A leading member of one of the world's largest roughly-coherent-but-fundamentally-untestable belief-systems has been in the UK for the last few days.
I don't really care about that, and even had the TV on to see if I could show the sprog Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, not far from where some of my grandparents lived, or the dissenters in Mosspark Boulevard, again, an area I remember from when I was wee and used to head North for holidays.
However, I'm a bit miffed about all this anti-secularism stuff that's been on the TV the last few days, from our Italian visitor, and from other untenable belief systems closer to home (the Church of England, the Royal Family, etc.), about how we should embrace faith more in our thinking. It's like everyone is gathering together to resist the harsh truth that physics doesn't care about people. Well, sometimes the truth hurts.
Here is a photo of a house on my road, slightly downhill.
A celebration that Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize winner for Quantum Physics lived about 14 houses away. Notes for saying "If we are honest - and scientists have to be- we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. ".
Dirac was mentioned by Wolfgang Pauli on this topic, Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet.
Now, turn 180 degrees round, head 20 buildings uphill from my house, and I see a Church, a monument to the time when religion was more prevalent in our society. But what is that up on the wall? A memorial.
A memorial for five people burned alive by Queen Mary I for holding different interpretations of the same set of religious documents than herself. The trouble with beliefs you can't test, see, is there's no way determine the correct answer through experimentation.
I don't see that as something we should be pining for, which is why I'm in the Dirac camp.
Now, before someone heckles, Euclids Axioms are also that: an untestable set of postulations, but together they produce something strongly consistent. Furthermore, we know they are just a simplification; special relativity implies non-euclidean model of spacetime. However, mathematicians never try to burn each other to death in an argument over whether or not parallel lines ever meet.