IncelGolem
Veteran
★★
- Joined
- May 24, 2018
- Posts
- 1,101
- It's not complicated: the great philosopher/scientists in history are great because they gave us new insights into the world. For an insight to be new, it often had to go against the current scientific authority. For e.g. Dalton -> no he's wrong -> Thomsom -> no he's worng -> no he's wrong -> Rutherford -> no he's wrong -> until finally the Quantum model of atoms. You're saying these historical scientists questioned their scientific authorities but not their religious authorities? No, of course not. Most have wrote or at least commented heavily on religion. Even the pure atheist scientists talk heavily of it (Dawkins, Hawking).I don't follow.
Like I said above, cherry-picking. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss. I could muster a longer list by just googling "famous atheist scientists" but you could also do that. The question is, will you?
Agnostic is not atheistic. He's one of the many scientists who I put in the "deism" semi-religion camp I talked about before. Einstein: "I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist… I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human being" (Spinoza is a 17th c. philosopher and he's writings are basically Deism). In another musing, also hinting towards deism, he used the analogy that the universe is like a library of books and mankind is like a small child who can only dimly understand there there is some order to be found there.I just realized you mentioned Einstein who said he was an agnostic.
Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
But even that doesn't matter because it's just cherry-picking. One could use the exact same list of people to claim the superiority of the white race but it would involve conveniently ignoring any great scientist who wasn't white. Which is essentially what you're doing.
Hawkingis also a deist who is a publicity whore that even appeared on the Simpsons. He used the popularity of atheism and the supposed drama of his marrying a devout christian to further his brand. What he wrote before labelling himself an "atheist", per USA Today:Like I said above, cherry-picking. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss. I could muster a longer list by just googling "famous atheist scientists" but you could also do that. The question is, will you?
One reason Hawking’s atheism was less well-known was he seemed to fudge the question of God’s existence for years. In his 1988 seminal best-seller, “A Brief History of Time,” he wrote, “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”
Later in the book, he writes of the quest for a unifying theory of the universe: “It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
Some saw those statements as proof that Hawking held private religious beliefs. He fed that idea with a few statements over the years — “The laws may have been decreed by God,” he told Reuters in 2007, “but God does not intervene to break the laws” — and even titled a 2005 book “God Created the Integers.”
Last edited: