Davies and Materialism

Paul Davies took a solid beating and responded in turn at The Edge.

Part of his response was to the effect that he didn’t mean all of science in his original discussion, but only meant instead the area of cosmology and theoretical physics which is his bailiwick. He exempts evolutionary biologists with that stroke. His opinions on cognitive science or neuropsychology would likely be similar (I bring this up since I see a few “grand problems” for science beyond the origin of the universe and some final theory of physics; the problem of mind and abiogenesis as similarly important).

But part of his discussion continued to hammer at the notion that uniformity and understandability of natural law was somehow intrinsically related to monotheism. It’s a rarefied argument that kind of bootstraps itself on the fact that Newton, Kepler and Galileo saw the hand of God in the correspondence of their mathematical abstractions to physical observations. There is an odd hint about his proclivities, though, in Davies’ mention of Lee Smolin’s evolutionary selection of universes, where other metaphorical narratives have informed the physical theory; a similar parallel exists in the use of computer metaphors in cognitive science, of course, or in ecological theories of perception. There are only a few basic algorithms available to try to explain unexplained phenomena: stochastic selection with replication (evolution), deterministic interaction (Newtonian dynamics), quantized interactive behaviors (quantum mechanics), thermodynamic uniformization, cybernetic control and feedback, computation and, yes, pure irrationality or theology.

I did some digging on some of the Davies’ arguments, passing back through the Wigner paper and the follow-on by Hamming, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” which builds-out the notion that there are essentially irrational drivers (aesthetics, play, mysticism) that push forward mathematics and that the results in turn drive scientific theory. All of this effort in some ways parallels or rediscovers the ongoing work during the same time period concerning aspects of irrationality in the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyeraband, etc.). The scientific method is not an acidic, scalding, and sacred pursuit devoid of irrational influences, nor are individual scientists devoid of personal faiths about their capabilities or the possibilities of their theories, but proclaiming the entire enterprise as strongly influenced by a monotheistic worldview is a strange preoccupation. Indeed, the only constant across the varied scientific pursuits is that any metaphysics is material in nature because no other explanations have provided any hint of validation or added to the task at hand (thus any metaphysics is tentative, itself), and that mathematics is a useful tool because it is simply a way of expressing relationships between objects that are not irrational but that vary according to sometimes complex but non-arbitrary ways.

Multiverses and Regress

Paul Davies and Dinesh D’Souza have much in common. Both have summoned Newton’s faithfulness that supported his belief in an ordered universe as a means for explaining how modern science is dependent on faith. D’Souza goes much further than Davies, however, in denying that any other culture other than Christian Europe could have developed science and reason as a central cultural pillar upon which liberalism and America ultimately emerged.

D’Souza’s flaw is primarily in his historical dismissal of the achievements of other cultures, like Islam, in the development of math and science. In his presentations and articles he tends to quote a single Islamic philosopher who believed that Allah could be as irrational as he wanted to be, as if that led all Islamic thinkers to dismiss as impossible any understanding of the universe beyond the ideas of the Koran. Of course we know that was not the case, and hence we get algebra through Aldebaron.

Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Democritus and Epicurus would be similarly shocked by D'Souza's claims.

Davies’ error is in his assumption that science must be a closed intellectual system, thus submitting the entire explanatory framework to an argument of infinite regress. If we see symmetry in forces, there must be an explanation for that symmetry. Then we need an explanation beyond that symmetry. If we assume that the existing laws are effective explanations, he declares that we have invoked faith that has the same essential character as the faith of the religious.

This, of course, dismisses the entire project of inference and abduction—the contingency of liberal rationalism—using a logical positivist conception of theory. We do not, as Davies declares, claim scientifically that there may be no explanation for the ordered nature of physical law. We simply hold that there is no clear theoretical construct and supporting evidence to provide such an explanation. We keep looking and constantly ask ourselves: are there any exceptions to relativistic conceptions of gravitation? We look for anomalous disconfirmation because it leads to conceptual revision. We tentatively hold forth multiple universes and ask whether there is any way to confirm or refute the idea, or whether the idea has consequences.

That, to my mind, is nothing like religious faith, and is only loosely allied with the grand ordered Deism of Newton.