Galileo was the founder of modern physics in the seventeenth century in two important ways. He set out the scientific method to the followed and he defined the scope of the new science of physics. This scope was very narrow and consisted essentially of matter and motion. Only matter and motion were not tinged with subjective, personal factors, in Galileo’s opinion, and were tthus suitable for scientific treatment and analysis. All Galileo’s work was later taken up by Newton who, at the end of the same seventeenth century, published his monumental synthesis of natural laws, the Principia Mathematica. These laws, far-reaching though they were, still dealt exclusively with matter and motion. The effects of causes were totally predictable and the way the world worked came to be seen as a sort of giant mechanical contraption which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had been almost totally explored.
Little new was left to be found. Lord Kelvin, an eminent physicist, expressed the prevailing mood: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; all that remains is more and more accurate measurement.”. God had gone completely and the rift between faith and science was well established and seemed permanent. God and his world were relegated to a realm of faith and belief only. The real world, the world of nature, was the exclusive province of science. It should be noted that, from the scientific point of view, the realm of faith and belief was our faith and our belief, which were therefore constructions of the human mind. God the Creator had become the creation of the created.
But this gaping abyss between science and faith worried few people, especially in science, when put against the spectacular successes that these laws of physics had generated in their industrial applications. Western Europe, from being an area about to be overrun by the Ottoman Turks before the gates of Vienna at the end of the seventeenth century, became masters of the world a scant two centuries later. Their empires covered the globe and controlled, directly or indirectly, some ninety percent of the world. The British empire alone spanned one quarter of the planet. This spectacular change in fortunes was attributable solely to the volcanic impetus provided by the new technology in the fields of manufacture, mining, transportation and, especially armaments.
While the great Western European empires did not survive in the twentieth century, the technology of this first industrial revolution has continued to spread unabated to other areas of the world, especially to countries like Russia, China, India and Brazil, all giants wanting to catch up with the developed world as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the nineteenth century model of new, advanced technology was based on dirty, non-renewable energy and raw material sources, first coal to which oil and natural gas were then added later. The huge manufacturing complexes using these raw materials, like the plastics and the petrochemical industries, together with the mining and extraction industries themselves and the power generation and transportation sectors, have now produced so much permanent and poisonous waste that the degradation of the land, the sea and the air are putting the entire planet in the gravest danger. In little more than one hundred and fifty years, and even without the full industrialization of the developing world, we are choking on the poisons and wastes of this first industrial model.
Naturally, he world has turned to technology to save the situation. The enormous energy exhibited by the technological innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could surely be counted on to provide the innovative impulse to get us out of the present danger. And indeed technology has largely risen to the challenge. There is technology to combat global warming, reducing and eventually eliminating carbon emissions, providing ever greater crop yields, designing and producing ever cheaper and more efficient machines for the very unsophisticated masses to produce clean water for themselves, provide energy and even provide the medications to eliminate a whole roster of completely preventable diseases. Techniques teaching reforestation, better water management, better use of the land and better hygiene are all readily available. So are we faithfully applying these new methods and saving the planet? There are countless international meetings of scientists, politicians and aid agencies, where endless scientific papers are read and approved, money is promised and communiques are prepared that give the impression that progress has been made. Yet the reality is that up to now, the problems are all still with us. The air is still getting filthier, the deserts are still spreading, the original rain forests with their priceless and unique eco-systems are still being cut down by thousands of square miles per year and half the world is still underfed. Whole species are disappearing at such a rate that the land and sea may contain very little naturally occurring life within a generation.
Something is clearly not working. The way the first industrial revolution developed was never very good in the first place, when its huge benefits affected less than half the world’s population, leaving the other half completely untouched. The chief reason for this is that this first scientific and industrial revolution, for all its stunning successes, contained an inherent flaw right from the start. It failed to include an ethical component, which meant that its multitude of applications concentrated entirely on the profit motive and the riches and power that came with this. Profits involve protecting your investment, which means that you must exclude everyone from the benefits of whatever you are doing, unless they pay you. In such a system, of course the poor must remain poor. Poverty can be tackled only if the profit motive is ignored. That is where the neglected ethical component comes in. The only ethics with any force behind it is based on religion. In the eighteenth century, humanism tried to apply ethical principles without religion by touting the ethical benefits of working for the good of humanity. The first, idealistic forms of communism and social Fabianism grew out of this attempt. It was thought that people would work with “ineffable ardor” for the good of all so that all forms of government or imposed authority would wither away. It took only a few years for the idealistic French revolution to turn into the Terror of the mobs and the guillotine, and any doubts about the perfectibility of man by these means were fully confirmed by the blood-soaked twentieth century.
But religious ethics is not of the pallid, humanistic, rational sort. It has shown immense passion and fervor in the past, even in what we now perceive to be largely mistaken forms such as the Inquisition or the Crusades, carried out in the name of Him who lovingly replaced the ear of one who had come to arrest him. Here, then we have two impulses which have shown immense energy in the past, one is science which, by itself, transformed first Western societies and then the rest of the world in two hundred years, the other is Christian ethics (when speaking of the West), which showed a similar transformative power in society before the age of science.
