Ever since he told a Guardian reporter last weekend that the idea of an afterlife is a “fairy story,” Stephen Hawking has been in the religion news. The author of A Brief History of Time isn’t the only physicist making religion headlines. Not long ago, a paper presented at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting led the BBC to report: “Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.” Finally, the ongoing work on particle physics at CERN prompted its director to tell an interviewer: “we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief.”
Posts Tagged ‘physics’
February 7th, 2011
Still in the province of philosophy
posted by John D. BoyAlva Noë criticizes The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
June 14th, 2010
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
posted by Michael Saler
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it’s an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a pairing of the sacred and the secular that can seem as incongruous as Buddhists at boxing matches. What do astral voyagers, shamanistic drummers, and OBEs (Out of Body Experiencers, not to be confused with the equally rarefied Order of the British Empire) have to do with a progressive community anchored by such bastions of rational knowledge as Harvard and MIT?
June 11th, 2010
Antihumanism and religion
posted by Martin Kavka
One of the things that intellectual historians show us, although often only implicitly, is the fluidity of the terms of debates that we take to be self-evident. In An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Stefanos Geroulanos shows us this fluidity by focusing on the French history of objections to (and reformulations of) humanist discourse from 1929 to 1952, a history that suggests that the rigidity of the categories of “religion” and “humanism” in Anglophone discourse is exceptional and unnecessary.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for physics
