Augustine Pamplany CST
Robert Aumann ((1930-) is a Jewish mathematician who became a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him for his researches in the field of conflict and cooperation through game theory. Aumann was born in in an orthodox Jewish family. In 1938, his family had to flee from Nazi Germany to the US. He obtained a B.Sc. in Mathematics and pursued advanced mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a Ph.D in 1955.
Aumann is an economist, mathematician, a rational scientist as well as a deeply religious person. Such multidisciplinary attributes are central facets of Aumann’s personality. He was a pure mathematician who developed the game theory and showed its importance in in economics. Thus he is an epitome of interdisciplinary or unified view of truth and rational behaviour. He refused to be an ivory tower thinker and got in touch with real-life phenomena in its complexities. Understandably, he is one of the founders of the Multidisciplinary Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
While underscoring the complementarity of diverse branches of knowledge, he does not fail to acknowledge the differences and unique methodologies of each discipline. He greatly emphasizes the values of both science and religion recognizing the difference between the two: “Religion is very different from science…. Religion is an experience mainly an emotional and aesthetic one. It is not about whether the earth is 5,765 years old. …. Belief is an important part of religion, certainly; but in science we have certain ways of thinking about the world, and in religion we have different ways of thinking about the world. Those two things coexist side by side without conflict.”
Of science and faith, he said, “Science and faith are two different ways to see the world. And both are in our head…. It is like having paintings by Tiziano, Picasso, or Matisse at Home. Different styles that portray people in different ways. We don’t need to choose between one or the other. I don’t believe them to be contrary. We just need to consider… that the scientific description of the world is made of models and the world is not a model.”
He applies the same pattern of thinking to understanding God too. For him, God stands for a model of thinking or meaning-making. “This is an example of what is behind the figure of God, call it a model, a way of thinking, a way of living…. God is a way of thinking of our lives; translated into practical terms, it tells us how to live as human beings.” His idea of science, religion and God provide space for the co-existence of diverse views and ideas of truth: “Truth is in our minds. If we are sufficiently broad-minded, then we can simultaneously entertain different ideas of truth, different models, different views of the world.”
