In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal experience and empirical evidence in shaping one's understanding.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell highlights a key distinction between the approach to understanding in Quakerism and research science. In Quakerism, individuals revise their understanding of God based on personal experiences, suggesting that faith is influenced by subjective realities. Meanwhile, in research science, the focus is on revising models based on objective data derived from experiments, emphasizing a systematic and objective pursuit of knowledge. This comparison underscores the balance between subjective and objective forms of understanding in different contexts.
In practice
During a seminar on the intersection of science and spirituality, this quote can illustrate diverse approaches to understanding reality.
There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they'd had more diversity, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.
Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
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