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 materially right. The deterministic universe that scientists have described for hundreds of years seems to imply no moral code at all. Science and Moral Philosophy have long been at loggerheads. Science went so far as to say that moral values, and even the very ideas of right and wrong, are fantasies. 

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, it must be real and so it must come from some source other than the material world. Therefore, he insisted, our deep sense of right and wrong, i.e. morality,  proves the existence of a spiritual dimension underlying all of physical reality. (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 scientists and their way of thinking has kept rising in the public consciousness, and as it has, most people in the West have come to feel 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". 

Yet, all of the signs indicate that if we don't define our moral values in modern terms, and we continue to blindly follow our old values systems, the ones that grew up in the Roman world or the medieval world or even the ones that grew up in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian worldview) - the inconsistent and 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 we derive from it 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 all of our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied 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.

            In fact, 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. According to physicists, an “object” is only an area in space-time where interfering quintillions of waves of sub-atomic fields are detectable to our senses, and so to human 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, texture, and colors and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains. (2.)