Facultad de Ingeniería y Tecnologías – Universidad Católica del Uruguay

Maestría en Gerencia de la Energía

Science, Religion and the

Limits of Knowledge
Final Essay: Facts, Theory and Mystery
Álvaro Castro

Professor: Aleksandar Zecevic

2015
Final Essay (at least 4 pages), (Due December 7): In the final essay, you will be asked to
provide your views regarding the relationship between science and religion. You can
select one of the topics discussed in class and expand on it, or you may combine several
topics. You can also propose a topic of your own, but all such proposals will be subject to
approval by the instructor. The essay should include the theoretical background for your
discussion, as well as an explanation for your choice of topic (I would like to know why a
particular question is more interesting to you than some others).

My views regarding the relationship between science and religion

Regarding the relationship between science and religion, I think that both disciplines have to
go hand in hand (they are absolutely compatible) but they should grow together and be willing
to cooperate. To reach the truth and transcend the limits there must be an open dialogue
between the two sides, and both scientists and theologians should not be closed, especially
theologians, who should openly take scientific theories. We should avoid contradictions
between science and religion, reconciling religious teachings and scientific theories.
These two extremes should be allies, but to do so they need to understand each other's
language.
Faith is what drives us to seek the truth although we cannot reach it. This is where science can
be a great ally of religion in order to be increasingly approaching the truth.

