engleski

Modern physics and religion: Compatibility and complementarity

Development of science and especially the results of classical physics in the 19th century seemed to announce the triumph of the «scientific method», which promised to solve all important questions regarding nature and humanity, thus arrogantly claiming all other human achievements, including arts and humanities, and especially religion to be irrelevant. This was interpreted as the decisive support to the positivist philosophy and its derivatives, e.g. in the form of «scientific» materialism or scientism. Deterministic character and causality implicit in the Newtonian mechanics, together with the successful application of the reductionist method seemed to announce unlimited powers of reason, which would, applying the «scientific method», eliminate the need for and the possibility of any other approach to reality, and particularly all metaphysics. However, modern science at the beginning of 20th century soon started demolishing the basic assumptions of this ideological construction. Quantum mechanics and relativity questioned the idea of determinism, locality, local causality, role of the observer and even the realism of our theories, and the extension of reductionism from the method to the general ideology was shown to be dubious. Arrogant announcements of the final theory («Theory of Everything») suffered a final blow from Godel and his theorem, though it could have been anticipated even from the analysis of the character of scientific theories. Finally, the studies of nonlinear systems opened a whole new field of complex phenomena where emergent properties appear and characterize the behaviour of higher level system, thus making the reductionist programme impossiblet. Many people – including scientists - are still unaware of these results of modern physics, and thus are possibly subject to certain inherited philosophical and ideological prejudices. In this paper I want to discuss some of them and point out their relevance in answering – positively - two important questions: “Are science and religion compatible?” and “Are science and religion complementary?”

classical physics; determinism; scientism; fideism; quantum mechanics; relativity; causality; (non)locality; reductionism; complexity; realism

nije evidentirano