It’s still true

Last updated on: April 27, 2019 at 12:49 am by Dan Peterson

It’s still true 2019-04-27T00:49:32-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Anglo-American physicist Paul Davies, winner of the 2001 Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics and the 2002 Faraday Award from the Royal Society (Wikimedia Commons)

On Wednesday, I posted a blog entry here under the title of “All too convenient ‘coincidences.’” It’s a quotation, in its entirety, from the Anglo-American theoretical physicist Paul Davies.

Paul Davies is someone whom I’ve quoted more than once here. I find him quite interesting. Here, for example, are a pair of quotations from Professor Davies thatnhave been featured here in the past:

“It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

“I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level ‘God’ is a matter of taste and definition.”

A reader might deduce from those two quotations that Dr. Davies doesn’t subscribe to a conventional religion and may not actually be an orthodox Christan or even a mainstream, believing Latter-day Saint.

I’ve pointed that fact out on more than one occasion. (Certain of my critics, who devote considerable time to obsessive study of my blog and my other writings, will be able to find those occasions at least as easily as I can.)

Now, though, I’m being accused of cheating, of attempting to deceive, of lying about Paul Davies, of attempting to pass him off as advocating something like the Latter-day Saint view of God.

Which, of course, I never did.

The quotation in my original blog entry is from a 2007 article in The Guardian entitled “Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean that a god fixed it: We will never explain the cosmos by taking on faith either divinity or physical laws. True meaning is to be found within nature.”

I stand by that quotation. (If you haven’t yet read it, please take a minute or two and do so.) In my view, it points to an intriguing reality. I don’t need to fully buy Paul Davies’s speculative explanation for the problem that he summarizes in order to find his summary of the problem worth quoting.

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Remembering an academic conference that I once attended in an ideologically hostile location

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