Facts, theories and mysteries

I will write about facts, theories and mysteries. I chose this topic because it encompasses many
mysterious questions that have not yet been fully resolved ranging from chaos theory,
quantum mechanics, theory of strings , cosmology, etc. which caught me a lot and I think they
are the basis for reconciling science and religion
To determine the rationality of religious teachings, we must first establish whether an
individual who has a scientific mind can believe in a God who is transcendent and immanent.
At the beginning, we can analyze what science tells us about the limits of human knowledge.
This can be important because the existence of these limits in science can be a good indicator
that there are restrictions in other fields as well. Under these circumstances, we can say that
some aspects of reality will always be beyond where we can go.
If the above arguments were valid, it would not be irrational to conceive a God whose essence
is not knowable to us. The question that comes is how we can describe this Ultimate Mystery
in a meaningful way. Knowing somehow that this effort is doomed to failure, we should try
anyway. With this in mind, we will examine to what extent love, goodness and omnipotence
can be considered divine attributes. To do this, we must confront the same linguistic problems
encountered by theologians for centuries and we will have to support us a lot of analogies and
metaphors. What makes our approach somehow unique is the nature of the analogies we use.
Ours derive from the world of mathematics and physics, which are more attractive to the
contemporary audience.
To reconcile science and religion we have to establish the existence of unknowable truths. It is
important to distinguish between the practically unknowable truths and intrinsically
unknowable truths. In the first ones we can formulate them and make conjectures about them
but we cannot expect to verify them experimentally. In the second ones we can only establish
their existence.
The topics are unknowable truths which is one of the fundamental questions that we have to
deal with when it comes to a dialogue between science and religion. To get a sense of why this
is so important imagine for a second that science and human reason can actually potentially
answer every question that we choose to ask. All that mean for religion, well among other
things it will mean that we conceivably learn everything there is to be known about god, or the
divine reality and some other traditions and that will really fly on the face of everything that
every nature really this tradition says. In a fact, there will be no mystery at all and the whole
idea that god is a transcendent being whose qualities cannot be known to us in their entirety
would go away and every religious tradition is vehemently opposed to such a view. So,
establishing whether unknowable truths exist as such is very important in this conversation, if
we were to find, that everything is knowable in principle, then religion is on early shaky
ground, and in discussing this topic we will focus on the scientific view, and what science has
to say about know unknowable truths because this is the domain in which we can probably
articulate things the most precisely and it is also the domain in which we are more or less
familiar and what we will find is that there are plenty of unknowable truths within science
alone and we will see this through a number of different examples. We will look at things like
chaos theory, like quantum mechanics, strings theory, cosmology, and subsequently also
mathematics and information theory, and we will see that in every one of those there are
questions that we will never be able to answer and I will go into this discussion and do want to
highlight an important difference between the unknown and the unknowable. There is a
fundamental difference between them, when you say something is unknown there is a
reasonable expectation that at some point in the future we will figure it out, either using
science or some other method of reasoning but there is a legitimate hope that this is a
temporary condition so to speak. In the case of a unknowable truths that is not the case, we
simply know that this is something that is off-limits to us in the words of physicist John Barrow
who thought about these things quite a bit he said that one of the greatest achievements a
modern science is the fact that we now know what we cannot know and this is really true
because you’ll say that are in all these theories that I mentioned there are results that
explicitly say what we will never be able to know. That is something that you are probably not
use to because your traditionally scientific and engineering education is very Newtonian in its
setup because we expect things to be deterministic or predictable or at least statistically
predictable but this hard limit be on which we cannot know certain things is not something
that normally shows up in any typical class on this topic. So this is the kind of thing we will
address and before we do that its helpful to make all secondary distinction here between
different types of unknowable trues. There are two types and this is my own classification so it
is nothing official but Is helpful as you will see. There are what we call practically unknowable
truths and intrinsically unknowable truth and they differ from each other a little bit because
the practically unknowable truth are truths well we can say quite a bit about a question but
then there is a part that is off limits and you will see it a lot in areas like quantum mechanics or
chaos and so on. The intrinsically unknowable truths are even tougher than that because in
such cases you can say very little perhaps only that they exist for something quite vague but
not much more. So, we will do this in order, we will first focus on practically unknowable truths
and when we are done with that we will look at some examples of intrinsically unknowable
truths that will be the subject of the following lecture. So I’ll begin with chaos theory for a
couple of reasons, one of which is that are most other projects in this class are directly related
to that type of phenomena. So what is chaos really? Well the name is misled to a large extent
because when you use the term chaos you are applying some sort of fundamental disorder.
That is not really the case here, because what you really have with the phenomenon of chaos
is a mixture of order and disorder in other words a mixture of orderly description and eventual
unpredictability and this actually is very surprising thing, this is not something that scientist
and mathematicians expected. The actual discovery of chaos was purely accidental. It was
discovered in the early nineteen sixties by Edward Lorenz whose name was come up again
when we put it here. Lorenz was a physicist who studied atmospheric phenomena and at that
point in his career he was developing relatively simple model for atmospheric processes, a
third order non linear differential equation which is really nothing special, it looks like any
other differential equation and in the early sixties simulation using a computer was not the
easiest thing, it was pretty slow process, so what he did is he broke it down into several parts,
so he did some of it, on one day he stopped, he recorded the values that he calculated and the
idea was to continue the next day and simulate for a longer period of time. Surprisingly what
he got the next day did not match what he had on the first day and this threw him off because
he thought there must be some kind of air in the software that he wrote or some other glitch
that he was not aware, after much analysis he realized that the problem was something
different, the problem was that at the end of the first day of simulation he had rounded off his
results to four decimal points which in normal simulation is not a big deal at all. If you round
things off a little bit, your accuracy might be off a little bit but certainly not to the point that
you cannot recognize the pattern. Well, here it seemed to make a huge difference and what
Lorenz discovered was really one of the trademarks of chaos. The fact that it is extraordinarily
sensitive to small perturbations either in the initial conditions or in the parameters describing
the system or both. What we are used to in normal physics, in classical physics for example is
that small perturbations have small effects, so few deals for example with the pendulum and
try to repeat an experiment you are never going to get quite the same initial conditions but it
doesn’t matter much if you are off at the fifth decimal point you will get pretty much the same
answer, not so in chaos theory where I use the term extraordinarily sensitive but it would
actually be more accurate to say infinitely sensitive. That is not something you expect to see in
physical systems, infinite sensitivity but you actually do in chaos and that means that every
little thing that happens in this room, somewhere else in this galaxy or beyond could
conceivably alter the pattern of the phenomenon that he observed of that, hypersensitivity is
one of the things that characterizes chaos. Once himself use a very nice metaphor, he refer to
it as the butterfly effect. So when, this theory of him became widely accepted and that took
about ten years because his result was not recognized as important early on, he gave a talk at
a conference and here is the term butterfly effect in the following sense: he said that the
movement of a butterfly wings in the amazon rainforest could conceivably affect the long term
weather patterns in China and mathematically speaking this is not an exaggeration it really
could happen because the systems are so extraordinarily sensitive to small changes that we
have to better have in mind. Having said that, let’s take a closer look at what chaos theory
really implies when it comes to unknowable truths and propositions. In science we generally
have two different ways of establishing fact of very fang theories. We either look for repeated
experiments or we use computer simulation, preferably we do both. It turns out that in chaos
theory both of this fail us to certain extents, we can do certain things but certain things will be
off limits. So, when you look at each one of these and then examine how this might give rise to
unknowable truths, so first we look at repeated experiments and I already hinted at what
might be the problem here. When you repeat experiments in classical systems you can never
repeat them identically you’ll always have a slightly different setup, might differ on the fifth,
sixth term decimal it is extraordinarily accurate but it is never quite the same and in a normal
system that makes no difference, your solutions will be more or less indistinguishable, in chaos
does. So realistically if you are working with such a system, no matter how accurate your
replication is of this process you will always get different results but not immediately. If you
have two experiments done with a chaotic system, one of them might give you a solution
which starts here and goes on like that.
Another one might start at the same point and for a while it will be identical to your original
pattern but then it’ll start changing and after a while they will have nothing to do with each
other what so ever

