Religion and science, the debate over the existence of God, has been going on for centuries.
Even isaac Newton (1643-1727), a tycoon of science, was a proponent of theism, but Newton believed in "deism," which held that God created the universe and the rules of its existence, after which God no longer had an influence on the development of the world and let it develop according to the laws of physics.
Creationism of God
The main cause of deism was the creation of Newtonian mechanics, which at that time could explain all mechanical phenomena, but had a fatal weakness, namely the "first impulse" problem, which was also the ultimate problem of science, religion and philosophy, and Newton attributed the "first impulse" to God.
God's first impulse
Religions also take a positive view of Newton—God created the world, and Newton discovered God's method of creation.
After Newton, there was also the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), who devoted his life to piety and faith in God, and could not allow any denigration of God to be published before him.
There is even a widely circulated story that Euler, in the court of Catherine II, challenged the atheist Denis Diderot, who was visiting the court at that time: "Sir, e^iπ+1=0, so God exists, please answer!" Denis had no idea how to respond and could only surrender.
The story about Euler may be a fiction of later generations that cannot be verified, but it also shows from the side that Euler is a strong supporter of theism.
But in Euler's time, there was another ambitious scientist who tried to drive "God out of the universe": the physicist and mathematician Pierre-simon laplace (1749-1827).
French scientist Laplace
In order to drive God out of the universe, Laplace insisted on proving his point with rigorous mathematical logic, and bluntly expressed this great belief in his mind, and when Napoleon asked Laplace why there was no God in his doctrine, Laplace proudly said: "I don't need that hypothesis"; this also became the famous saying of the atheists of the time who despised God.
Euler–Laplace equation
The equation, founded by Euler and then popularized by Laplace, exists in all areas of physics and is almost ubiquitous.
In addition to his important contributions to mathematics, Laplace explained the formation of stars and planets in his Cosmological System Theory and Celestial Mechanics, which explained the formation of stars and planets strictly on the principles of mechanics and mathematical reasoning, in which he believed that the solar system was formed from a primordial nebulae, which formed a primordial fireball due to motion and mutual attraction, and the fireball gradually differentiated into planets in the solar system due to further contraction and development due to gravity, and finally formed the current solar system. He also calculated the characteristics of the solar system, strictly mathematically explained the motion and orbit of the planets in the solar system, and his theory was gradually recognized by the scientific community, which was a remarkable achievement at that time.
Sun and Earth
However, his doctrine also leads directly to determinism (also known as Laplace's creed), because according to Newtonian mechanics and atheism, the development of everything in the world is determined by the initial state of the universe at the beginning, which seems to be caught in another "quagmire".
Of course, this problem, until the development of quantum mechanics in the twenty-first century, from a scientific explanation, because the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, from a scientific point of view, denies that "objective things change with human consciousness", in fact, quantum mechanics is a "discounted" determinism, but the explanation also leaves a lot of problems, the most famous is "Schrödinger's cat", about this experiment, but also in my other article "Five Quantum Mechanical Experiments Against Common Sense (Part II)" detailed in this.
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