© 1992 Bryan Appleyard
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
By Bryan Appleyard,
Author Of ‘Understanding The Present: Science And the Soul of Modern Man’ (Picador, 1992)
Here are the last lines of two recent books which have attempted to popularise the latest and weirdest developments in scientific thought.
The first: If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.
The second: We are truly meant to be here.
The first is the closing rhetorical flourish of Stephen Hawkin’s super best-seller, ‘A Brief History of Time’. The second is the conclusion of Paul Davies’s book, ‘The Mind of God’. Both men are physicists, and neither knows what he is talking about.
For Hawking, evoking God is an empty gesture, since he believes in no such being. In the case of Davies, there is a genuine intellectual progression to the idea of a real human purpose. But his terms are hopelessly narrow.
What counts, however, is not the physics, nor the hubristic and muddled ambition of their claims — it’s the fact that both feel qualified by their discipline to say such things, and that, in the case of Hawking, millions have bought the book, presumably in the conviction that he is right.
Scientissts, through such popular channels, are at last coming clean: they, and only they, hold the key to the meaning, purpose and justification of human life. The truth or otherwise of this claim, as well as the question of whether it is the real underlying belief by which we conduct our lives, is the most urgent issue of our age. Indeed, I believe it is the only issue of our age, the decisive debate that shapes all others. If we do not begin to understand science, we cannot claim to understand the present.
For 400 years we have lived in the shadow of the scientific enlightenment. This is the modern age. It began when a number of scientists of genius (primarily Galileo and Newton) exploded the medieval world view, and a number of philosophers (notably Descartes and Kant) struggled to rebuild human certainties in the wake of that detonation. The medieval world was destroyed by the discovery of the quite staggeringly effective intellectual method that we now call science.
In contrast, the new cosmos was a machine. Whether we were part of it or not was irrelevant — it just ground on regardless. Humankind lost its place in the universe. With Charles Darwin, it also lost its place on Earth. Even in the Newtonian machine we could still believe that our lives were special. But Darwin showed we were accidents of deep time and blind evolution.
With Freud, our expulsion from Eden was completed — we were exiled from the world of our own mind, which turned out to be no more than the brutal conflict between instinct and the world, all laced with an extraordinarily vicious death wish.
This is a familiar story to scientists such as Hawking and Davies, and to previous popularisers such as Bronowski and Sagan, but they do not put it quite like this. They see the story as a happy one, a heroic one in which the human mind gradually frees itself from crushing dogma and learns to roam the stars or peer into the minutest workings of matter or life.
What they ignore is the urgent issue of how people are supposed to lead their lives in the aftermath of such insights.
At first, the philosophers did not ignore this. The great enlightenment figures struggled to find a new way of defining the specifically human. This was to prove a truly heroic enterprise because of the odds they were fighting against. For, as time passed and technology improved, science became ever more devastatingly effective.
First it explained the cosmos to those who were qualified to look. But later it produced machines, cured diseases and generated wealth so efficiently that everybody was affected. Science was so flamboyantly good at these things that it must be right, it must be "The Truth’.
The Oddest Thing About The Science I Have Been Describing Is Not Simply That it creates a cosmic machine that does not need us, but that science only actually works on the assumption that we do not exist.
But if it was right in that way, then humankind was a purposeless nothing. Trying to discover meaning or morality in such circumstances was pointless. It was no good pretending: we were alone with whatever values we could construct in the privacy of our own heads. “A dog,” said Charles Darwin, bleakly, “might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
And Freud, with his characteristic tragic sense, wrote: “Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…”
This is the bitter message of classical science. This is ‘The Truth’, but it has no place for us; we can find no basis for our values in the world. Most scientists circumvent this problem by insisting on the limitation of their field, by saying that science is one specialised realm of knowledge.
