larger in both space and time than the universe that traditional Christians think their omnipotent God made.

There’s nothing traditional about YEC. It’s a modern invention.

I’m glad to learn this (but sorry to hear it!)

Astronomy certainly leads to an appreciation of “something greater” – the immensity of the cosmos. Modern cosmology is even more awe-inspiring. The same with particle physics, and the study of the universe at the smallest scale.

Mathematically, the abstraction of “string theory” is astonishing, and hugely inspiring.

All of these stop well short of suggesting any kind of awareness to the cosmos: God cannot be a “person” as we understand the term. There is simply no evidence for this at all…and some very strong reasons not to believe.

(Humans evolved over aeons, to fit their environment. An “absolute” God has no environment, and thus no possible evolutionary path. Such a God could not possibly be “person-like.” He might, at best, be somewhat Azathoth-like.)

Huh? How large do you think Christians think the universe is?

Well, they’re a little vague on the specifics, but they’re certain that the scientific methods are all screwed up.

Of course, you can (and should) argue that one quasi-fundamentalists interpretation of the Bible and the degree of biblical literacy does not represent all, or even a majority of Christian believers. But that then begs the question, “What do Christians believe, and why do they believe it?” There is nothing in the methods, principles, or factual results of science that validated the core tenets of Christianity or any other religion, and skeptical inquiriy has often debunked, or at least, defactualized closely held beliefs in most if not all religions, and will progressively chip away at supposed facts in the Bible or other reglious dogma which does not reflect reality. There will always be areas where a gulf of knowledge leaves room for belief, and of course, you are as free to believe in a god or gods as I am in the fantastical invulnerability The Great Morog, Space Pirate Extraordinaire and his invisible stellar sailing sloop, The Dread Star-Expunger, but neither of us has any evidence to back up our beliefs, so it all boils down to who tells a better story and how many people they can get to pay for it.

Stranger

Christians at the time of the compiling of the New Testament thought the Firmament was fairly close overhead. They would never have envisioned “light-years.”

Even “Enlightenment” era Christians thought the stars were somewhat close by. They had enough geometry to work out the “parsec” and knew that the stars were farther away than that. But even into the early 20th century, it was not known that there were distant galaxies.

Not until the 1980s did cosmology come up with estimates of the cosmos exceeding around 40 billion light-years.

“Traditional Christianity” never formally addressed the question, but the Dantean “Empyrean” was not very far above the mountain-top of Purgatory.

More like a reinvention. The Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is only a few thousand years old is itself centuries old by now.

Probably the most famous example was James Ussher’s calculation in the 1640’s that the universe was created around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC (Ussher’s calculatuions apparently weren’t precise down to the minute).

The traditional belief was that the Earth was the center of the universe. The sun, the moon, and the five visible planets orbited the Earth. And the stars were a big sphere just outside this. So the entire universe was essentially the size of the solar system.

Granted most of this derived from classical Greek and Roman texts rather than biblical sources. But traditional Christians adopted this system as part of their world view.

If you change “think” to “thought,” we probably wouldn’t have to argue about this. What’s debatable is what today’s “traditional Christians” believe about the size of the universe.

The basic notion of Biblical literalism in determining the history of the world is not new (although it fell out of favor in parallel to the adoption of evolution, even before Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’, and advances in astronomy), but the pseudoscience behind both that and so-called ‘Intelligent Design’ are quite new. ‘Creation Science’–a painfully unironic term of its adherents–has its roots in early 20th Century cultural revisionism, and has links to the racist undertones of nascent fascism. It morphed into its modern apologetic form somewhere in the 'Seventies or early 'Eighties and has since taken root in the United States as a widely held belief that science is some kind of perversion of a small cabal of eggheads who want to scare everyone with their big shiny domes and stories that we might just be doing harmful things to our ecosystem by dumping pollutants and releasing hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of a few decades. And of course, companies interested in protecting their profits in selling that carbonaceous fuel latched onto the ignoranum of the masses in order to sell an agenda of science only as we like it, often by the same marketing and public relations companies which convinced us that four out of five doctors recommend that we smoke Camels for a milder, smoother, better tasting emphysema.

Clair Patterson had almost as much trouble convincing the public that he had correctly estimtaed the age of the Earth (4.55 Byr, current estimate is 4.54 +/- 0.05 Byr) as he did that the tetraethyl lead added to gasoline as an anti-knock agent was a massive public health hazard. But what do you expect of a species which views a vacation to a hideously illuminated, concrete-slabbed destination in the middle of a desert to give away their hard-earned money to shady-looking mooks as “a good time”? We are, collectively, not very smart. Some of us are just substantially dumber or more easily swayed than others.

Stranger