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Believing what can’t be proven

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I thank Catherine for pointing out edge.org's What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?. I see that at least Catherine, Lloyd, Lynn, and Laura have presented some of their own answers or intimations of answers. The question is certainly one of those big and sloppy ones. But it is hardly a novel one, so I am bemused by the interest that edge.org's posing of the question has generated.

The question is a tough one to answer for me because I need to fight the temptation to be comprehensive, definitive, and exacting in whatever I might write today. I also don't want to go for the most basic or obvious (for example, that I believe in the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God or that Jesus was that God Incarnate) but feel the need to make such fundamental statements because they are in such contradistinction to the vast majority of "third culture" scientists who share what I'm guessing is the largely unarticulated (and I might add unproven) belief that there is no God.

I want to move beyond a meta-discussion. I will just throw myself out on a limb and throw out a bunch of things I believe are true but can't prove:

  • there is no odd perfect number

  • the humanities will never be reducible to physics

  • in fact, chemistry will never be reducible to physics

  • our knowledge of physics will always be limited and subject to expansion

  • Bach is the greatest composer ever

  • life is a miracle

  • love even more so

Andrew Ross and Bach

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I was excited to learn that Andrew Ross, the classical
music critic for The New Yorker Magazine
has a blog:The Rest
Is Noise. I developed a special interest in Ross after using of a quote by
Ross in my essay The
Cosmic Bach?:

    "When people talk about Bach, they often sound
    like Erich von Stroheim in 'Sunset Boulevard,' as he intones, in
    tribute to Norma Desmond, 'She vas de greatest of dem all.' .... One
    can end up saying, in a distinctly off-putting way, not only that
    Bach...is the greatest but also that everything else is worthless."

Some other references to J. S. Bach in Ross' blog are:

The Rest Is Noise: Escaping the Museum: 

                
     Were Baroque listeners uncultured

idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in
society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like
gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.

  • Alex
    Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Abba to Zywny    : 

                    
       When it comes to the central figures

    of musical history, the Grove gets the proportions right. Beethoven is
    still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned
    pages of biography and analysis. As in the previous edition,
    Beethoven’s works are written up flawlessly by Joseph Kerman, the dean
    of American musicologists. J. S. Bach gets thirty-six pages, Schubert
    thirty-four, Haydn thirty-three, Handel thirty-one, Mozart
    twenty-nine.

    Happily ensconsed in Toronto

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    I am happily settling into the life of my own family in Toronto but am surprised by how fatigued I am. I slept a very sound 9 hours the last two nights, which is much more than the typical seven hours I get in Berkeley. Yesterday, I felt energetic, but after lunch today, I started to feel really weary. What's going on? Am I coming down with something? I need to remind myself that for many, many years that my visits to Toronto were opportunities to sleep and rest. I am somehow able to give myself permission or space (at some deep subconscious level perhaps) to sleep in.