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Volume 5 Summer 2013 Volume 5 Summer 2013 Academic Partners Cover image M.C. Escher, Dewdrop (1948). Mezzotint Editors Ulisses Barres de Almeida Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas [email protected] Juan Rojo TH Unit, PH Division, CERN [email protected] [email protected] Academic Partners Fondazione CEUR Consortium Nova Universitas Copyright © 2013 by Associazione EURESIS The user may not modify, copy, reproduce, retransmit or otherwise distribute this publication and its contents (whether text, graphics or original research content), without express permission in writing from the Editors. Where the above con- tent is directly or indirectly repro- duced in an academic context, this must be acknowledge with the ap- propriate bibliographical citation. The opinions stated in the papers of the Euresis Journal are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editors or the members of the Euresis Association or its sponsors. Euresis Journal (ISSN 2239-2742), a publication of Associazione Eu- resis, an Association for the Pro- motion of Scientific Endevour, Via Caduti di Marcinelle 2, 20134 Mi- lano, Italia. www.euresisjournal.org Contact information: Email. [email protected] Tel.+39-022-1085-2225 Fax. +39-022-1085-2222 Graphic design and layout Lorenzo Morabito Technical Editor Davide PJ Caironi This document was created us- ing LATEX 2" and X LE ATEX 2 Letter from the Editors Dear reader, As with our previous four issues, we are glad to present the proceedings of yet another San Marino Symposium, which took place in 2007, on the theme of "Science, Reason and Truth". These proceedings were originally meant to be published elsewhere, but due to reasons external to Euresis, the process was greatly delayed and we finally publish this volume within our Journal. The theme of the 2007 SM Symposium was inspired by the title of the Rimini Meeting: "Truth is the destiny for which we have been made". These words by Luigi Giussani remind us that the idea of \truth" is present in our cultural tradition as a foundational concept. For Giussani, truth is a constitutive el- ement in our nature, manifested as a fundamental need of reason. But regardless of that, the modern cultural climate forces us to ask a pressing question: does it still make sense to speak of truth in our times? Or has this view of reality been superseded by another, where the detailed descrip- tion of the scientific laws and the quantification of the interactions between the elements of the world are enough to satisfy man's thirst for knowledge? As we grow in our understanding of natural phenomena, the idea of what it means to have knowledge of the natural world seems to coincide with the causal descriptions that we are able to provide within the framework of the scientific disciplines. For instance, our concept of life is ever more linkedto the understanding of the DNA, and the measurement of cosmological param- eters offers the potential for a self-contained description of the Universe. The question about the existence and the possibility of knowledge of truth becomes even more relevant then, when we realise that the kind of certain- ties that science can provide us with are marked by limitations of method, observational capabilities, and lack of complete information. Scientific truth is determined by concepts such as 'domains of validity', for example, and even if science gradually and continually progresses to a greater understand- ing of natural phenomena, its certainties will always have a provisional and limited character, which may seem to keep any final truth forever out of reach. Even in the face of these intrinsic limitations of the scientific method, and of conceptual open problems such as the interpretation of quantum mechanical systems or G¨odel'sincompleteness theorem, it seems to us that truth remains a fundamentally relevant concept, and crucial also in the scientific adventure |not because its existence can be secured by the many scientific discoveries, neither because it is fully reachable through them, but because it is afirmed and required as a fundamental necessity of reason itself. Reason, this mysterious energy of man which the Christian tradition identi- fies with man's \imago Dei", is indeed what provides the links that connect all things into an ordered, unified world-view. Reason, by its natural dynamism is rooted in the concept of truth |a \positive hypothesis" which renders reality understandable, or at least a path towards knowledge possible to be followed. The contributions in this volume are a testimony that the question of truth, before being a judgement on the objectivity or subjectivity of the knowledge of reality, is intimately related to our conception and use of reason, as the movement of reaching out to the knowledge of things starts within man, the only being capable of a conscious relation with others, and not outside him. This volume is dedicated to the memory of our long time collaborator and friend, Peter Hodgson, who passed away in 2008. His contribution to this volume is yet another testimony of his everlasting quest for beauty, truth and meaning. The Editors. 