Chapter 3 Patterns on the Shore of the Universe
Chapter 3
Patterns on the Shore of the Universe
The story is told of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene (ca. 435–ca. 356 BC), who found himself shipwrecked and washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean island of Rhodes. He had no idea of where he had landed. Was the island inhabited? As he walked along the shore, he found some geometric patterns marked out in the sand. “Let us rejoice!” he declared. “There must be people here!”1
Aristippus had seen features of the natural landscape which seemed to him to point to human intelligence. The patterns stood out as having been designed and drawn by people like himself. Nature itself could not have produced such structures. The only explanation that made any sense to him was that there were other people on the island.
It is a great story; yet we must not overlook its deeper significance. Aristippus observed a clue, something which he realized pointed to something else. The geometrical markings on the Rhodian sands were signs of a human presence on the island. Another story to make much the same point is Daniel Defoe’s famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). Crusoe is shipwrecked on an island and believes that he is on his own. One day he is astonished to find the print of a human foot on the sandy beach. The conclusion he draws from this observation is as simple as it is inevitable: there has to be someone else on his island. He is not alone. Crusoe is not sure whether to be delighted or terrified. Is this other person a friend or an enemy? An ally or a threat?
Here we see a pattern of thinking that is particularly characteristic of the natural sciences. We observe certain things. Yet as we mull them over, we realize that they seem to point to something beyond themselves—to something that is unknown and as yet unobserved. The clues in the world around us alert us to the likely existence of hitherto hidden and unknown realities. Human intellectual inquisitiveness being what it is, we long to discover these hidden truths. What we see makes us long to go beyond the horizon of our knowledge and ascertain what lies beyond. Can we discover what these clues seem to point to? Can we enter into the new world that they suggest?
Here we see a pattern of thinking that is particularly characteristic of the natural sciences. We observe certain things. Yet as we mull them over, we realize that they seem to point to something beyond themselves—to something that is unknown and as yet unobserved.
In 1781, the British astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet. The discovery caused great excitement since the scientific establishment of his day had assumed that there were no planets beyond those known to ancient astronomers: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. After some disagreements, the international scientific community agreed to call the new planet “Uranus.”2 In the years following its discovery, astronomers watched the new planet, calculating its orbit and distance from the sun. It was immediately obvious that Uranus lies far beyond Saturn, making the solar system larger than anyone had previously thought.
Yet it soon became clear that something was wrong. By 1821 it was increasingly obvious that the new planet did not behave exactly as predicted. British and French mathematicians had calculated its orbit on the basis of the classic theory of planetary motion set out by Sir Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. Yet Uranus did not behave as predicted. So what was the problem?
One possible explanation was that Newton’s theory was wrong. Perhaps the whole theory of planetary motion would need to be revised. Perhaps the gravitational attraction of the sun does not follow Newton’s predictions at such great distances. Yet there was another way of making sense of these puzzling observations. What if there was another unknown planet beyond Uranus? Its gravitational pull might distort the orbit of Uranus and make it behave in this unusual way.
Two mathematicians undertook to investigate this possibility independently. John Couch Adams in Cambridge and Urbain Le Verrier in Paris arrived at similar predictions of where a hitherto-unknown planet might be observed in the night sky. In the end, Le Verrier wrote to a colleague at the Berlin Observatory in September 1846, telling him where to look for the hypothetical new planet in the night sky. Within an hour of beginning his search, the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle found the planet now known as “Neptune.”3
This well-known story is often told to emphasize the predictive power of the natural sciences. Science does often get things wrong, making predictions that turn out to be based on incorrect assumptions. Yet even these failures are instructive. After all, they help identify false assumptions and force their correction. Adams and Le Verrier were confident that the puzzling behaviour of Uranus was only perplexing because it was being interpreted against the wrong background. Using one theoretical lens, it was opaque and out of focus. But they were confident that another theoretical lens could be found which would bring its behaviour into sharp focus, casting light on the celestial movements and offering an explanation of why Uranus behaved in this way. And as events proved, that confidence proved justified.
Here we see the classical outline of the scientific attempt to make sense of our observations of the world. Things don’t just happen. They fit into a pattern, a bigger picture, an overall scheme of things. What theory makes most sense of what we experience and observe in the world? The need to “preserve the phenomena” in scientific explanation has been appreciated since the time of Aristotle, in the classical era. Scientific theories change over time for two main reasons. First, new discoveries are made, which mean existing ways of thinking have to be re-evaluated. Second, a new theory is developed which makes better sense of the observational evidence than existing theories.
The new explanation of the mysterious orbital behaviour of the planet Uranus was easily checked out and shown to be right. But things are not always that straightforward. Sometimes a theory seems to make a lot of sense of what is observed; yet it cannot be proved, because there just isn’t enough information available. A classic example of this is Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, set forward in his Origin of Species (1859).
