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Philosophy and worldview

Heisenberg admired Eastern philosophy and saw parallels between it and quantum mechanics, describing himself as in "complete agreement" with the book The Tao of Physics. Heisenberg even went as far to state that after conversations with Rabindranath Tagore about Indian philosophy "some of the ideas that seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense". Regarding the laws of nature he remarked that "the concept of 'the law of nature' cannot be completely objective, the word 'law' being a purely human principle".

Regarding the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heisenberg disliked Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus but he liked "very much the later ideas of Wittgenstein and his philosophy about language."

Heisenberg, a devout Christian, wrote: "We can console ourselves that the good Lord God would know the position of the particles, thus He would let the causality principle continue to have validity", in his last letter to Albert Einstein. Einstein continued to maintain that quantum physics must be incomplete because it implies that the universe is indeterminate at a fundamental level.

In lectures given in the 1950s and later published as Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg contended that scientific advances were leading to cultural conflicts. He stated that modern physics is "part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world".

When Heisenberg accepted the Romano Guardini Prize in 1974, he gave a speech, which he later published under the title Scientific and Religious Truth. He mused:

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

Heisenberg referred to nature as "God's second book" (the first being the Bible) and believed that "Physics is reflection on the divineideas of Creation; therefore physics is divine service". This was because "God created the world in accordance with his ideas of creation" and humans can understand the world because "Man was created as the spiritual image of God".