Science and Philosophy

I found this article in this week's Science Times, on the extreme improbability of the Big Bang. Basically it says that the chance that our universe came into existence due to a "giant fart" (as my old Sunday School teacher so disparagingly put it) is much much less likely than the chance of finding bodiless brains floating around in space.

I can't help thinking what a random comparison this is- almost like asking why aren't apples oranges and oranges apples? I also find myself thinking about the nature of probabilities- they are, after just probabilities, only saying what is likely to happen. What actually happens is a different matter (this is where I refrain from making a horrible pun concerning matter, you're welcome). Unless you're a cat in a box- then apparently, you're both dead and alive until someone opens the box and finds out that you're actually dead. Or alive. Yep, makes just about as much sense as a unicorn on a bowling ball.

I also find myself thinking about the divide between philosophy and science that happened a few centuries ago. In the beginning, there was the Word, yes, but also, science and philosophy were one- science was a subcategory of philosophy in Ancient Greece up until the 17th or 18th century. But then science (and other fields) became more and more specialized, and they sort of became at odds with each other with respect to their goals, one driven by metaphysical questions of how we know in general, and the other by empirical questions of what we know specifically through our senses.

These days with the rise of quantum mechanics and also brain research, it seems like the domains of philosophy and science are intersecting again, and this is especially noticeable in this article, where reincarnation is being discussed alongside cosmology. Cosmologists are wondering whether they should consider other universes that may be bubbling forth zillions of light years away when doing their calculations, but that doesn't make sense to me. How can you study something scientifically if you can't see it? See meaning detect, of course. The reassuring thing about science is that you can test your results by trying to manipulate things or create things artificially. You push something, it falls, cause and effect. Of course, philosophers would object saying how do you know for sure that that's the cause, maybe there was in intermediary cause that was the real cause...there's all these objections, but the wonder of science is that we are surrounded by results that come from our manipulations that show that we are onto something, at least. Genetically-enhanced food, cloning, robots controlled by mere thought, the list is endless.

What other field of knowledge has such a list? Someday, would we know enough about this so-called "God" to actually be able to manipulate him? Highly, highly doubt it. But that's a totally different situation, right? He's not supposed to be tangible, therefore rendering him un-manipulatable. Right...totally different situations.