| Author |
Message |
Otilio
| | Posted on Monday, September 10, 2012 - 8:11 pm: | |
Hi Bob,I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the religious parts. I think Paul was tiryng to communicate my experiences in an honest way. In fact, it would be dishonest to talk about my experiences and neglect to discuss my faith.As to statistics about the commonality of religious scientists: the Wikipedia article you link to states that 60.7% of natural scientists polled in 1996 express disbelief or doubt in the existence of God (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings) or, restated, 39.3% do believe in a personal God. This is consistent with my experiences: nine of the 25 or so students I have worked with have some level of religious faith from a variety of religious backgrounds (though many may not feel comfortable talking about it given the religious climate in the U.S.). So Paul's assertion that it is not unusual to find religious scientists is confirmed both by polls, and by experience.But, as you say, most senior scientists are atheists: in my view, this is a natural product of a generation of extremists (both Atheist and Fundamentalist Christian) arguing that science and religion are incompatible. Even today, there is a lot of rhetoric expelled on the topic of Christianity vs Evolution , as if these two ideas were somehow at odds.But I think that the climate is changing. I have found with current and recent students who have grown up' with cosmological fine tuning' and Anthropic arguments for the nature of the Universe, the default belief seems to be agnosticism' rather than Atheism.I think this is a healthy change Science is not the domain of only one religious tradition (eg, Atheism). Any somewhat compelling objections to the existence of a good God that I have heard have nothing to do with science, but rather involve issues like the nature of suffering. Not surprisingly, the nature of suffering is the topic of the oldest book in the Bible, so the discussion is nothing new, and is unlikely to be resolved by the discovery of the nature of dark matter, or the chemical origin of life. But, for many perhaps even most it is resolved by our interpretation of personal experiences. Thus, in the movie, the recovery of the pressure vessel had a profound impact on me in giving me increased confidence in his goodness and provision but it did not have the same impact on Mark. So in the context of scientific exploration, like all other parts of life, matters of faith remain matters of faith. I think this is what Paul was communicating, and I think he did it very well.As to your question about the hard drives: at least one was a Western Digital WD2500JB. I'm not sure about the other it might have been a Maxtor. Pretty much all of these drives have similar shock resistance specs, and both had to be repaired by a hard drive recovery company after the vibration from being dragged. We are moving to solid state drives for our next flight (yes, BLAST has been rebuilt), which ought to be more robust (famous last words .)Barth Netterfield |
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