3 Table of contents Letter from the Editor pag. 3 Science, reason and truth. An interdisciplinary engagement pag. 7 Marco Bersanelli, Charles L. Harper Jr and Peter van Inwagen Organizers The nature of the laws of physics and their mysterious biofriendliness pag. 15 Paul Davies Arizona State University Wonder and knowledge: scientific investigation and the breadth of human reason pag. 37 Marco Bersanelli Universit`adi Milano The given as gift: Creation and disciplinary abstraction in science pag. 61 David Schindler The Catholic University of America God's order, man's order and the order of Nature pag. 99 Nancy Cartwright Durham University The \revolution" of Plate Tectonics in earth sciences and the relationship between science, reason and truth pag. 109 Xavier Le Pichon Coll`egede France Limitations on our understanding of the behavior of sim- plified physical systems pag. 125 Harvey M. Friedman Ohio State University Narrative and the knowledge of persons pag. 153 Eleonore Stump Saint Louis University The European enlightenment and the age of reason pag. 171 Keith Ward Oxford University Philosophy, politics, and objective truth pag. 191 Peter van Inwagen University of Notre Dame Self-trust and the natural desire for truth pag. 209 Linda T. Zagzebski University of Oklahoma The search for truth in science and theology pag. 225 Peter Hodgson University of Oxford 4 The shifting aspects of truth in mathematics pag. 249 Enrico Bombieri Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton 5 Volume 5 Summer 2013 Science, reason and truth. An interdisciplinary engagement Volume 5 Marco Bersanelli1, Charles L. Harper Jr2 and Peter van Summer 2013 Inwagen3 journal homepage www.euresisjournal.org 1 Universit`adi Milano, Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Festa del Perdono 7 - 20122 Milano, Italy. Marco. [email protected] 2 The John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Foundation Press, 300 Con- shohoken State Road, Suite 550 - West Conshohocken, PA 19428 USA. [email protected] 3 University of Notre Dame, Dept. of Philosophy, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556-4619 USA. [email protected] Abstract \In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a discovery of mine, but rather as something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up. These words by the great astrophysicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Nobel laureate in physics in 1983, beautifully describe a fundamental trait of scientific knowledge. While there is no progress in science without the systematic application of a rigorous methodology, surprise and unexpectedness are often components of scientific discoveries at all scales, from the daily advances in an average research laboratory to the major breakthroughs of quantum mechanics and relativistic physics in the twentieth century. The progress of science continuously opens up wider horizons on the physical world and new findings often challenge our imagination and common sense. To citea recent example, cosmologists have come to understand that almost all our universe, something like 95% of its mass-energy content, is composed of two distinct unknowns, an unknown kind of energy and an unknown kind of matter. We have stumbled on the evidence for this state of affairs with no premonition of the existence of these things. These gigantic discoveries were a complete surprise to everybody. Science can be like that. 1. The San Marino 2007 Symposium The statement by Chandrasekhar seems to point to something that is not confined to the natural sciences, rather, it indicates a feature that is common to many other fields of investi- gation. For every discipline, whatever the methods it employs, truth is something out there to be discovered: it is not a product of definition, it is not constructed by human thought, but it is rather the result of an encounter with a reality outside the investigator. It is something that |on occasion| we happen to bump into without prior notice. This issue of Euresis Journal hosts a number of contributions presented at the 2007 edition of the San Marino Symposium on Science, reason and truth. Due to a number of unfortunate circumstances { independent from the San Marino Symposium organization { these proceed- 7 Science, reason and truth Volume 5 Summer 2013 ings are published quite late; however, the central content of each paper remains perfectly valid and, when relevant, revisions have been applied by the authors. The theme of the San Marino Symposium was inspired by the title of the Rimini Meeting of that year: Truth is the destiny for which we have been made. These words, taken from a book by Don Luigi Giussani, are suggestive of the yearning for an ultimate meaning that characterises human experience.
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