Can science and ethics join forces, so that their combined energies might be enough to propel the world into action to save the environment? Only if two things happen. First, the rift between science and faith must disappear so that the idea that these two powerful impulses are irrelevant to each other also disappears. Then we must change our mindset when applying technology in society. If Christian ethics really become a factor in the way we look at technology, we could never subject living beings to untold suffering in the name of efficiency and profits: we could never have chicken batteries, hog and cattle fattening pens, present-style slaughtering houses, whale hunting, seal clubbing, shark fin mutilations and on and on, The list is never ending. We would also not poison and pollute our rivers, lakes and seas, our land and air in the name of profit. We would start of learn from nature, which has produced waste and dead matter for millions of years and yet remained pristine and sparkling for man to enjoy. New energy? Nature has produced all the energy required for growing plants from the sun by means of photosynthesis, with high efficiency and a total lack of pollution. Today, we still have an old mindset when we think of new, clean energy sources, like solar, wind, even nuclear. Perhaps if we started to look at nature differently, not from without with (often brutal) methods of exploitation in the name of profits, but from within, learning slowly from her wisdom, we might find quite new solutions to our problems.
Of course, such fundamental changes of society take time. But if we have the final goal in mind, we can do a great deal, even in the short term, to save ourselves and our planet. The first industrial revolution will be with us for some time yet, no matter what we do. If we can start adding a social conscience to our business models, if we can start paying attention to the extreme gravity of the situation before it actually overwhelms us, if we can apply what we already know to stop the spreading of deserts, to clean up pollution and so on, we can begin the long process of real change. It is not impossible but it will need enormous will and energy. This brings us back to the need, already mentioned, of spanning the gulf between science and faith, so that the inherent energies in both can be united. What are the chances of this happening?
Surprisingly, the answer to this question is very positive and could justify optimism in other areas also. In looking at how this rift appeared in the first place, it is clear that thinkers like Galileo and Newton were responsible for it, when they removed God (and therefore ethics) from what was then called “natural philosophy” and substituted nature and her mathematically expressed laws as the only needed explanation for physical phenomena. Today, this rift between science and faith is often expressed in terms of a controversy between creationism and evolutionary theory. However, it antedates Charles Darwin and it is the progress of physics itself which must be looked to, to see if this gulf can be spanned. Right from the beginning, this gulf between science and faith involved the concept of reality. It has already been pointed out that, when God was removed, the only reality left was that of the world of nature. This reality was strong and solid throughout the era of Newtonian physics. Even atomic and subatomic particles were thought to be simply very small bits of this same solid matter. However, quantum mechanics found conclusively that the laws of Newton did not apply to these small particles and that they were very different from matter on a larger scale. One example of this difference is that matter on this microscopic scale exhibited the essential particle-wave duality of matter which quantum mechanics mandated. The wave manifestations of larger, visible bodies, while they existed theoretically, were so infinitesimally small that they could not be detected. Nobody had much doubt about the reality of large bodies, existing in nature, but on the particle level, what was “really” there? Werner Heisenberg, one of the titans of twentieth century physics, had this to say about that subject: “In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, the phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
The long search for the ultimate, irreducible particle of matter has thus ended, apparently, in “potentialities” or “possibilities”. What does this say about the reality of large bodies, which consist entirely of large accumulations of just these “potential” particles? Clearly, something is missing here, when it comes to concepts of reality. The reality of ordinary objects in nature, which both Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics recognizes, is of the subjective kind: It needs our presence, our senses and (as quantum mechanics insists) our consciousness. It is obviously insufficient in itself to answer all the questions about physical manifestations, especially on the particle level. In classical physics, apart from the concept of subjective reality, there was also the concept of objective reality, that is a reality which does not require the human presence or the human senses. Galileo, in fact, believed that matter and motion (his “primary qualities”) were objectively real, that is they did not require the human presence to exist, they were independent manifestations of nature and, therefore, suitable for science. In this, he made an error: in order to be observed and analyzed, matter and motion still needed the human sense of sight. To modern physics, therefore, everything in our field of sense perception is subjective and objective reality has disappeared from the science. However, in the case of microscopic particles, if they exist in the “potential” state, they could certainly exist in an objective reality, which is beyond the human senses. In fact, to a Greek philosopher, the potential state of anything was very real indeed. An immaterial world of reality was another name for the divine realm which, although “objective” to man in that it did not need his presence and was beyond his sense perceptions, nevertheless contained all true knowledge.
At present, the problem of the difference in the reality of particles from that of visible bodies remains unresolved in quantum mechanics and is part of the many puzzles of the “quantum enigma” If the old, philosophical concept of an objectively real but immaterial world were to be reintroduced into physics, it would not only solve the problem of reality just mentioned but it would also be the concept that would span the gulf between science and faith, because faith could naturally see in this real but immaterial world the world of God. If this small step can be achieved, it might be a sign that other things also are capable of solution.
