Excerpts from The New York Times, Tempe, Ariz., November 24, 2007, with comments by Yours Truly
Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses.
Wrong. The testing of hypotheses takes place in the context of assumptions that remain untested, even though it is usually claimed, wrongly, that they have been tested as well, and that they are therefore “scientifically established.” There is more crap strutting about as “scientific fact” than you can readily imagine.
Religion, by contrast, is based on faith.
Everything is based on faith, only scientists don’t seem to know this. When you sit down on a chair, your implicit faith is that it won’t collapse. When you set about doing something with a purpose in mind, your faith is that you can achieve this purpose. The nasty thing about science is that it clips the wings of your faith, thereby drastically limiting your potential.
The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference.
Another rationalistic distortion, albeit one made up by the apostle John himself. If you want to know what and why Thomas was doubting, check out his own account. Thomas was a mystic who had found Jesus inside himself. For a mystic, the resurrection story lacks point. (Death, where is your sting?)
Jesus said to his disciples: “Make a comparison and tell me whom I am like.” Simon Peter said to him: “Thou art like an angel of righteousness.” Matthew said to him: “Thou art like a wise man (philosophos).” Thomas said to him: “Master, my mouth will not at all be capable of saying whom thou art like.” And Jesus said gently, am not thy master, because thou hast drunk, thou hast become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have measured out. And he took him and they withdrew. He spoke three words to him. When Thomas came back to his companions they asked him, “What did Jesus say to thee?” Thomas said to them: “If I tell you what he said to me, you will take up stones and throw them at me.” [Logion 13]
What were those three words? Not “I am the son of man,” for that expression was simply the Aramaic way of saying “I am an ordinary man like everybody else.” Not “I am the son of God,” for in none of the gospels did Jesus say that, and nobody referred to him in that way during his lifetime. Likewise nowhere did Jesus say that he wanted to be the Jewish messiah, let alone the Saviour-God of the Roman Empire. I’d put my money on something like the Vedantic tat twam asi: “This thou art,” meaning you are the One who has become All. It is not surprising that we can trace this same Thomas later preaching his gospel of oneness as far away as India, a country where he could speak of the oneness of God and man without being stoned, and could even be understood.
In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
When you have genuine spiritual experiences, a healthy skepticism is at least as important, otherwise you get stuck in mental constructions based on a very preliminary set of experiences. On the other hand, when you study science, there is a lot of stuff that you have to take on faith. You are told that whatever you are told can be verified, but that’s equally true of genuine mystical experience. Now I let Paul Davies come to the point.
The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
Come on! The general framework of theoretical physics is a bunch of algorithms for calculating the probabilities of possible measurement outcomes on the basis of actual outcomes. Nobody has the slightest idea about the mechanisms or processes that correlate measurement outcomes, not only across time but also across space (i.e., outcomes of measurements that are simultaneous in some reference frames). What is more, there are so-called “no-go” theorems that rule out virtually every explanation that one can think of.
The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs.
Rationally intelligibility? You must be kidding!
The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?
Forget about the metaphysical embroidery that comes with the classical (i.e., pre-quantum) stories about electromagnetism and gravity. The questions remain: where do the laws that correlate measurement outcomes come from, and why do they have the form that they do?
… Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.
A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.
The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue.
Quite so.
There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too…
It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research.
But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Indeed. But will it ever? On the one hand, the well-tested theories (the Standard Model plus General Relativity) are readily seen as logically inevitable, at least as effective theories.* The fundamental theoretical framework of physics presupposes measurements, and the actual occurrence of measurements requires the physical laws to have precisely the form that they do. It’s a simple matter of consistency. This does not touch on the origin of the laws, which is, and will forever remain, as mysterious as the fact that there is anything, rather than nothing at all.
* An effective theory is one that is valid on some but not all scales of length (or energy). One conclusion that can be drawn from the manner in which quantum physics assigns probabilities is that “all scales of length” do not exist. When you conceptually divide the universe into smaller and smaller regions, there comes a point when these regions or conceptual distinctions correspond to nothing in the real world. They exist solely in your head. Which comes to saying that there is no such thing as an “ultimate theory” to which effective theories are approximations. Effective theories are all there is.
