Reflection: Eifelheim

As you can probably guess, my post is going to be based on that YouTube video. Go ahead and watch!

Feynman, in this set of interviews from the 1980s, almost outright refuses to answer the interview's question. "How do you answer why something happens?" I think this has important implications for Eifelheim, especially as we watch the Krenken try to decode why things are happening around them. As Feynman points out, a visitor from another planet has no concept of basic answers to the question why, since they're unaware of the social underpinnings of the answer; they don't understand the context of the answer. "I'm telling you how difficult the why question is... I can't understand magnetic forces in terms of anything that you're familiar with because I don't understand it in terms of anything you're familiar with."

The concept of "how we know" is deep in the heart of Eifelheim. The most obvious examples of faulty logic is Dietrich's trust in the sometimes erroneous Greek and Christian philosophers. Compare this to the Krenken's "post-Einstein" stellar knowledge, the world views, and the answers to why is drastically different. But the logical extension of this is ask if Dietrich's supposedly erroneous claims are valid. What makes them not true? This takes us to the fundamental question posed in class - what is the difference between science fact versus religious faith?

"That's just one thing you'll have to take as an element in the world." Feynmen sounded a little fundamentalist there, didn't he? It sounds a lot like faith, at least on the surface. On our sister blog, the poster said that faith has no underlying metonymic qualities; it is irreducible to data-points. This fits nicely with my pre-existing world view, and something akin to what PTJ defined faith as in class. But how do we reconcile that with Feynman, who is making a pretty clear point that if you can't do high level mathematics, you have to take a physicists word for it. The layman's understanding of physical phenomenons is something akin to faith.

Therefore, I call for another definition of faith, a more personal version at that. Faith is belief in an idea when oneself is incapable of answering the why. This, of course, has wide implications on the religious and scientific spheres of influence, as it puts personal knowledge we thought we were sure of to the test. Let me add a reminder: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It is the "scientific" principle that tells us that we cannot be sure of anything in the world which we perceive. If we connect the two, our result is almost dumbfounding: all human knowledge as an element of faith in it. And if all human knowledge is as easily disproven as Dietrich's world view, we are in a shockingly naive state as humans.