The power and effectiveness of this view forced some philosophers finally to capitulate. With Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer came the last cowardly admission of failure — henceforth philosophy was to be no more than the handmaiden of science, helpfully, sycophantically, deciphering the concepts handed down by the high priests of this new, unconsoling truth. But, in spite of its apparent triumphs and its philosophical groupies, there were two barriers which hard, classical, pessimistic science found it impossible to cross. The first was the question “Why?”
The Newtonian cosmic machine was self-sustaining: it just kind of hung about the place like some thick-witted skinhead — mute, gormless and callous. Science could observe and theorise about this brute, but not about anything else. Why it was there, what it was for, and whether there was anything else were questions beyond the scientists’ reach.
This, of course, left room for God: he was simply outside the system, not inside, in the workings of nature, as the medieval theologians had said. The second barrier was subtler. This was the barrier of the human self.
The oddest thing about the science I have been describing is not simply that it creates a cosmic machine that does not need us, but that science only actually works on the assumption that we do not exist.
This is a complex point that has been spotted and argued about by many 20th-century scientists and philosophers. But it can be summarised simply: we observe nature with the assumption that our presence does not affect our observations. We are utterly neutral observers, the fact of our consciousness does not affect what we observe.
To some this may seem like common sense. To me, it seems like one of the weirdest and most extreme demands ever placed upon the human imagination — yet it is a demand which, to a large extent, we still obey. The fact that classical science (roughly speaking, science up to the year 1900) appeared to be able to talk about anything except the sensation of the human consciousness meant that the attempt to find a moral defence against the successes of science moved progressively inwards.
From the Reformation onwards, the dominant theme in western thought has been the attempt to find a solid basis inside the self from which to arrive at some system of values. This basis was needed precisely because science had invalidated the alternatives.
The movement inwards inspired great thinkers — Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaarde — but in our age it inspires mainly trash Narcissism — self- worship — the hallmark of popular culture; it is the primary defining quality of technologically advanced and affluent societies. We are told to diet to be thin, to exercise to avoid illness, to use cosmetics to stay young, and even, when age really strikes, to have dangerous and useless plastic surgery.
Corrupted psychoanalysis — the psychobabble interminably propagated on television shows in the United States and, increasingly, here — is employed to induce anxiety and the spurious conviction that the self and its ‘relationships’ are the moral centre of our lives.
The scientific world has denied us our external anchor for our values. It seems to have made everything either controllable by our problem- solving ingenuity or understandable by our analytic and experimental powers. Out there, we seem to have no role; but in here, in the refuge of the self, we can find something to do, we can find values.
In the 20th century, they will say, science has changed and so it has. From the moment when the great physicist Max Planck arrived at the idea of the quantum (during a walk in the woods in, conveniently enough, 1900), 20th century science has become progressively more weird and progressively more unclassical.
…only when science has been returned to its proper place as a part, but only a small part, of the totality of human culture, can it really become science again.
The three big weirdos, of which most people have now heard, are: quantum mechanics, Relativity and chaos theory. Explaining them in this space would be impossible. But it is easy to describe their primary message.
Quantum mechanics appears to destroy the basic fabric of causality and to confuse the position of the observer with what is being observed. relativity overthrows the absolutism of Newtonian time and space, revealing them to be a single continuum which curves and loops through the universe. Chaos theory reveals the linearity of classical mathematics as a seriously deficient model of the real world.
In short, the message of all three theories is: classical science is wrong insofar as it claims to be a final interpretation of reality.
But the Weird Three have also led to a carnival of philosophical and religious fun. For if classical science was wrong all along, then maybe its bleak, pessimistic message is also wrong. This is an enormously important development in the cultural and imaginative history of the scientific world, and it is one which now divides science.
On one side are devoutly classical, hard scientists such as Dawkins and the Oxford scientist Peter Atkins, whose book ‘The Creation’ provided one of the most powerful restatements of the case. “There is nothing that cannot be understood,” he wrote, “…there is nothing that cannot be explained, and…everything is extraordinarily simple.”
For people such as Atkins — and, indeed, for most scientists in their daily work — there is nothing especially weird about the Weird Three. They are simply further developments in our understanding of the world which modify, but do not overthrow, the temple of classical science.
