Our speaker on Tuesday 16 September 2014 is Professor Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials and Director of the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Oxford.
Prof Andrew Briggs on The Penultimate Curiosity
Don’t worry, he is not going to talk about quantum information! He plans to talk about curiosity, about whether there is anything different about the search for religious truth. If you are curious about big questions, bring a like-minded friend. On the other hand, if you aren’t curious about anything at all, ask yourself why not! The condition could be curable.
Have you ever asked your friends what they’d like to know more about? Some people might say, “I’d love to know more about the private lives of celebrities”. To others, that seems stupid, but if such attitudes did not exist, newspapers, magazines and TV would have to go back to giving their followers very different stuff to read about.
Others might respond, “I’d like to know how to grow better vegetables” or “how to rescue my computer from a Windows crash”. But many people are not really very curious about anything. They just take life as it comes. Those who are determined to find the answer to really big questions are very valuable members of our society, because the answers they dig up are useful to everybody.
Western scientists in the past, such as Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday, have usually been keen Christians, and Wikipedia gives a long list of Moslem scientists. (Some of the Moslems played a big part in devising the numbering system we Westerners use everyday). We could well ask whether the attractive force that draws men and women to science and mathematics also pre-disposes them to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Even scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins have shown a lot of interest in religion, if only to debunk it.
Professor Andrew Briggs
Our speaker on Tuesday 16 September 2014 is Professor Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials and Director of the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Oxford. Don’t worry, he is not going to talk about quantum information! He plans to talk about curiosity, about whether there is anything different about the search for religious truth. If you are curious about big questions, bring a like-minded friend. On the other hand, if you aren’t curious about anything at all, ask yourself why not! The condition could be curable.
Professor Briggs summarises his talk as follows:
The curiosity that leads to the search for religious understanding and the curiosity that leads to the search for scientific understanding have common origins in aspects of the human mind that go back as far as the earliest records of human intellectual endeavour. Andrew discusses these development paths & how they can be viewed as mutually consistent.