Augustine Pamplany CST
Walter Kohn (1923-2016) is a scientist born in Austria who later accepted the US Citizenship. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. He was chosen for the Nobel prize with John Pople for his contributions to the development of the density functional theory. His discovery had a major impact upon transforming the scienstists’ view of the electronic structure of atoms. His discovery showed that the movement of the electrons in atoms are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics which in turn influences the structure of the atoms.
He obtained his Ph.D. in physics in 1948 from Harvard University. For about two decades, he taught physics at the University of California, San Diego and was the Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics.
He was of Jewish origin and he cherished his Jewish faith very much. As regards the existence of God, he said, “There are essential parts of the human experience about which science intrinsically has nothing to say. I associate them with an entity which I call God.” In a lecture following his interactions with Pope John Paul II in Vatican in 2001, he said, “Certainly science, especially physics and chemistry, is a very important part of my identity. But I also consider myself a religious person, and in two senses: one, based on my liberal Jewish upbringing which I have passed on to my children; the other, a kind of nondenominational deism which springs from my awe of the world of our experiences and is heightened by my identity as a scientist. It also includes a conviction that science alone is an insufficient guide to life, leaving many deep questions unanswered and needs unfulfilled.”
In an Interview in July 2001, he was interviewed on the relationship between science and religion. Between science and religion, he said, there should be, “Mutual respect. They are complementary important parts of the human experience.” In this interview he clarified his views on the deistic understanding of God: “I see no reason to believe that every once in a while the laws of nature, that as scientists we study, are suspended by divine intervention. But at the same time I do not see the universe as necessarily proceeding in a simple, totally predictable, mechanistic fashion. There continue to be very deep epistemological questions about the significance of sharp scientific laws like the laws of quantum mechanics and the laws that govern the nature of chaos.”
He stated that both quantum mechanics and chaos theory have literally eliminated the purely deterministic and mechanistic view of the world that was seemingly dominant in the atheistic philosophies of the 17th to 19th century. For him, though the world is comprehensible for sciences in several ways, there are incomprehensible elements as well in the universe.
