Do any physicists actually believe in God?

Factual Questions
41

TVAA wrote:

*1) Proving something IS disproving something. *

Okay, if you want to get nitpicky. If two theories are mutually exclusive, proving one disproves the other automatically. Proving that evolution is the process responsible for the diversity of life on Earth would disprove the alternate theory of Biblical creation.

But the nature of the logic involved doesn’t let you set out to prove that there are no pink elephants. To prove the existence of pink elephants, all you’d have to do is find one (and show that it wasn’t a fake somehow). To disprove their existence… how would you do that? What could you find that would conclusively show that they don’t exist? All you can prove is that we haven’t found pink elephants yet.

For example, take the whole UFO sighting business: none of these sightings have been conclusively shown to have been caused by aliens from outer space. That still doesn’t prove that there are no aliens, it just says that the alleged example wasn’t what it was thought to be.

2) Science neither proves nor disproves.

In that there’s always room for error and uncertainty, yes. But it’s common practice to talk about ‘proving’ something, because anyone trained in scientific thought is aware of the uncertainties. They’re unspoken, but everyone knows them.

42

The title of the OP asked that, and as I have stated was a bit misleading in this respect. But if you read the OP itself, I mention that I am not interested in thier personal beliefs. I was interested in whether thier understanding of physics would allow them to admit to the possibility of a “god”.

43

From SlowMindThinking :"I read an article once describing the results of a study of religious beliefs and physicists. I believe it was in Physics Today, which is the monthly mag put out by either the American Physical Society or the American Institute of Physics - I can never keep them straight. (One is the umbrella org for the other, I think.)

At any rate, something like 90% of physicists do not believe in any sort of god. Period. Less than 5% believe in anything resembling a Judeo-Christian-Muslim God. The percentages get more extreme at the AAAS level, which is the best of the best."

I read an article once where Batman killed Superman. I think it was in Marvel Comics.

At any rate, something like 100% of invulnerable superheroes could be defeated. I won’t bother with a cite, either.

44

Just to add to the discussion, the following is a list of Nobel Prize winners who have been or are members of the Pontificial Academy of Sciences (pontificial as in Pope, Vatican)

Lord Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Prize for Physics, 1908),
Guglielmo Marconi (Physics, 1909), Alexis Carrel (Physiology,
1912), Max von Laue (Physics, 1914), Max Planck (Physics, 1918),
Niels Bohr (Physics, 1922), Werner Heisenberg (Physics, 1932),
Paul Dirac (Physics, 1933), Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933),
Sir Alexander Fleming (Physiology, 1945), Chen Ning Yang
(Physics, 1957), Rudolf L. Mössbauer (Physics, 1961), Max F.
Perutz (Chemistry, 1962), John Eccles (Physiology, 1963), Charles
H.Townes (Physics, 1964), Manfred Eigen and George Porter
(Chemistry, 1967), Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall W.
Nirenberg (Physiology, 1968),
Christian de Duve (Physiology, 1974), Werner Arber e Geroge E.
Palade (Physiology, 1974), David Baltimore (Physiology, 1975),
Aage Bohr (Physics, 1975), Abdus Salam (Physics, 1979), Paul
Berg (Chemistry, 1980), Kai Siegbahn (Physics, 1981), Sune
Bergström (Physiology, 1982), Carlo Rubbia (Physics, 1984), Rita
Levi-Montalcini (Physiology, 1986), John C. Polanyi (Chemistry,
1986), Jean-Marie Lehn (Chemistry, 1987), Joseph E. Murray
(Physiology, 1990), Gary S. Becker (Economics, 1992), Paul J.
Crutzen (Chemistry, 1995), Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Physics,
1997) and Ahmed H. Zewail (Chemistry, 1999).

45

Not all of them are Catholics or even Christian, but I’d guess there aren’t many rabid Atheists in the list.

46

Xavier, your OP is a murky mess, and your attempts to explain what you mean in your later posts are a murky mess. What, for instance, does this mean?:

> Only taking into account the skeptical analysis given thier depth
> of knowledge in physics, would they ever consider the
> possibility of the existence of God?

What do you mean by their skeptical analysis? What do you mean by “would they ever consider the possibility of the existence of God?”, since you have said that you’re not interested in their personal beliefs? What are you talking about? What would it mean for physicists as a whole to have a belief about the existence of God that’s different from the beliefs of each individual physicist? Do you seriously think that in physics classes teachers lecture about why the present state of knowledge in physics proves or disproves the existence of God?

Once again, the existence of God is never discussed by physicists in their role as physicists. Oh, they might discuss it during their off hours, in the same way that a freshman might discuss it in a dorm room bull session, but they would never claim that they could deduce the existence of God from their knowledge of physics. It’s not even considered relevant to physics. They know perfectly well that there are many physicists that are theists and many that are atheists and many that are agnostics. They quite possibly wouldn’t even know the religious beliefs of their closest colleagues, since asking a colleague about their religious beliefs is generally not considered to be a polite sort of thing to do.

