Sublime

As science has revealed the laws and equations governing the universe, some scientists have convinced themselves that laws and equations are somehow an alternative to an argument for divine intelligence rather than evidence in its favor—that if one could just reduce the entire universe to an original condition and a set of especially beautiful equa

The first bottom-up attempt to untangle the riddle of design was to search for a profound mathematical truth at the kernel of existence. The second line of attack, multiverse cosmology, also relied on timeless metalaws, but augmented with the anthropic selection of a habitable island universe.

Thomas Kuhn argued that paradigm shifts—the fundamental advances in science—don’t happen because people are persuaded by reason. Rather, they depend on the guardians of the old orthodoxies becoming tired, and dying. Kuhn quoted physicist Max Planck’s comment that science proceeds ‘one funeral at a time’. It follows that if there are fewer funerals

As stated by Jim Peebles, professor

Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “Tell me, why do people say it is more natural to think that the sun rotates around the Earth than that the Earth is rotating?” The friend said, “Well, obviously, because it just seems like the sun is going around the Earth.” Wittgenstein replied, “Well, what would it seem like if it did seem like the Earth

Even more important than these contributions, he set in motion the process of rethinking our worldview—a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming “certainty,” which is one of the main roots of scientific thinking.