Presidential Address

In his inaugural address, President Obama told us that his administration ‘will restore science to its rightful place’. If we can agree that former-President Bush’s administration sowed confusion about the nature of science, and confounded its free pursuit, we might still wonder what such a rightful place looks like.

Science has created the world we live in. All our technological inventions  – steam engines, fertilisers, particle-accelerators and i-Phones – convince us that the world is real, and becomes somehow more real the more sophisticated the technological world becomes. Technology is the outward and visible sign that science is getting somewhere. And by somewhere we mean the ability to create simulacra of reality that we call the material world. It’s what we mean by progress.

If we, the public, see clearly what science does, we understand only poorly what science is.

Science has a methodology, a way of approaching what is out there. It sets out from the position that the world is made out of things that move. Science ultimately tries to find out what those things are made of, and what we mean by motion. It turns out that it is really hard to answer these questions.

Science begins by separating out phenomena as things with names, but progresses by uniting phenomena into ever more inclusive descriptions. Four hundred years of the application of the scientific method points to a possible unification of the laws of nature. Our universe is a patch of pure radiation that expanded and evolved over billions of years into all the structures of matter we find in the universe today, including (incidentally and probably not ultimately) ourselves who tell the story.

But materialism has become so bizarre – possibly requiring the existence of an infinite number of parallel worlds, or the non-existence of hundreds of elementary particles – that it is moot what now separates mystery from mysticism.

Mysticism could be said to approach reality from the opposite direction. Mystics (who might include artists, philosophers and theologians) try to apprehend the unity of nature all in one go. The approaches may be different but they end up in the same place – a universe of unified phenomena – and they are both about looking and seeing.

Science is more intimately connected to religion than is generally supposed. If as a population we knew more about the history and philosophy of science, we might understand that a popular debate that has religion on the one side and science on the other is at best naïve, and at worst propagandist. The scientific revolution wouldn’t have happened but for monotheism (and didn’t happen in those parts of the world where there were other kinds of belief systems; China, notably). The three great monotheistic religions believe that there is something eternal and unchanging at the heart of the universe. So does science. Science is atheistic only in so far as it means to explain nature without recourse to the supernatural. Scientists, however, need not be atheistic, nor must agnosticism necessarily rule out spirituality.

Monotheistic religion and science both aim, one more explicitly than the other, to people the universe. Science attempts and succeeds in making life more comfortable for some, but science also facilitates an increasing population, only partially provides the means to support it, and at ever greater cost to the planet. In time, science expects to people other planets across the universe. Indeed it can have no other hope. Science and religion relieve suffering but also increase suffering. If religion often provides the reason for war, it is science that provides increasingly sophisticated means of killing people.

Scientific progress is also inextricably linked to economics. All business models depend on ever-increasing output and ever-increasing profitability, and the engine is technological progress. The scientific method, like capitalism, is always in search of new markets to exploit. These days there is plenty of evidence that the way we do science and the way we do business are unsustainable.  Starkly, there may not be much time left for the earth, at least not as a place willing to host us. How much unrestrained optimism in unrestrained progress can we bear? This is not an unreasonable question to ask even by the most ardent supporters of science or of capitalism. We cannot unravel the material world, and who would want to? Materialism is the greatest story ever told. But we can try to understand what it is and what we are in relationship to it.