Chapter 16 – A Summing Up of the Case So Far

At this stage of my argument, then, a summing up is needed before I attempt to move on. In order to finish the argument and bring all the threads together, it is necessary to go backward and more carefully review some of the assumptions that are implicit in any argument that is based on science.

What are we committing to if we agree with the points argued so far and especially with what the entire argument assumes and builds on? Three ideas are essential.

   

                                             Martian sunset, as photographed by the NASA probe, Spirit Rover

In the first place, a basic assumption—for many modern thinkers, an implicit assumption they are not consciously aware of and do not examine—is that the universe is a single, integrated system. Every one of its parts connects to all of its other parts: one set of laws, each of which is consistent with all the others, rules the universe. We don’t understand the full system of natural laws yet, but in doing science, we implicitly believe that the laws of science apply on Mars and Gliese 581g just as precisely as those laws apply here on earth. (Dennis Overbye sums up the debate in a 2007 New York Times article.¹)

To some readers this assumption may seem so self-evident that stating it seems silly. But such a reaction is a hasty, careless one. Accepting this basic assumption of science—in conjunction with a few of the other conclusions reached so far in this book—has implications for all that we think and do.

To be even plainer, let’s consider this idea that our universe is all one system compared with the idea’s alternatives. In short, let’s ask, “As opposed to what?”

   

                                                           Artist’s conception of the Gliese 581 system

The alternative view of our universe sees it as being made up of areas or dimensions or epochs in which different sets of rules apply or once did apply. This was the view of many of our forebears. They saw the universe as being run by many varied and mutually hostile gods, each with his or her own realm. For example, for the ancient Greeks, Poseidon ruled the sea; he could make storms at will and bring them down on any group of luckless mariners. Hades ruled the underworld, Zeus, the skies. Hades took Persephone down to his realm, and even Zeus could only negotiate to get her back for half the year. From this quarrel came the seasons. Two bellicose brats, who happened to be supernatural beings, and who could not get along. A universe run by caprice, lust, cruelty, and revenge.

                              

                                                      The Return of Persephone (Frederic Leighton, artist) 

The classical Greeks also implicitly accepted that their ancestors had been much stronger than they were. Repeatedly in The Iliad, heroes hoist rocks that “no man today could lift,” and they do it with ease.² In such a universe, certain systems of ideas that were right in one area or era might be quite different from those that were right (in both senses of right) in some other distant land or era.

In the modern view, under science, we assume that the strong force, the weak force, and the laws of electromagnetism and gravity apply everywhere and always have done so. It is true that we have not yet found a way to translate our model of gravity into the system of ideas and equations that describes the other three, but we are confident that a unified field theory does exist. Ours is a single coherent universe, we assume.

Do most people in our modern society truly believe the universe is a single, coherent system? Yes. That is what science is about. The alternative – superstition – is simply not palatable for most people in the West today. Whatever the flaws in the current scientific world view—and it is not logically airtight, as we have seen—we’ve nevertheless seen it achieve far too many successes to gamble on any of the superstitious alternatives. People today, by and large, do not turn a sick child over to a shaman for treatment. Who today would try to fix his vehicle by casting pennies or lighting incense sticks or chanting? In today’s world, for better or worse, we in the West especially are citizens of the Age of Science. The evidence says that is a solid Bayesian choice, therefore, a fully rational one.

Let’s keep this first implicit assumption of science in mind. All is connected to all else in a coherent, systematic way. (Nicholas Maxwell discusses this view and its problems at length in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, pp. 107–109.³)