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.
I am not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach.
Who is the most favored of God? He from whom the greatest good comes to His creatures.
There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
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