The first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics states that All men by nature desire to know. This desire, like those for food and sex, serves a biological function. It serves the conscious extension of a more general, unconscious function of the nervous system: the perception of coherence contained within floods of otherwise incoherent sensory input, and the extraction of information from this coherence. The key conscious extension of interest here is science.

Biological extensions develop only by evolving, and common evolutionary origins suggest a shared inheritance and multiple similarities. We shall see that the observed structure of data processing by the sensory system and by the hard sciences supports this suggestion. If science can be understood as a natural extension of a basic function of the nervous system, can all forms of knowledge-seeking be understood in that way and similarly share, at some deeper level, commonalties in structure? I will try to make two ideas clear, convincing, and meaningful: (1) that science and the senses serve a similar underlying biological purpose and strategy, and (2) that an understanding of what science is about is relevant to what all knowledge is about.

The nature of knowledge is, of course, a very large question. Part of it can be addressed by science; but much of it–a metaphysical part-- cannot. Science nevertheless requires, and has developed, views concerning the nature of knowledge that are both internally coherent and consonant with its biological purpose and strategy. These views comprise a large part of what I propose to discuss under the heading of the scientific worldview.

The view of science presented here, and the attitude towards knowledge that goes with it, are thematically described as biologism and instrumentalism (or pragmatism) respectively. Both themes can be given many variations of which this is one. I hope this one will be especially interesting and useful, and believe it may be so, mainly as a result of being informed by a range of sensibilities differing from that of most writers on these subjects.

One sensibility is to the importance of theology, by which I mean attitudes and beliefs stemming from the fundamental question, Why is there anything rather than nothing. We all---consciously or not, and willingly or not--have such a theology, and I will show how it correlates to, if not determines, our attitudes towards all forms of knowledge, including and especially, that of science.

Another sensibility informing this book derives from my experience in the actual practice and creation of physics, a field which has a unique role in determining and illustrating the origin and meaning of the scientific worldview.

The context of the discussion in this book will be firstly, physics, secondly, the hard sciences, thirdly, all the sciences, and fourthly, all knowledge. Each can be taken, in varying degrees, as an exemplar of the next, with degree decreasing down the list. Physics is certainly an exemplar of the hard sciences, whereas science is considered to be only partially so for all knowledge.

The assumptions underlying this ordering are widely understood, but also hotly disputed. They are often given words of opprobrium such as ‘reductionist’, ‘scientistic’, and overweeningly presumptuous. The last of these is applied mainly to physics, which stands at the head of the list.

This ordering is reductionist, and is so because science is reductionist. Scientific explanation is reduction to simpler form. The assumption that some phenomena or laws can be scientifically explained, is the assumption that they can be further reduced. Continual explanation is continual reduction, and this leads inexorably to physics. Reductionism is an assumption,--indeed a faith,--which may turn out to be untrue, but nonetheless underlies the practice of science.

The processes of reduction are seen most clearly and dramatically in physics: data are reduced to formula, formula to laws, laws to theories, each a simpler but also more abstract representation of the previous. No other science approaches physics in its level of abstraction. Increasing abstraction and conceptual distance from phenomena move us beyond the range of language built to describe phenomena. Physics forces us to face questions of epistemology--what knowledge is about–beyond those of any other body of knowledge.

Physics is often defined as the study of the basic laws of nature, and metaphysics, which has many definitions, was at one time said to be the study of true causes. These related topics indicate common origins, and although now separated for more than three centuries, physics and metaphysics still strongly interact.

One way they do so is by arguing, as is typical of once united entities disengaging from one another--husband from wife, child from family, or regions from countries. As they disengage, they argue over shared interests. Physics, like a vigorous and newly independent adolescent, denies metaphysics relevance–often to anything, but especially to itself. Metaphysics, like a parent, admires physics youthful accomplishments, yet feels it lacks true wisdom, true depth of understanding. Thus there is a long history of metaphysical criticism of the quality of the knowledge physics provides; and it must be addressed, because any broad conclusions about knowledge-seeking derived from physics will be suspect if physics itself is suspected of lacking wisdom, and being narrow, and incomplete

The hard sciences accumulate knowledge on the basis of which hard predictions can be made--hard enough to form the foundations of modern scientific technology. This is not in question: few doubt that physics accumulates such useful knowledge. The doubts of the metaphysicians are about a kind of understanding that goes beyond utility.

Such questions appear at all levels of sophistication, all educational levels, and they extend from physics to all the sciences. They are not like questions arising from ignorance of scientific facts, which can be remedied by normal educational methods. Metaphysics determines whether ‘facts’ are to be accepted as facts. Its doubts can prevent facts, no matter how well presented, from being absorbed; they lie deeply in the mind, are difficult to reach, to analyze, and to change.

They often first surface in beginning students who are dissatisfied with Galileo’s description of projectile motion in terms of uniform acceleration because he does not explain its cause. Students then reject all of physics when they realize that it too is similarly incomplete; that all physics explains only by reducing one description to a simpler one.

The mathematical nature of physics gives rise to another claim of incompleteness, namely that mathematics only describes things (e.g. matter and motion) but explains nothing about real essences, what things really are. Mathematics also appears to makes physics false in the sense that its descriptions are always idealized ( e.g. perfectly straight lines) and thus never describe the true complexity of reality.

