Of course, other civilizations have also had eras during which they were in ascendancy. In fact, many economic and political signs today indicate that the dominance of the West may be ending. The new worldview Science is offering and the values and morés it fosters are so different from the ones out of which the successes of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, sometimes seem to be verging on self-destruction. The obsolete parts of the Western worldview will be replaced, but we must work hard to insure that they are not replaced by others that simply lead to new forms of injustice. With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for our species if we can’t do this work.

Discussing the moral implications of the worldview offered by the new Science, and the New Physics in particular, will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code and an argument for it that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s but is more useful. The theory of morality presented in the remainder of this book offers some firmer measures by which we can design our actions.

   

                   Karl Popper, conversing with Cyril Hoschl (1994) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

However, this new theory will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples.¹ Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theories (notably the theory of evolution) could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether they could be falsified. He wrote off the social sciences pretty much completely.

Popper argued that only theories that can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified deserve to be called science. For example, he was deeply impressed by the theory of relativity, because it could be tested definitively. If it had failed to predict Eddington’s observations of the stars visible during a full solar eclipse, the theory would have been viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein’s international reputation soared.

Biology is not that neat. The theory of evolution can be tested only in ways that, if successful, may make it seem more likely to be true. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a science. But gradually, over years, he came to concede that some theories could make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions rather than neat, causally linked ones and could still be rigorous enough to be properly called scientific. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx weren’t useful and were not science, but Popper came to see that the theory of evolution was.²