John Barrow goes to church, and is smarter than you are, so stuff it Tom Smith

John Barrow, about as distinguished a mathematician and fundamental physicist as one could wish for,  won the Templeton Prize recently, which is 1.4 million reasons for scientists to take religion and/or spirituality seriously.  I like Barrow because he is especially good at explaining cosmology to lawyers, and others with congenital problems with mathematics.

Oddly, if you follow this sort of thing, you can see that for some people, anybody with religious inclinations must produce bad science, no matter how well Nature responds to their hypotheses.  Some people call this prejudice Scientism, but I think that disserves science.  Barrow may have been unfairly harsh when he said to Richard Dawkins, “you’re not a scientist; you’re a biologist,” but one sees his point.  Locked in a death grip with biblical creationists, biologists proclaim that all is explained by little billiard balls bouncing around, which sounds clever only compared to saying the Grand Canyon was caused by the Great Flood, while physicists are mightily mystified by unities, singularities, constants, strings, manifolds and other enormities.  Marxists and biologists are enamored of materialism, while physicists wonder what matter could possibly be to be so strange.  Personally, I am grateful to live in the universe we apparently actually live in, rather than the one dreamnt up by the 19th century materialists, which may not even be possible, for all we know, let alone the one we live in.  If Somebody did create the universe we live in, you certainly have to give Him a lot of credit for posing good questions.