In my view, Michael Faraday's postulations were in the realm of what we call "religion" today, because without mathematical formulae, he could only hope that his experiments would return the same result each time they were performed. And they did.
OK; some may consider it far-fetched to liken Faraday's experiments to religion because although he could not express his findings mathematically, he could nonetheless demonstrate the behaviour of his magnetic and electric materials to observers. I humbly submit that Faraday could do this only because the time required for his experiments to "mature" was infinitesimally small, compared to the time required for religious invocations to play out. If you are confused at this stage, don't worry, so am I.
I am confused because of Inertia. The phenomenon of Inertia cuts across material and non-material things/objects. Recall my earlier posting on how the continent of Antarctica reminds one of Tom and Jerry or the Road-runner and the Coyote? Those are material things whose behaviours vis-a-vis inertia are presumably explained by Newton's laws of motion. But inertia does not end there.
Society's behaviour exhibits characteristics typical of manifestations of inertia, but the related inertial behaviour takes much longer to play itself out. The most despicable tyrants take over countries, legally or otherwise. They subject their people to untold suffering, all the while thinking that the people either love them or are too afraid to forcefully get rid of them. But eventually social inertia asserts itself and the dictator is sent to the dustbins of history. Only those dictators who adapt their methods to the restorative reactions of social inertia last any significant time.
There is no country on earth which does not "cycle" its leadership. Various methods are employed - son or daughter succeeds father/grandfather; sister succeeds brother; a "place-holder" is installed while a son is being groomed. All these are exhibitions of social inertia. The opponents of the recycling may have a very good reason to oppose it, but they too acknowledge the futility of confronting social inertia at the wrong time.
In my view, one of the greatest acknowledgements of social inertia occurred when the Soviet Union came into being. This was a union based on a philosophy that negated religion, but if you examine the soviet flag (hammer and sickle) you can't help feeling that it looks like the Muslim crescent and an Orthodox cross. In other words even the anti-religious Bolsheviks could not help subliminally installing religious symbols on their banners to stave off negative reaction due to social inertia.
And so in my view, humanity's inability this far, to formulate a mathematical equation that cuts across material and non-material phenomena, and explains God and religion in terms of the principle of inertia, is no different from Michael Faraday's inability to formulate mathematical equations to explain his experimental observations in electricity and magnetism. We know that Faraday's experiments have since been mathematically explained; it is therefore foolhardy to deny that non-material Inertia (and God) may one day be mathematically explained.
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