Chapter   12       World Views, New         Part A

    The new worldview that can be used as a base for a new moral code begins in the most difficult branch of modern Science, i.e. quantum theory. Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a base for a moral code. And the moral code that can be derived from it is not really that far from one that, at least in theory, we should already be familiar with.

          C. S. Lewis 

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behavior that most people in the West felt was "morally right" could not be integrated with what Science said was physically right. The universe that the scientists have described for hundreds of years seems to contain no free will. Thus, it implies no moral code at all. Science and Moral Philosophy have long been at loggerheads. 

Descartes' solution was to posit two realms, one of mind/spirit and one of matter/body, and assign Moral Philosophy to govern the first and Science to govern the second. Even some fairly recent thinkers - for example, C.S. Lewis - have argued that since our sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in all of us that it must be real and so it must come from some source other than the material world, and therefore our deep sense of right and wrong, i.e. morality,  proves the existence of, a spiritual realm. (1.) 

But most people in the West today do not reach Lewis' same heartening conclusion. This view of Science and Religion as being incommensurable and irreconcilable - a view being advocated by many scientists and moral philosophers alike - is not an encouraging view for most people. (This view has been dubbed "NOMA" for "non-overlapping magisteria", a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) The influence of Science and the scientific way of thinking have kept rising in the public consciousness, and as they have, most people in the West have felt more and more that if, first, there is only one reality, and second, only Science can describe it, then, because Science has been silent about what right and wrong are, there really are no such things as "right" and "wrong". 

     All of the signs indicate that if we continue to follow our old values systems - the ones that grew up in the Roman world or the medieval world or the ones that grew up in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian worldview) - the hypocritical codes that let us march over other nations and even Nature herself - then we are going to destroy our world.

    But there is hope. We have a new worldview. The question is: "Can it provide us with a base for a new code of values?" Let's see what we can do with the worldview of the New Physics.

          Quantum theory is the most complete explanation that we have of reality. It correctly predicts whole areas of data drawn from all of our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied all of our scientists. But the world view which quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially for the Western style of mind. In the world today, only a very few can do the math involved in quantum theory, but its most fundamental principle is not hard to state.

        The overarching principle of quantum theory can be stated very easily: reality is flux. But grasping what those words mean is another matter. To say that everything is in a constant state of flux is inadequate. Rather we must say that change is reality. For example, the "things" we think we see, with their surfaces and masses and colors, are illusions. An “object” is only an area in space-time where interfering waves of sub-atomic fields (according to physicists) are accessible, via the data we can detect by our senses, to our consciousness. These temporary arrangements of particles and fields act on our (temporarily stable) sense organs in such a way as to produce impressions of solidness, weight, shape, and colors and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains. (2.) 

          But according to quantum theory, and even some parts of pre-quantum science, these phenomena that I think I am seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object, or particle, will do so and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability to them, but we cannot “pre-know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are. Cause and effect don't always connect. Odd things, external and internal, can, and sometimes do, interfere.  

artist's view of giant meteorite entering Earth's atmosphere

          I can't know when I go to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it won't. I can't know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that the pen that I just bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor may strike the Earth tonight. My pen may get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field which, until today, I knew nothing about.

      I can't know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that these events will happen. In usual, everyday life, I base my estimates of events' probabilities on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are very accurate most of the time. But I can't know anything for certain.

     In the terms of everyday human experience, this means change that one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule and that is the rule which says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. And, as the old saying goes, life is full of rude awakenings.

    This point is important enough to deserve a special digression of its own. We live in an age in which many people, especially in the West, people of education and experience, have grown smug and complacent. Many in the West today comfort themselves with the deluded thought that in the West, we do understand the workings of politics and Economics and Biology and even physical science so well that we need no longer fear catastrophes such as those which befell our forebears. This sort of self-delusion is merely another example of cognitive dissonance reduction. People have fallen prey by the millions to complacency because they are drawn to believing something that they deeply want to believe – not because they have adequate grounds for the beliefs that give them this confidence, but because they want right into their deepest subconscious levels to hide from their totally rational fear of the unknown.

   The point of Thomas Kuhn's famous book from 1962, titled "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions", one of the seminal books of our time, is that even in the most rigorously logical and real, material world-grounded of fields, namely Science, there are no certainties. All of the models of reality that have ever been constructed by the human mind have undergone major revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution – from the sub-atomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic – will be used to guide research by anyone a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, effective idea, any more than there was in the idea of the ether or the idea of phlogiston - two scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

  artist's conception of atoms inside a strontium clock 

    And electrons themselves? Am I saying they will cease to exist? Why, that's absurd. Actually, it isn't at all. Quantum physicists are saying something much more radical. Electrons aren't there in the first place. The way we were taught to draw a solar system-styled sketch of the atom in high school is only a useful model of sub-atomic reality. What is really down there cannot be drawn at all.

    The waves of light that enable human beings to do what we call "seeing" are longer than the dimensions of this so-called "electron". "What does an electron look like?" is a meaningless question. An electron doesn't "look" like anything humans can relate to, even if we could pool all of the seeing and imagining that the whole human species has ever done. That solar system-like model of the atom is merely a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and then make predictions about the phenomena that these supposed particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod them in certain ways that are available to us in our labs.

   But no physicists really think there are a bunch of little bullets whirling around down at the sub-atomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not get attached to it. Its day is all but up. New results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions implied by that model.

    However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can't "picture" it, has profound implications for our worldview. Therefore, it also has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behavior.

Notes 

1.http://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/ mere-christianity/Book1/ 
cs-lewis-mere-christianitybook1.php#.U1gQFo1OVLM

2. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0811/0811.3696.pdf