"Silly that"?
Hardly. The capital T thingie is what man has sought since the ape was first capable of thought. Surely you'd grant that "why are we here?" has been asked for at least several generations, no?
I haven't been in a serious religious discussion, at least I don't recall having been in one, in quite some time. It is "silly" to discuss religion imo. Too personal, entirely subjective, etc.
As an aside to this longish debate about whether mythology and science belong in the same classroom, I thought I'd point out the idiocy of believing that the two can ever cross paths to Scott (as I'm sure Ben would agree, but not necessarily for the same reasons). In past discussions in other forums, my interpretation of Ben's remarks is that he believes there is a true, reliable relationship between the laws of mathematics and reality.
If science were ever to "come close enough" to modeling T so that the "models were consistent with religious convictions" as has been suggested by both parties in this thread, at best that would make science a subset of religious convictions. At worst, that would mean that science was fundamentally flawed. But science simply cannot ever get close to T because of the ambiguity of the relationship between the laws of mathematics and reality. Is that relationship close? Yeah, well, kinda. We tend to ignore things that bother us too much, like yeah, we kind of cheat in physics (1/n = 0 for sufficiently large n, and such) Is that relationship certain? No.
If T is ever to be achieved, and contrary to what you might think it will continue to be sought for as long as there are humans, it will not come from science, but from religion. That, in a nutshell, is the statement I think Ben would argue with.
Science and mathematics are very interesting games, and nothing more. It may well be argued that T is the only thing worth using our brains for.
