Can Science Reveal the Truth?

Beyond Nature's Horizons

Cosmologists allow that the Universe might look quite different beyond the horizons. We look out to the most distant objects in the Universe and we find that we are also looking back in time to the origins of the Universe. We look down to the smallest objects in the Universe, and in order to do so we find that we recreate the conditions of the early Universe. The horizons looking out to the largest and to the smallest things in the Universe turn out to be the same place. These horizons as far as we can see according to our current understanding of the nature of light. In that way, the Universe is the limit of how far we can see both literally and metaphorically. The Universe is our sum knowledge of our understanding of it.

When scientists say that the laws of nature may be quite different beyond these horizons they push our current non-understanding beyond reach, but leave such knowledge open to future and deeper material understanding. But what if nature is always bigger than whatever material understanding we can construct, and not just at the far reaches of the Universe but everywhere around us, all the time?

Materialists often ask: well if there is a non-material world, then where is your evidence? Unfortunately creationists fall into this invitational trap and try to compete with science on its own terms. The point about other forms of understanding of the world is that they must by definition be non-scientific.

Buddha's Eye View

Buddhists approach reality from the opposite direction. They say that there is not nothing and there is not something. This isn't as irrational as it may first appear. Buddhists agree that there is a world of phenomena; they argue, however, that this skein of phenomena is inseparable. It is in that sense that there is not a world of things. Mystics start from the understanding that the world is a connected web of phenomena, whereas scientists begin by separating out phenomena (which we understand as separate things) in order to describe them.

Scientific investigation of the world deepens when separate descriptions of reality are shown to be aspects of some more unifying theory. For a while there were separate theories to describe magnetism, electricity and optics, until electromagnetism unified all three descriptions. Today we understand how to unify the electromagnetic force to the strong and weak nuclear forces. There are even hints that all the forces of nature might be unified at very high energies, a condition that last pertained when the Universe began.

So a mystical view of reality starts where science ends up, with a whole. And 'mystical' we might broaden in definition to include all artists, and perhaps all of us when we are being our most human: when we live as individuals with our secret knowledge and our hidden beliefs. Here is Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch protecting her deepest self against public scrutiny:
"...I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."
"What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."
"That is a beautiful mysticism - it is a -"
"Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. "You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it..."

And here is the novelist Hilary Mantel reminding us that everything about us that makes us human is also what cannot be measured and replicated: "We ... need to differentiate between qualities that can be measured and qualities that can't – without stigmatizing the latter as less useful. The heart's electrical pattern can be traced, but not the wayward impulses of love and hate... Those who do not believe in what cannot be measured or quantified are on shaky ground: their inner reality is doomed to be alarmingly divorced from the reality of most of those about them."

The scientific method is still in its very early days. It seems to me still much too early to be claiming materialism as some absolute description of all there is. Ask me again in a few thousand years time. Perhaps then, as the physicist Robert Jastrow predicted, the scientist who has climbed the highest peak may find "as he pulls himself over the final rock [that] he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

And Christ, I might point out, spoke in parables, a form that is beyond any possibility of literal meaning.

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate. What, indeed.

For more information, read Christopher Potter's book You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
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