Science is rightly strewn with doubt

                                     Tina Zellmer for The Chronicle Review 'Big Brains, Small Minds'

Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where his work focuses on dark matter and general relativity, has a new book, The Big Picture, that has been greeted with praise of this kind:

“Weaving the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry, Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we’ve figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don’t yet understand.  Yet in the end, it’s the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

Just as Tyson makes a key point about science when he points to the fact that there are some (not all) things "we’ve figured out in the universe",  Carroll is eloquent in his honesty about what is not yet understood. He points to this state of affairs in a subsequent interview with Phil Torres published on Salon.com: "Of course I’m not an expert in all of the fields I talk about in the book – nobody is [my emphasis]. But the different disciplines need to keep up a continual conversation, if we’re to fit the big picture together."

That "conversation', conducted in humility by all parties, must include philosophy, anthropology and theology because these delve into the nature of the human race just as much as areas of study regarded as hard science. The conversation is needed within the broad church of science, which is the search for knowledge,  because of the diversity of views about all kinds of reality. For example, Carroll calls himself a "poetic naturalist", just one of the divisions within the scientific community, who seem to find it hard to agree with each other:

On the one end of the spectrum you have the most hard-core variety, who claim that only the most deep-down fundamental description of nature can be said to describe something “real.” They might say that consciousness, or morality, or free will, are all just illusions. On the other end of the spectrum you have naturalists who believe in only the natural world, but are willing to ascribe objective reality to various extra properties it might have – moral judgments, for example, or inner states of conscious experience.

Following on from that portion of the interview, Carroll in fact makes the case which those who believe in God have been making to promote dialogue with atheists. Carroll declares:

There is only one world, but we have many ways of talking about that world. And if a particular way of talking gives us a useful handle on what the world is and how it behaves, it’s completely appropriate to consider the concepts it evokes as “real.” Air is really made of atoms, but its temperature and pressure are real, even though the individual atoms don’t have temperatures or pressures. Human consciousness and free will are real, even though they’re not present in the individual particles or cells of which we are made.

When it comes to meaning and morality, there are multiple allowed ways of talking, and the correctness of one or the other can’t be settled by doing experiments. That’s where naturalism becomes its most poetic – when we use our creative powers to attach judgment and significance to what goes on all around us.

Those last statements could have come from a Christian in the face of a dogmatic scientist who is arguing that only what can be measured can be regarded as real. The statements also draw a very pertinent question from Torres, an American biologist and scholar and the founder of a non-profit organisation, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. The question relates to the projection that in 2050, despite the expected continued loss of adherence to organised religion in the materialistic West, Pew researchers expect 87% of the world's population to have a value system based on some form of religious belief. Torres leads up to his question this way:

I’ve often thought of science as a special kind of story-telling in “assertion mode.” And the story it tells — involving quivering atoms, swirling galaxies, and evolving organisms — is without a doubt the “greatest story ever told.” But what’s missing from the story is a transcendent source of meaning for our lives. Without such a source — usually said to be God — how can our lives have true meaning? If the ultimate fate of the universe is a state of infinite entropy [the decline in or lack of order or predictability - Brendan] then what makes life valuable and worth living?

Carroll's response highlights one of the intellectual weaknesses of New Atheists, and even the threat they pose to the common good. Carroll states:

The trick here is “true” meaning. My life has meaning without any supernatural guidance, no matter what anyone else might say about it. The meanings that we finite human beings attribute to our lives are the only kinds of true meanings, because those are the only kinds of meanings there are.

That response could only have come from someone thoroughly imbued with an utterly individualistic cultural mindset. "My life", Carroll declares, is the source of "true" meaning, "no matter what anyone else might say about it".  This blog has just previously featured one insightful description into how the culture we live in can be deterministic as to our beliefs and behaviour if we let it. The way such a value system can be a threat is that it denies the hard-won human rights victories of humanity, such as with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world", which closely echoes the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which sources the origin of human dignity: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

Where does Carroll source his value system? In his own self. He has been fortunate that American society retains enough of its Christian credentials for him to feel secure in his atomistic world, but if the Christian (and mainstream religious) world view is lost, he would be far less sanguine about his situation. Of course, here I am creating somewhat of a straw-man, because Carroll may be bighearted, strong in defence of the poor and weak, and decidedly not self-centred.

But the fact remains, notwithstanding so much scandalous history to the negative, religious groups are more likely than those without a spiritual dimension in their lives to see the dignity of the person, the worth of nature in itself, and the obligation to uphold the rights of others, even to the point of death, all because they understand how God has makes clear this dignity in his own relationship with humankind.

However, Carroll's main point of the need for conversation about reality must be an ongoing one. His point of view is reinforced by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Big Brains, Small Minds", in which the authors decry the way those in the hard sciences have come to snub the contribution of the humanities, which the authors refer to as the "soft sciences". They find it disturbing in this way:

As the sciences rightly grow, a free society must ensure that criticism of the sciences grows apace. Effective criticism depends on distance, in this case on an unshakeable difference, between the humanities and the STEM fields. That is not to say that STEM researchers can’t or shouldn’t be experts in the humanities, but rather that the work that the humanities do should not be judged by the metrics of hard science. As Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, suggests at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, "precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions." Similarly, we should not expect the humanities to be driven or dominated by the objectives of science. Plato teaches us that part of the liberal arts’ enduring mission is precisely to critique these objectives.

It ought to be obvious that the study of law, justice, and the arts is one of the best preparations for governing. This goes for governing our polis and equally for governing our technologies and ourselves. If you’re interested in learning about justice, you don’t go to the chemistry laboratory. You go to philosophy class and travel to Plato’s Republic.

But if you go to the Republic in search of concrete answers about justice (as do many of our students who are encouraged to search for the "right" answers in their labs), you will be disappointed. Plato is not famous for answering questions but for staking his life on the chance to ask them. He seems more interested in inviting his readers to ask their own questions and to finish the dialogue themselves, as if to say that it’s more important to learn to think than to memorize others’ dogmatic principles. The question about justice that motivates the Republic is posed in a lengthy series of dialogues, and it does not give rise to a fixed doctrine. Plato seems to be suggesting that part of being just is taking the time to think seriously about justice. 

Carroll would, I'm sure, agree with the authors' fears that the West is "on the verge of becoming the best trained, and least educated, society"  in 2000 years, given the historically recent demarcation by some of the totality of human experience of reality into spheres that are "clean" and "unclean", or "higher caste" or "lower caste" - even to the degree of there being "untouchables" - and based upon about the same degree of logic or reasonableness.

When it comes down to it, as to the important things of life, mainstream Christians don't care if there are multiple universes, for example. As we have seen, most people in the world care more about understanding their spiritual experience, especially to be in a closer relationship with the God who loves them.  Therefore, to interpolate a wider significance as to their conclusion, the authors of "Big Brains, Small Minds" see the only chance of rescuing the situation is if scientists of all shades, as with all seekers of knowledge, join together and "take it as their mission to pursue wisdom [so as to] guide political and technological ambition, and to stake their lives on the chance to help [us all] ask meaningful questions, rather than give half-baked answers, about the meaning of life".