Your faithful blogger stumbled across a quote by Freeman Dyson while knocking around the Intertunnel one rainy day. Intrigued, the Oracle Google was consulted. Read the almost 90 year old's wiki here. Below are some of the more interesting (but not the most interesting) quotes attributed to Dyson. (Go here to see if you can discover his most interesting quote.)
I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason.
Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too.
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.
As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
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