Taking
Science on Faith
By
PAUL DAVIES
 Published:
November 24, 2007
(New York Times)
Tempe,
Ariz.
SCIENCE,
we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about
the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion,
by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas”
well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism
is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief
without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
The
problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,”
as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science
has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the
assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible
way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe
was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.
When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure,
or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect
to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this
faith has been justified.
The
most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos
is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which
nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws
that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion —
all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where
do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they
do?
When
I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely
off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover
the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The
laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the
universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth
— and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you
had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable,
absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.
You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that
we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to
hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
Over
the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws
of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s
not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.”
The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they
are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly
is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific
explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically
and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces
these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality —
the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts
us, it makes a mockery of science.
Can
the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about
us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature
is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity
somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.
Although
scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions
concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted
considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that
the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of
observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form
of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of
rules, life would almost certainly not exist.
A
second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within
the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we
long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly
fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary
from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view
might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its
own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,”
life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws,
so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe
— one that is just right for life. We have selected it by
our very existence.
The
multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t
so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There
has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow
bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws.
Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up
a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
Clearly,
then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely,
on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like
an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe
even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason,
both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide
a complete account of physical existence.
This
shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical
law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many
scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute,
universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that
God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians
envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe,
while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent
realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
And
just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for
its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists
declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal
laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what
happens in the universe.
It
seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical
universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws
or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence.
The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe
they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated
together within a common explanatory scheme.
In
other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the
universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics
of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until
science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe,
its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
(Paul
Davies is the director of Beyond, a research center at Arizona State
University, and the author of “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe
Is Just Right for Life.”)
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