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كل ماعرضته يتناول عدد الملحدين بصفة عامة وماكنا نتناقش فيه هو عدد الملحدين فى المجتمع العلمى .
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لاتزعل هنا الاحصائيات التي تريدها:
1- العلماء الذين في المقدمة مايزالون يرفضون الله:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
2- وهنا موضوع يقول ام تقريبا جميع علماء الفلك ملحدين:
Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists
Sean M. Carroll, University of Chicago
Prepared for God and Physical Cosmology: Russian-Anglo American Conference on Cosmology and Theology, Notre Dame, January/February 2003. See also the pdf version.
Abstract
Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed.
Introduction
One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God. I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe.
The title ''Why cosmologists are atheists'' was chosen not because I am primarily interested in delving into the sociology and psychology of contemporary scientists, but simply to bring attention to the fact that I am presenting a common and venerable point of view, not advancing a new and insightful line of reasoning. Essentially I will be defending a position that has come down to us from the Enlightenment, and which has been sharpened along the way by various advances in scientific understanding. In particular, I will discuss what impact modern cosmology has on our understanding of these truly fundamental questions.
The past few hundred years have witnessed a significant degree of tension between science and religion. Since very early on, religion has provided a certain way of making sense of the world -- a reason why things are the way they are. In modern times, scientific explorations have provided their own pictures of how the world works, ones which rarely confirm the pre-existing religious pictures. Roughly speaking, science has worked to apparently undermine religious belief by calling into question the crucial explanatory aspects of that belief; it follows that other aspects (moral, spiritual, cultural) lose the warrants for their validity. I will argue that this disagreement is not a priori necessary, but nevertheless does arise as a consequence of the scientific method.
It is important from the outset to distinguish between two related but ultimately distinct concepts: a picture of how the world works, and a methodology for deciding between competing pictures. The pictures of interest in this paper may be labelled ''materialism'' and ''theism.'' Materialism asserts that a complete description of nature consists of an understanding of the structures of which it is comprised together with the patterns which those structures follow, while theism insists on the need for a conscious God who somehow rises above those patterns. (These categories can be found, for example, in Richard Swinburne's Is There a God? (Oxford, 1996). I don't mean to pick on the conference organizer, but this short book is a well-presented and paradigmatic example of the kind of view I want to contrast with mine.) Science is most often associated with a materialist view, but the essence of science lies as much in a methodology of reaching the truth as in any view of what form that truth might ultimately take. In particular, the scientific method is an empirical one, in contrast to appeals to pure reason or to revelation. For the purposes of this paper I will assume the validity of the scientific method, and simply ask what sorts of conclusions we are led to by its application.
Within this framework, there are two possible roads to reconciliation between science and religion. One is to claim that science and religion are not incompatible because they speak to completely distinct sets of questions, and hence never come into conflict. The other is to assert that thinking scientifically does not lead to rejection of theism, but in fact that religious belief can be justified in the same way that any scientific theory might be. I will argue that neither strategy succeeds: science and religion do speak to some of the same questions, and when they do they get different answers. In particular, I wish to argue that religious belief necessarily entails certain statements about how the universe works, that these statements can be judged as scientific hypotheses, and that as such they should be rejected in favor of alternative ways of understanding the universe.
Probably nothing that I say will be anything you have not heard elsewhere. My goals here are simply to describe what I think a typical scientist has in mind when confronted with the question of science vs. religion, even if the scientists themselves have not thought through these issues in any detail.
Worldviews
One of the most difficult tasks in discussing the relationship between science and religion is to define the terminology in ways that are acceptable to everyone listening. In fact, it is likely impossible; especially when it comes to religion, the terminology is used in incompatible ways by different people. I will therefore try to be as clear as possible about the definitions I am using. In this section I want to carefully describe what I mean by the two competing worldviews, materialism and theism, without yet addressing how to choose between them.
The essence of materialism is to model the world as a formal system, which is both unambiguous and complete as a description of reality. A materialist model may be said to consist of four elements. First, we model the world as some formal (mathematical) structure. (General relativity describes the world as a curved manifold with a Lorentzian metric, while quantum mechanics describes the world as a state in some Hilbert space. As a more trivial example, we could imagine a universe which consisted of nothing other that an infinitely long list of ''bits'' taking on the values 0 or 1.) Second, this structure exhibits patterns (the ''laws of nature''), so that the amount of information needed to express the world is dramatically less than the structure would in principle allow. (In a world described by a string of bits, we might for example find that the bits were an infinitely repeated series of a single one followed by two zeroes: 100100100100...) Third, we need boundary conditions which specify the specific realization of the pattern. (The first bit in our list is a one.) Note that the distinction between the patterns and their boundary conditions is not perfectly well-defined; this is an issue which becomes relevant in cosmology, and we'll discuss it more later. Finally, we need a way to relate this formal system to the world we see: an ''interpretation.''
