Chapter 12 – Modern World Views

The new worldview that can be used as a base for a new moral code begins in the most difficult branch of modern science, 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, writer, academic, critic, theologian, lecturer, and Christian apologist

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behaviour 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’s 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, that is, 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’s 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 one for most people. (This view has been dubbed NOMA for non-overlapping magisteria (that is, realms or fields), a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) The influence of scientists and the scientific way of thinking has continued to rise in the public consciousness. As it has, most people in the West have increasingly come to feel that if there is only one reality and 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 the signs indicate that if we don’t define our moral values in modern terms and we continue to blindly follow our old value systems—the inconsistent, hypocritical codes that developed in the Roman world, the medieval world, or even in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian world view) 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 world view. 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 model we have of reality. It correctly predicts all our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied scientists. But the worldview quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially to Western thinking. 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 constant flux is inadequate. Rather, we must say that change is reality. For example, the things we think we see, with their surfaces, masses and colours, are illusions. According to quantum physicists, an object is only an area in space-time where interfering quintillions of waves of subatomic fields cause illusions of matter that 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 colours and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains.²

But according to quantum theory, these things I think I’m seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object or particle will collapse and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability, 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, sometimes interfere.

 

  

                                       Artist’s conception of a giant meteorite striking Earth 

I can’t know when I go to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it may not. When that day will come, I can’t say. I can’t know whether the sun will rise tomorrow or whether the pen 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 antigravity field that, until today, I knew nothing about.

I can’t know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that I will experience these events and objects. I base my estimates of these probabilities on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on beliefs and habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are accurate most of the time. But I can’t know anything for certain.

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