[amc] Taking Science on Faith
- From: Werner S <wjs3108@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:08:04 -0800 (PST)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
November 24, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES
Tempe, Ariz.
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable
form of knowledge about the world because it is based
on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is
based on faith. The term ?doubting Thomas? well
illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy
skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in
religion, having belief without evidence is regarded
as a virtue.
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.
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.
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?
When I was a student, the laws of physics were
regarded as completely off limits. The job of the
scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and
apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The
laws were treated as ?given? ? imprinted on the
universe like a maker?s mark at the moment of cosmic
birth ? and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a
scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is
governed by dependable, immutable, absolute,
universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.
You?ve got to believe that these laws won?t fail, that
we won?t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from
cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the
hour.
Over the years I have often asked my physicist
colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are.
The answers vary from ?that?s not a scientific
question? to ?nobody knows.? The favorite reply is,
?There is no reason they are what they are ? they just
are.? The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is
deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a
scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the
world is ordered logically and that there are reasons
things are as they are. If one traces these reasons
all the way down to the bedrock of reality ? the laws
of physics ? only to find that reason then deserts us,
it makes a mockery of science.
Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive
in the world about us ultimately be rooted in
reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a
fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and
absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and
rationality.
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. 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. For that
reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox
science fail to provide a complete account of physical
existence.
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very
notion of physical law is a theological one in the
first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm.
Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute,
universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian
doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in
a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding
the natural order from beyond the universe, while
physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an
abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical
relationships.
And just as Christians claim that the world depends
utterly on God for its existence, while the converse
is not the case, so physicists declare a similar
asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws
(or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious
to what happens in the universe.
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.
Paul Davies is the director of Beyond, a research
center at Arizona State University, and the author of
?Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for
Life.?
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