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, namely quantum theory. Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a major part of the base for a new moral code.

          

                              

        C.S. Lewis, writer and lay theologian (credit: Arthur Strong, via Wikimedia Commons) 

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behavior most people in the West felt was morally right could not be integrated with what Science said was materially right. Or as Hume put the matter: we can't derive "ought" from "is". 

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 have recently gone so far as to say that moral values, and even the very ideas of right and wrong, are fantasies, as real as unicorns and Santa Claus.

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 seems to be 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 proves that there is a spiritual dimension underlying all of physical reality.¹

But most people in the West today do not reach Lewis’s heartening conclusion. Instead, they reach the more modern belief that Science and Religion are irreconcilable—a view being advocated by many scientists and moral philosophers alike. This modern belief is not a very encouraging one. (This view has been dubbed NOMA for non-overlapping magisteria, a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.)

The influence of the scientific way of thinking keeps growing in the public consciousness. In modern times, we don’t quote verses from the Bible to win an argument. We quote scientific studies. As the influence of Science grows, 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, the only conclusion to draw is that there really are no such things as right and wrong. The words don’t name anything real at all.