Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Science, Faith and Society by Polanyi

In his 1963 preface to his 1946 book Science, Faith and Society, Michael Polanyi says many interesting things.

The creative life of such a community rests on a belief in the ever continuing possibility of revealing still hidden truths. In Science, Faith and Society, I interpreted this as a belief in a spiritual reality, which, being real, will bear surprising fruit indefinitely. To-day I should prefer to call it a belief in the reality of emergent meaning and truth.

He died in the 70's. Wow, wouldn't he have loved to see where science and technology are now.

Evidently he is reponsible in part for this idea of "emergence", something that I presently find fascinating, meaningful, and worthy of deeper investigation.

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