The reader might worry that we are glossing over very subtle and important issues in the philosophy of science; they would be correct, but needn't worry. Philosophy of science becomes difficult when we attempt to describe the relationship of the formalism to the world (the interpretation), as well as how we invent and choose between theories. But the idea that we are trying, in principle, to model the world as a formal system is fairly uncontroversial.
The materialist thesis is simply: that's all there is to the world. Once we figure out the correct formal structure, patterns, boundary conditions, and interpretation, we have obtained a complete description of reality. (Of course we don't yet have the final answers as to what such a description is, but a materialist believes such a description does exist.) In particular, we should emphasize that there is no place in this view for common philosophical concepts such as ''cause and effect'' or ''purpose.'' From the perspective of modern science, events don't have purposes or causes; they simply conform to the laws of nature. In particular, there is no need to invoke any mechanism to ''sustain'' a physical system or to keep it going; it would require an additional layer of complexity for a system to cease following its patterns than for it to simply continue to do so. Believing otherwise is a relic of a certain metaphysical way of thinking; these notions are useful in an informal way for human beings, but are not a part of the rigorous scientific description of the world. Of course scientists do talk about ''causality,'' but this is a description of the relationship between patterns and boundary conditions; it is a derived concept, not a fundamental one. If we know the state of a system at one time, and the laws governing its dynamics, we can calculate the state of the system at some later time. You might be tempted to say that the particular state at the first time ''caused'' the state to be what it was at the second time; but it would be just as correct to say that the second state caused the first. According to the materialist worldview, then, structures and patterns are all there are --- we don't need any ancillary notions.
Defining theism is more difficult than defining materialism, for the simple reason that theist belief takes many more forms that materialist belief, and the same words are often taken to mean utterly different things. I will partially avoid this difficulty by not attempting a comprehensive definition of religion, but simply taking belief in the existence of a being called ''God'' as a necessary component of being religious. (Already this choice excludes some modes of belief which are sometimes thought of as ''religious.'' For example, one could claim that ''the laws of physics, and their working out in the world, are what I hold to be God.'' I am not what the point of doing that would be, but in such a case nothing that I have to say would apply.)
The subtlety has therefore been transferred to the task of defining ''God.'' I will take it to mean some being who is not bound by the same patterns we perceive in the universe, who is by our standards extremely powerful (not necessarily omnipotent, although that would count), and in some way plays a crucial role in the universe (creating it, or keeping it going, etc.). By a ''being'' I mean to imply an entity which we would recognize as having consciousness -- a ''person'' in some appropriately generalized sense (as opposed to a feature of reality, or some sort of feeling). A rather concrete God, in other words, not just an aspect of nature. This notion of God need not be interventionist or easy to spot, but has at least the capability of intervening in our world. Even if not necessarily omnipotent, the relevant feature of this conception is that God is not bound by the laws of physics. In particular, I don't include some sort of superhero-God who is bound by such laws, but has figured out how to use them in ways that convey the impression of enormous power (even if it is hard to imagine ultimately distinguishing between these two possibilities). When I say that God is not bound by the laws of physics, I have in mind for example that God is not limited to moving more slowly than the speed of light, or that God could create an electron without also creating a corresponding positively-charged particle. (We are not imagining that God can do the logically impossible, just violate the contingent patterns of reality that we could imagine having been different.) Of course these are meager powers compared to most conceptions of God, but I am taking them to be minimal criteria. There are various types of belief which are conventionally labelled as religious, but inconsistent with my definition of God; about these I have nothing to say in this paper.
It should be clear that, by these definitions, materialism and theism are incompatible, essentially by definition. (The former says that everything follows the rules, the second says that God is an exception.) It does not immediately follow that ''science'' and ''religion'' are incompatible; we could follow the scientific method to conclude that a materialist description of the world was not as reasonable as a theist one. On the other hand, it does follow that science and religion do overlap in their spheres of interest. Religion has many aspects, including social and moral ones, apart from its role in describing the workings of the world; however, that role is a crucial one, and necessarily speaks to some of the same issues as science does. Suggestions that science and religion are simply disjoint activities. generally rely on a re-definition of ''religion'' as something closer to ''moral philosophy.'' (See for example S.J. Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Ballantine, 2002.)Such a definition ignores crucial aspects of religious belief.
In judging between materialism and theism, we are faced with two possibilities. Either one or the other system is logically impossible, or we need to decide which of the two conceivable models better explains the world we experience. In my view, neither materialism nor theism is logically impossible, and I will proceed on the idea that we have to see which fits reality better. Of course arguments against materialism have been put forward which do not rely on specific observed features of our world, but instead on either pure reason or revelation; I won't attempt to deal with such arguments here
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