> CB: Perhaps a way to differentiate science and religion, is that for
> science there are an infinity of unknowns, but nothing is unknowable
> in principle. For religion, Christianity anyway, some things are
> unknowable in principle.
Charles, then what about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Also, what if the human brain is equivalent in expressive power to a Turing machine (or some other defined computational abstraction). What about problems which are theoretically unsolveable by a Turing machine?
To give an example - here's a problem a Turing machine (e.g. a computer) can't solve:
A) Suppose you write a program whose purpose is to examine another program and decide whether the program halts. Let's call this program H. If a program halts, H does not halt. If the program does not halt, H halts.
B) Feed H to itself. Now there are two possibilities:
B.1) H decides that H halts, in which case H does not halt. Oops!
B.2) H decides that H does not halt, in which case H halts. Oops again!
Now, a computer can't solve this problem. My question is, can anyone?
While I personally am quite anti-religious, some religious people use intractable problems of this nature to suggest that the 'unknowable in principle' exists. I think Ken said last year made some kind of link between politics and psychoses - certainly, I can understand why today's world, with its multitude of in-practice unknoweables is a fertile breeding ground for paranoia (or to spin a take like Johnnie from the film Naked on this: the present doesn't exist).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844