Scientists struggle along without arriving at certainty

Given the vise-like hold science has over the thinking of much of society, I like to scan scientific publications to gain insights into what scientists and academic types say about their own domain. Of course, science is a boon to the well-being of society, but along with that goes the legacy of rationalist thinkers who blew much of the treasure of a rich civilisation, leaving us a threadbare wardrobe of consumerism, individualism and lack of direction.

The writer of a Scientific American article just out (see here) is an agnostic - both as to belief in God and what science can prove - who digs into the "theories that try to explain [all the] big metaphysical mysteries",  quantum mechanics being one of those theories. This is the key point: Despite the impression you get from public intellectuals who tend to argue that they have the world neatly packaged, science writer John Horgan finds that scientists are often skeptical that the full truth can be found in their work. 

Here are the writer's credentials that run with the article:

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology [a private research university in New Jersey]. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American. 

To quickly highlight some of the points Horgan makes, a good place to start is with "the problem of suffering" - and with the "problem of beauty". For Horgan, suffering is a closed case, supporting his skepticism about God. Beauty is another matter. 

He states: "We experience love, friendship, adventure and heartbreaking beauty. Could all this really come from random collisions of particles?" He also reports that the prominent physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist, who died in July, had conceded that life sometimes seems “more beautiful than strictly necessary”. In fact, it’s interesting how often scientists, particularly physicists and mathematicians, describe the laws and other features of their field as beautiful.

In dealing with another of his "problems", Horgan examines quantum mechanics and finds the theory wanting:

Quantum mechanics is science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is, physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works. Many physicists—most, probably—adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation, advanced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But that is a kind of anti-interpretation, which says physicists should not try to make sense of quantum mechanics; they should “shut up and calculate”, as physicist David Mermin once put it.

To continue:

Philosopher Tim Maudlin deplores this situation. In his 2019 book Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory, he points out that several interpretations of quantum mechanics describe in detail how the world works. [...] But here’s the irony: Maudlin is so scrupulous in pointing out the flaws of these interpretations that he reinforces my skepticism. They all seem hopelessly kludgy and preposterous. 

Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a theory about information. [...] But to my mind, information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes. The concept of information makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the information.

Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity. Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms that have existed for a brief period here on Earth. So how can quantum mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy, apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang? Information-based theories of physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe revolves around us. [...]

Another sticking point for Horgan is science's quandary over of the "mind-body problem":

The debate over consciousness is even more fractious than the debate over quantum mechanics. How does matter make a mind? A few decades ago, a consensus seemed to be emerging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his cockily titled Consciousness Explained, asserted that consciousness clearly emerges from neural processes, such as electrochemical pulses in the brain. Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that consciousness is generated by networks of neurons oscillating in synchrony.

Gradually, this consensus collapsed, as empirical evidence for neural theories of consciousness failed to materialize. As I point out in my recent book Mind-Body Problems, there are now a dizzying variety of theories of consciousness. Christof Koch has thrown his weight behind integrated information theory, which holds that consciousness might be a property of all matter, not just brains. This theory suffers from the same problems as information-based theories of quantum mechanics. Theorists such as Roger Penrose, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is even more lacking in evidence than integrated information theory.

Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should take. Should it be a philosophical treatise? A purely mathematical model? A gigantic algorithm, perhaps based on Bayesian computation? Should it borrow concepts from Buddhism, such as anatta, the doctrine of no self? All of the above? None of the above? Consensus seems farther away than ever. And that’s a good thing. We should be open-minded about our minds.

Horgan has long been exploring the realms of what is knowable and unknowable, but his conclusion for this latest effort is: 

I’m definitely a skeptic. I doubt we’ll ever know whether God exists, what quantum mechanics means, how matter makes mind. These three puzzles, I suspect, are different aspects of a single, impenetrable mystery at the heart of things. But one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon.

God is at the heart of things, and it has been the Catholic position that, using our reason, we can know the existence of God. This has been consistent from Paul (Romans 1:19-20), through the 5th Century's Augustine and the 13th Century's Thomas Aquinas, and the magisterium of the Church expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (source):

Created in God's image and called to know and love Him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know Him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments", which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. (31)

For example, since Horgan talked of the beauty of life as a counterargument to the problem of pain, we can take Augustine's demonstration of knowledge of God from the beauty of creation. Augustine writes:

Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky...question all these realities. All respond: "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is a [statement] (confessio). However, these beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One (Pulcher) who is not subject to change?

That's just one way that the existence of God can be accepted as a reasonable proposition. We can also draw from the nature of the human person a knowledge of our transcendence, and of God as the origin and end of the universe.

The human person: With their openness to truth and beauty, their sense of moral goodness, their freedom and the voice of their conscience, with their longing for the infinite and for happiness, the person questions themself about God's existence. [The debate over atheism is itself a sign of the existence of God.] In all these ways mentioned the person discerns signs of their spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material," can have its origin only in God. (Adapted from CCC 33) 

For another statement on the natural proofs for the existence of the soul, go here.

In all this, we have to recognise the obstacles to accepting the demonstrations from creation and from the nature of the person:

The truths that concern the relations between God and the person wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence, they call for self-surrender and abnegation.  The human mind, in its turn is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and imagination, but also by disordered appetites. ... So it happens that the person easily persuades themself that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful. (CCC 37) 

Unfortunately, this last element is what we see often within the scientific community, where scientists are immersed in an atmosphere of dismissal of anything not material, and so they do not even consider options that cannot be measured but rather are to be observed. Horgan has a telling testimony in his article, citing Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is a Christian, and in his 2006 book The Language of God, he calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” 

Horgan quotes Collins as telling him:

That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer. I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence.  

Therefore, science is by its nature an uncertain domain, but it worsens its condition when it allows itself to be a blinkered activity that does not examine reality in all its fullness. In that case, it will fail to be of service to humanity, and, in fact, will take humanity down paths that give rise to disorder and regret.

Ω For a good discussion about uncertainty in science, go here.

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