Is science opposed to faith?

Charles Darwin

The opposition between science and faith is a nineteenth-century invention. And it was not scientists who invented it, since most of them were believers. Those responsible were atheist philosophers such as Marx, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. I count Marx among philosophers, even though he abhorred philosophy, which he considered dead (he said in the Manuscripts), just as Stephen Hawking did a century and a half later, as I commented in this post. I once said that Marx would have been horrified to know that he is studied today in the history of philosophy, for he did not consider himself a philosopher, but an economist.

The nature of the physical world

Arthur Eddington

The Nature of the Physical World is the title of a landmark work in the history of popular science. Published in 1928, it compiles the Gifford lectures given in Edinburgh by its author, Arthur Eddington, in 1927. Eddington was then famous, having been the scientist who, in 1919, on the occasion of a solar eclipse, organized the expedition that proved one of the predictions from Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the deflection of light when passing near a star. It was said of him that he was one of only three people in the entire world who understood General Relativity. In addition to this, Eddington was a pioneer researching on the origin of the energy of stars, for he was the first to propose that it came from the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man

The title of this post is the translation into English of a book of mine, published in 2017 by the publisher CEU Ediciones. As its name implies, the book is divided into three main parts, the first of which (the first four chapters) reviews the origin, evolution and history of life (biological evolution), while the second (chapters 5 and 6) focuses on the origin, evolution and history of man (cultural evolution). Finally, the third part (chapters 7 to 9) compares both types of evolution, emphasizing their similarities and differences; reviews the current situation of human evolution; and offers some ideas about the future.

As is often the case, this book did not come out of nowhere, but rather builds on previous works of mine. Especially in the first part, some of the titles of some chapters and subchapters may be familiar to the readers of my blog, because they are similar to some of my posts:

Physics and Free Will

In the January 2021 issue of Physics World appeared an article entitled Why free will is beyond physics. This article, written by British science writer Philip Ball, is clearly anti-reductionist and says things like these:

“Free will” is not ruled out by physics – because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.

If physics can disprove free will, then it must override everything else too, even evolution.

But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.

Chance and certainty

In a comment to the Spanish version of a previous post of mine, JL advised me to read the book entitled Chance and Certainty, by Georges Salet, who wrote it to prove that the origin of life and its subsequent evolution are impossible, if we apply the calculus of probabilities. In addition, he challenged me to refute at least one of the arguments proposed by the book, in the following words:

The work contains hundreds of arguments and demonstrations; if you, or anyone else whose help you ask, are able to refute a single argument or demonstration, I will readily admit that life can indeed arise spontaneously.

Salet's book is out of print and very hard to come by. I am grateful to another comment contributor, who provided me with the opportunity to read this book. I can therefore accept JL's challenge.