How many ways can I say this? Physicists don’t generally discuss the existence of God in any professional context. They generally don’t believe that their religious beliefs have any real relevance to their work in physics. They generally are turned off by any attempt of someone to imply that physics proves or disproves the existence of God. They generally scoff at the idea that being physicists makes them any sort of experts in theological argument.

47

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Headcoat *
Atheists and Deists argue over Einstein, each side claiming him as their own, but a thorough investigation of his writings makes it clear that he didn’t believe in god.

I went to the Einstein exibit at the Field Museum in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend. Einstein was raised Jewish and his Jewishness (or the perception of his Jewishness) played a major part in his life. He did not seem to be a big advocate of Orthodox Judiasm but was half-heartedly offered a very high position in the government of Israel. Somehow, I think athiests would have a hard time being invited to join the government of a Jewish state. The museum exibit claims that he believed in God (or G-D) but was a little unsure about Orthodoxy. For those of you interested in Einstein, this exibit at the Field Museum is not to be missed.

48

Nitpick:

Well, the damned thing is also beyond physics, but the topic here is the blessed thing. Try to stay on track.

49

If you had trouble understanding the OP or what it was asking for you should have

A) Asked before you attempted to submit an answer

or

B) Ignored the thread

Choice is yours.

We are not talking here about the beliefs of individual physicists at all, let alone beliefs that differ from “physicists as a whole”. I don’t see how many more times I can say the same thing to you in a way that would make you understand.

Let me begin with the only line of questioning that is relevant here, that is to say you’re argument with the terms, “skeptical analysis” and “consider the possibility of the existence of God”.

Yes it’s open. But I think that even you can see that if I’m not talking about the existence (or possible existence) of God to a physicist with respect to his/her personal beliefs, then it’s got to be something else.

Again my point was; why use physicists? Because they study nature at the most fundemental level. Clearly we are talking about thier ideas/analysis with respect to thier understanding of physics.

So what does this understanding reveal about “God” i.e. does he “exist”?

When I use the phrase “consider the possibility of the existence of God”, I am saying can physicists make any assumptions one way or the other (i.e. “No God does not exist/ Yes God does exist”) with respect to thier understanding of physics?

That much should have been clear when I stated in the OP:

See here’s where you’re starting to go off the rails again. My question was not about whether a physics teacher presents lectures on these matters as part of a course. But I am interested to know whether they (as physicists) make any assumptions on the matter, given thier understanding of physics. The assumptions they can make come in two forms:

a) God does not exist

b) God does exist

Here’s where of course you come in with:

Which is an acceptable answer. But then what the hell is your problem?

My initial reply was a response to your statement:

I took this as meaning the fact that whilst the title of my OP specified “belief”, the OP itself nullified belief from consideration. Therefore you thought I was asking different questions, and I didn’t realize it. So I clarified my position by stating that YOU, in answering the title of the OP were not actually answering the OP itself. The title of the OP is an indicator, but you can hardly ever glean sufficient information from the title to answer the OP.

So I wondered from where you had drawn the conclusion that I didn’t understand that I was asking different elements of the same question. You did not provide me with any type of answer, you simply rattled off in another direction (which I addressed in my 4th post).

And once again, I can only address the issues you have raised with me. You seem to be of the attitude that by hurling insults and snide insinuations somehow it manages to demean me. If you are of this mindset, I suggest you go elsewhere (telephone dating may be a good idea). I am only willing to follow our arguments to thier logical conclusion with someone who is genuinely interested in them. I mistook you for one of those people.

50

Isn’t it possible that a physicist might say there’s no God around other athiests and say God is manifest in the logic of numbers around the religious folk? Seems much simpler this way and would allow them to get on with their physics work and not get sucked into a whole religious debate.

51

I think the problem Wagner is having with your question Xavier, is that you’re basically asking whether Physics, the subject and matter itself, says anything about the existence of God. At first, it sounds nearly nonsensical, because you’re asking for a relation between entirely unrelated subjects. God and physics are orthogonal. Physics analyzes the laws which govern the physical world, and nowhere does God enter into it at all.

52

As other people have noted, there are physicists who believe in God. One of them is John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge mathematical physicist who became an Anglican preist. You can hear from him, and a few other religious physicists, here.

Richard Dawkins describes Einstein & Stephen Hawking as atheists or pantheists. “Pantheists” meaning that they use the word “God” to refer, metaphorically, to the order of the universe. This is very different from believing in a supernatural God who either created the universe or who continues to interact with the universe. I think that Dawkins is correct on this point.

53

Dawkins is not correct about Einstein being an atheist.

(From The Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press)

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

(From Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer, Princeton University Press)

“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

Some scientists do consider the possiblity that the observable universe and the unimaginably intricate laws of nature governing it might have been deliberately designed, in ways and for reasons inaccessible to our “frail and feeble lminds”. Not necessarily designed by the angry, jealous, white-bearded mass murderer guy in need of heavy financing (the so-called Judeo-Christian “God”), but designed nonetheless. Why should there be anything at all? is indeed the question that haunts me to no end.