Chapter 13 – 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, literary critic, lay theologian 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. Some in 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 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 i.e. realms or fields), a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) 

The influence of scientists and the scientific way of thinking keeps rising in the public consciousness. As it does so, 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.