So we have a kind of long term unpredictability which is really another trademark of chaotic
systems. So, no matter how small this difference is initially. It could be at the twentieth
decimal point for all we know eventually these two outcomes are going to be different so a
correct assessment of this when it comes to repeated experiments were telling that in the
short term yes. You can validate the dynamic behavior of the system experimentally but in the
long term you simply cannot because of its infinite sensitivity to initial conditions and it does
make a difference for phenomena like weather. This is why short term weather prediction
works and long-term weather prediction best because simply put such sensitivity makes it
impossible for us to predict exactly how the system will evolve in the long term and it’s not like
we will be able to solve this with more powerful computers because you are not dealing with
high accuracy and high sensitivity, you are dealing with infinite sensitivity and whatever we
build will ultimately be finite and our precision will be finite and at some point the behavior of
our system will become unpredictable. Now, the reason we refer to this as a practically
unknowable truth is the fact that while they do differ and we have no idea exactly how they do
differ within certain limits, it’s not like of them shoot off to infinity and the other one stays
fine no, they live within certain bounds which we can actually estimate but what happens
within those bunds is simply put unknowable. People always say oh yeah, maybe will refine the
model and it will become knowable and that is really not the case when it comes to chaos
theory because when you look at the models here the most precise as you could possibly
imagine they are no less deterministic than the model that describes how pendulum moves or
how simple circuit works or something like that, they are fully deterministic. There is nothing
about the system that we do not know when it comes to modeling. The only problem is that
the initial conditions will have to be specified with infinite precision that’s the problem that we
cannot work or way round by changing the mall, it is the nature of the model itself that makes
this problem an acute one. Alright so if we can do repeated experiments what about computer
simulation well, they are problem there as well which I’ll try to illustrate in a slightly different
way but before I do that let me set out some parameters in particular, when computer
simulations make sense. They make sense if you can predict the long term behavior of the
system using a much shorter simulation. So, for example if you want to determine how your
system behaves over a period of 100 minutes you could do that

Chaos theory

La teoría del caos sugiere la existencia de relaciones en los sistemas complejos que no
pueden ser observadas empíricamente. En la teoría del caos ocurre que ante pequeñas
discrepancias de cualquier tipo podemos tener consecuencias dramáticas, y pueden
alterar totalmente la salida. Sumado a que estos errores no son evitables en la práctica,
tenemos que la observación experimental solo nos facilita un rango de información
limitada sobre el comportamiento de los sistemas complejos.
La sensibilidad extraordinaria de estos sistemas hace que no puedan ser tratados por
separado. Si el movimiento de una mariposa en california afecta la temperatura en china,
entonces para modelar el fenómeno del caos con precisión debemos incluir todo el
entorno. No es necesario decirlo pero desarrollar modelos tan inmensos es casi imposible.
Es importante reconocer, que esto es solo una parte del problema. Aunque nosotros
obtengamos una descripción matemática perfecta del sistema en caos, predecir su
comportamiento a largo plazo requerirá una precisión numérica infinita. Esto demuestra
que es claramente algo inalcanzable para nosotros, con lo que es razonable decir que
existen cosas de los sistemas complejos que no van ser conocidos por nosotros.

Quantum mechanics

Existe una diferencia fundamental entre la incertidumbre encontrada en caos y la que se

puede encontrar en mecánica cuántica. En el caso del caos, se estableció que la
incertidumbre puede desaparecer si tenemos completo conocimiento de las condiciones
iniciales y de los valores de los parámetros. Esto requiere precisión ilimitada lo cual es
imposible en la práctica, pero no en la teoría. En mecánica cuántica por el otro lado
ninguna cantidad de información adicional nos va a permitir predecir lo que vamos a
medir.

Pero, aunque los sistemas de mecánica cuántica no pueden ser conocidos en total detalle,
esta incertidumbre no se extiende en el dominio de experiencia humana normal. Esta
conclusión surge del hecho que el comportamiento de objetos macroscópicos
generalmente reflejan las propiedades estadísticas de una larga colección de partículas.

Tengo que poner mi posicion entre la ciencia y la religion. Elegir uno o mas temas de los
que dimos y expandirme, marco teorico, y explicación de por que elegi esos temas