Charles Peterson

Eclectic Pragmatism: is There a God? Charles Peterson

For centuries Religion has explained our Universe as the work of one or more supernatural beings. In the last three, Science has been able to describe (not explain) many phenomena by means of regularities it has uncovered (not invented) that it calls Laws of Nature. Because it has been able to utilize these Laws in marvelous ways, it has created an illusion of God-like power and fostered increasingly clamorous voices that attack the concept of supernatural powers. Its own concepts (Evolution, Relativity, and Uncertainty) have been grafted into the sphere of human relationships with the aim of reinventing civilization. They threaten to displace our findings from centuries of bloody human experiments on how to get along with each other. Science also offers us bizarre concepts (an expanding Universe, quarks, gluons, cosmic strings). We are told we cannot rely on our own experiences or intuitions for explanations. But we find that the concepts rest on measurement systems that are arbitrary and relative. Questions like, 'Is there something smaller than a quark?' and 'What happened before the Big Bang?' are dismissed as meaningless. This book is intended to stir your thinking about the make-believe basis of Science and its limitations in explaining our Universe. It is written in clear English to make the paths to the conclusions easier to understand than those in standard textbooks. It is not necessary to plough through the equations, but they are provided so you can examine more critically the bases for the conclusions.