Darwin was faced with a series of observations about the natural world which he believed did not fit well into existing theories of the origin of species. For example, why did some species have vestigial structures: such as the nipples of male mammals? Darwin believed that his own theory of natural selection made more sense of these observations than any other theory. But he could not prove it was right. There were loose ends everywhere. His theory cast light on many observations of the natural world—but not all of them. Darwin was nevertheless convinced that his theory was right. It was just too good to be false: it explained so many things and explained them so well.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers.4
The point that Darwin was making was simple and is not scientifically controversial. Only in rare cases can a scientific theory be proved to be true beyond all doubt. In most cases, theories are accepted as true because they make enough sense of things to persuade us to take them seriously. Although some recent atheist writers have suggested that Darwin limited his view of reality to what could be proved, Darwin was quite clear that many scientific theories had to be accepted on faith and in trust. Darwin was a champion of scientific inquiry, not of dogmatic atheism. Darwin was convinced that there would always be an element of doubt in a theory which offered such a “big picture” of things. Not everything was a perfect fit. But his theory of natural selection accommodated many things so well that its truth seemed assured, despite anomalies, apparent contradictions, and some evidence that just didn’t seem to fit in with the theory.
A crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.5
The capacity of his theory to explain, in Darwin’s view, was a reliable indicator of its truth.
Not everyone was persuaded.6 There were too many theoretical and evidential loose ends, they argued. Many of these were sorted out in the ensuing decades, when some of the difficulties Darwin had noted turned out not to be such problems after all. But Darwin believed that he didn’t need to wait for all the loose ends to be tied up or for every aspect of his theory to be confirmed. His theory was just too good at explaining things for it to be wrong.7
That’s what most scientists think. Darwin is not an exception: in many ways he is a model of scientific thinking, now often expressed in terms of “inference to the best explanation.” Some of Darwin’s ideas are echoed in the famous essay “The Sentiment of Rationality” by the psychologist William James (1842–1910), who argues that human beings all need what he calls “working hypotheses” to make sense of our experience of the world.8 These “working hypotheses” often lie beyond total proof, yet they are accepted and acted upon because they are found to offer reliable and satisfying standpoints from which to engage the real world. For James, faith is a particular form of belief, which is pervasive in everyday life. James understands faith as “belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible.” Taking this idea a stage further, James declares that “faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.” We hold that certain things are true, and we rely upon them—while realizing that we cannot prove them to be true in the way that we could prove a proposition from Euclid’s geometry.
James thus affirms the possibility of believing in a theory, a way of making sense of things, a “working hypothesis,” which is not finally confirmed and may not ultimately be capable of final confirmation—yet which is found to be reliable. Darwin’s theory is an excellent example of the kind of thing that James has in mind. But James’s idea of a “working hypothesis” goes far beyond Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an explanation of the natural world, and beyond any other scientific theory. It concerns one of the most profound realities of human existence: things that are really worth believing in lie beyond proof. Our most important beliefs are the ones that simply cannot be proved.
This is an unsettling point, one that needs closer attention. There are a number of statements that can be proved beyond doubt. Here are three of them:
1. 2 + 2 = 4.
2. The whole is greater than the part.
3. The chemical formula for water is H2O.
While these are all true, none of them can exactly be said to give us a reason for living. None gives us reason to wake up in the morning with a song in our heart or a sense of purpose in our lives.
Christians believe that there is a God, whose loving presence and grace transform human nature and give us a reason to live and to hope. It cannot be proved. But it is a belief which, if true, utterly transforms life. We see everything in a new way and a new light. The atheist believes that there is no God. This article of faith cannot be proved either. Christianity and atheism are both faiths, what William James calls “working hypotheses.” They are of critical importance to people’s lives. But they can’t be proved.
I recall a conversation with an atheist in London after a debate. He was a very courteous and gracious person, who explained to me that he did not believe in God and did not believe he needed to believe in God. What gave his life purpose, he told me, was the goodness of human nature. Without this philosophical and moral lodestar, his life would have no purpose. I told him that my belief in God was a bit like that. He smiled and shook his head. “I have no need for faith,” he told me. I pointed out, in what I hope was a gracious and kindly manner, that as a matter of fact he did have faith. Whether he liked it or not, he had faith in the goodness of human nature. I explained that it was not a faith that I felt I could share with him. And I told him why. I spoke of the profound ambiguity of human nature and the horrors that human beings inflicted on each other. I spoke of Auschwitz and nuclear weapons. I just couldn’t share his faith. There was too much evidence against it. Maybe we are capable of doing good; but we also seem to be capable of doing evil. I couldn’t share his belief in the goodness of human nature. It didn’t square with the evidence.
My friend—I hope I can call him that—paled. We talked a bit more. I pointed out how I and many others believed that democracy was better than fascism, that liberty was better than oppression.
These were passionate and deeply moral beliefs. Yet they could not be proved to be true. So, I asked my friend, was I wrong to hold them? No, he replied, adding that he believed these things himself. As we prepared to go our separate ways, I left him with the thought that the things that really matter in life are ultimately matters of faith. They can’t be proved. But we continue to believe in them, and we are justified in doing so. That’s just the way things are. His final words to me as we parted were simple: “I’ve got some thinking to do.”
One of the more puzzling features of the New Atheism is its aversion to any suggestion that atheists have beliefs. Yet we all do. That’s the way we are. To believe is human. That doesn’t stop us from trying to work out which beliefs are most reliable. So how do we make sense of things and come to a reliable judgement about the best frame of reference? We will explore this further in what follows.