But the hard-science view of Atkins, Hawking and Dawkins is not affected by such changes. Indeed, the new science actually stimulates their ambitions. The reason is that the cosmos of relativity and quantum mechanics is no longer a dumb skinhead, just hanging there. Rather, it has become a dynamic, evolving system, a ‘wave-form’ in quantum speak. And the speculative power of our new theories has enabled us to penetrate this system outward to its spatial and temporal limits and inward to the ultimate constituents of matter. With our radio telescopes listening to the faint echoes of the big bang, or in the vast underground doughnuts in which we collide particles, we seem to be drawing ever closer to the final outer and inner extremities of existence.
Our Experience And Our History Are More Real Than Either. We Know This To Be true, but science has done terrible damage to our faith. It is time to start making repairs.
This leads science to the brink of asking the forbidden question: “why?” It offers the chance of a Theory of Everything, a grand set of equations that will embody the How, the Why and the What Next of creation. And this means that, in the hands of the hard scientists, new science is invading the final stronghold of philosophy and faith, the first of the barriers to the final triumph of classical science.
The other barrier, you will recall, was the self. For the moment, these defences appear stronger. Robot technology has been a long slow struggle to mimic even the smallest aspect of human behaviour, and the so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ planned for the next generation of computers is a wild misnomer.
Nevertheless, computer processing and memory functions are set to achieve ‘human equivalence’ within a few years. This means only that computers will theoretically be as big and as fast as a human brain; it emphatically does not mean they can function with the flexibility and massive complexity of the human brain.
But the question is: Can we create a mechanical self, a machine possessed of a self-consciousness similar to our own? And behind this question lies the deeper, older question: Are we just machines? If we are, then presumably one day we can download our ‘selves’ on to floppy discs, make copies and become immortal. It may come as a shock to realise that human immortality is actually an item on the speculative scientific agenda these days. But it is. The urgency of this issue is obvious to anybody who cares to look, not just because of the idea of immortality but because of the more immediate question of what the human self actually is. Science and the entire culture are now pushing hard against the barrier of the self.
It is vital that none of this is dismissed as some kind of academic parlour game. Scientists are talking about immortality; they are working on intelligent machines. Ethical issues arising from their work — embryo research, animal experimentation, and so on — arise with accelerating frequency. And, above all, science is silently accepted as our contemporary Truth.
But perhaps the insight that makes the urgency of this most obvious is the realisation that science is the defining force behind our liberal-democratic societies.
Others have recently said the same thing. Francis Fukuyama in ‘The End of History’ and ‘The Last Man’ pinpoints science as the decisive factor which gave a particular direction to history. Allan Bloom, in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’, sees scientific attitudes behind the paralysing refusal within the American education system to defend the cultural heritage of the West.
I agree with them both: the open-endedness, the valuelessness, the apparent objectivity and effectiveness of science have progressively stripped away any reason to value one way of life, one system, above another. Modern scientific attitudes — because of science’s effectiveness rather than any conspiracy by scientists — destroy purpose in life, reduce us all to a condition of blank adolescent nihilism.
There is an answer to all this, but it is not easily understood. It is not an anti-scientific answer, although it does involve the humbling of science and the ridiculing of some of its more absurd and incoherent rhetoric. As Bloom and others have pointed out, only when science has been returned to its proper place as a part, but only a small part, of the totality of human culture, can it really become science again.
The answer is not easily understood because it needs to be realised. It certainly cannot lie in any developments within science itself. It is as pointless trying to find God in the quantum or in chaos theory as it was to find him in the Newtonian cosmos. Science will move on — and where will God be then?
The answer lies in finding a belief in all of what we are, or perhaps in simply admitting what we are. Nothing about our lived experience ever corresponded to Newton’s laws of motion, and nothing in Hawking’s equations will ever resemble what our natures demand of the mind of God.
Our experience and history are more real than either. We know this to be true, but science has done terrible damage to our faith. It is time to start making repairs.