Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

Cambridge professor Sir Arthur Eddington described one of his lectures as an attempt to “dispel the feeling that in using the eye . . . of the soul [for] our conception of reality, we are doing something irrational and disobeying the leading of truth which as scientists we are pledged to serve.” Among his many brilliant and insightful statements, which, by the way, today’s new aggressive materialist atheists would do well to ponder, is the following:

“That consciousness is ruled by laws of physics and chemistry is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar. In human affairs [law] means a rule . . . which may be kept or broken. In science it means a rule which is never broken. . . . Thus in the physical world what a body does and what a body ought to do are equivalent; but we are well aware of another domain where they are anything but equivalent. We cannot get away from this distinction. . . . The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think. . . . However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought—that it may be correct or incorrect. . . . [Truth] involves recognizing a domain . . . of laws which ought to be kept but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural law may swallow religion; it can’t even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.”