THE RELIGION OF MAX PLANCK
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Quote:
Max Planck: "Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on April 23, 1858, in Kiel, Germany, the sixth child of a distinguished jurist and professor of law at the University of Kiel. The long family tradition of devotion to church and state, excellence in scholarship, incorruptibility, conservatism, idealism, reliability, and generosity became deeply ingrained in Planck's own life and work...

In his later years, Planck devoted more and more of his writings to philosophical, aesthetic, and religious questions.

Together with Einstein and Schrödinger, he remained adamantly opposed to the indeterministic, statistical worldview introduced by Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and others into physics after the advent of quantum mechanics in 1925-26. Such a view was not in harmony with Planck's deepest intuitions and beliefs.

The physical universe, Planck argued, is an objective entity existing independently of man; the observer and the observed are not intimately coupled, as Bohr and his school would have it."
[Source: http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/Planck/mplanck/mplanck.html].

From: Rich Deem, "Famous Scientists Who Believed in God", last modified 19 May 2005, on "Evidence for God from Science" website (http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html; viewed 5 October 2005):

Planck made many contributions to physics, but is best known for quantum theory, which has revolutionized our understanding of the atomic and sub-atomic worlds.

In his 1937 lecture "Religion and Naturwissenschaft," Planck expressed the view that God is everywhere present, and held that "the holiness of the unintelligible Godhead is conveyed by the holiness of symbols." Atheists, he thought, attach too much importance to what are merely symbols.

Planck was a churchwarden from 1920 until his death, and believed in an almighty, all-knowing, beneficent God (though not necessarily a personal one). [I suspect that he would agree: GOD is Being, not A being.]

Both science and religion wage a "tireless battle against skepticism and dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition" with the goal "toward God!"

[Source:] J. L. Heillron, Dilemmas of an Upright Man (1986)

http://www.adherents.com/people/pp/Max_Planck.html[b][/b]

Last edited by Revlgking; 07/23/10 09:58 PM. Reason: Always helpful!

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