Science and faith

Laws of physics like religion are never questioned

an article by Paul Davies

Tempe: Science, as 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 scepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magesteria" Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion is that science has its own faith-based 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 that the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe into 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 ration intelligibility of cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which the 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 they have the form they do?

During our student days, the laws of physics were regarded completely off the limits. 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 laws of unspecified origin. You have 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.

The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti -rational. After all, the very essence o of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. 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: meaningless and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Although certain 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.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is that the realisation that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might be more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to lace 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 selected it by our very existence.

Clearly, then,both religion and science are founded on faith-namely,on the belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws,maybe an 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 scientist 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 laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendental 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 metalaws),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 is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws that exist reasonless 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 be incorporated 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 of 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.