Physics also seems incomplete because it is deterministic: it leaves no room for free-will, and relatively little for uncertainty, both of which seem to be obvious realities. It also seems unable to explain higher level phenomena–a problem associated with the word emergence. Properties are said to emerge in complex physical systems that seem inexplicable in terms of the language of physics--properties such as life, consciousness, intent, and so on.

Such have been typical metaphysical challenges. They are not about the observations and theories of physics themselves, but rather about the completeness and uniqueness of their truth and reality. These, in turn, must depend on assumptions concerning the meaning of truth and reality.

Physics has developed definite operational–and therefore especially clear–meanings of these words. Not surprisingly, judged on the basis of the meaning of truth and reality as defined by itself, physics finds itself not deficient in these respects. Whatever one’s views are concerning these difficult and contentious concepts, it is obviously important to understand those of physics, which are ultimately those of all the sciences. This is also part of the meaning of the scientific worldview.

Before going on with these questions, bear in mind that physics and metaphysics do not only argue. Because both share a common background, they share deeply rooted ideals: that truth and reality exist, are meaningful, and are worth seeking.. At this deeper level they unite against an anti-metaphysical, anti-scientific tradition of thought that will be discussed later.

How can other meanings of truth and reality contend with one warranted by biology and created and tested by physics’ direct and successful questioning of nature? How did these others arise, and how can they continue? An important (but only partial) source of this conflict can be traced to evolutionary memory.

Three evolutions are relevant: that of humans biologically, of individuals psychologically, and of society culturally, all with very different time frames. Extending furthest into the past, biological evolution has provided our deepest intellectual endowments: for example, our sense of reason and reasonableness. No one is taught elementary logic, it is biologically inbuilt. But so is our instinct to distrust and override logic when it leads to apparently unreasonable conclusions or simply becomes very elaborate. This instinct has undoubtedly been advantageous to survival in the past and is eminently reasonable in everyday life today, but it also presents a deep problem for science which has learned how to operate in a regime of logical certainty previously unknown. The hard sciences regularly produce correct yet unreasonable ideas which this instinct mistrusts.

From our psychological evolution, each of us has a residue of ideas appropriate to the needs of infancy and childhood which also pose a problem for science. When individuals begin to ‘individuate’–to distinguish themselves from the womb, mother, and environment, and distinguish objects within the environment, they make certain basic associations. For example, the movement from the known to the unknown, is associated with that from unanalyzed wholeness to analyzed separateness, and that from carefree safety to anxious danger. Science is a continuation of this generally outward motion of consciousness. Its constant call to analysis,--to pull apart,--stirs memories of anxiety and loss of wholeness.; and in fact these are highly emotional themes often found to accompany critiques of science.

Cultural evolution leaves the most obvious imprints of all. Views appropriate to earlier levels of knowledge and earlier social conditions, become either the wisdom of the past or its superstitions. The conviction that science and religion are natural enemies, a prejudice widely held on both sides of the divide, is a prime example of an unwarranted residue of historical contingency and cultural evolution.

In sum, basic mental mechanisms bequeathed by our biology, emotions developed by our early psychology, and prejudices of our culture, all combine to modulate our concepts of truth and reality. As a result, many unnecessary, misleading or simply wrong metaphysical challenges to science arise from antiquated beliefs, especially from those that were natural and useful in the context of earlier stages of evolution. To help in recognizing them, they will be traced to their roots--to the infancies of people and of civilizations.

A large portion of the nervous system is taken up with the reduction of data of all sorts--sensory, observational, relational, physical, numerical, verbal,--into useful form. The system first weeds out irrelevancies and then transforms the remainder into useful form. The scientific community does the same and both systems achieve massive reductions.

The visual system reduces its input data, in the form of light, to a relatively few electro-chemical signals. The reduction achieved is dramatically demonstrated by neurophysiological discoveries made during the last half century They show a more than a ten million fold reduction (10⁷) as data flows from the output of retinal photosensors to locations at which all the useful information has been extracted from it. Our systems of sense and science are designed around the goal of achieving this sort of reduction; it is key to the structure of both

Reduction in physics can similarly be measured by a ratio: the amount of data representable by, to that representing an equation, law, or theory. Thus, hundreds of experimental data points encoded into ten or so mathematical symbols, unnumbered actual and innumerable potential atronomical data encoded into the tens of symbols comprising Newton’s laws.

Physicists reduce data when they explain phenomena. This is done in stages: experimental data are reduced directly to formulas and laws, then the latter are reduced to theories, then theories are reduced to more basic theories. Thus the operative meaning of explanation in physics is reduction, and since Newton, physics has continually reduced ever more data to ever fewer theories. It will become clear that the large magnitude of the reduction physics achieves is what gives it its compelling predictive power.

Data reduction governs the evolution of physics just as natural selection does biological evolution. In both cases, their governance is hidden behind appearances. The situation is similar within physics. For example, the laws of quantum electrodynamics govern most things we are aware of in everyday life, yet virtually none of it shows directly. Basic concepts of electric charge and magnetism show themselves only in isolated and special circumstances. The governances of natural selection and data reduction, are similarly hidden beneath surface appearances.

Physics has shown that great complexity can hide, and be completely generated by simple law. But a great disparity between complexity and simplicity violates common sense; and however often it is shown to be misleading, common sense inhibits belief that simplicity will be discovered behind another class of as yet incompletely analyzed phenomena. Natural selection is a very simple concept which, religious qualms aside, is still subject to this source of doubt. Like natural selection, data reduction is a simple idea and a simple mechanism which, it is being claimed, explains considerable complexity. Neither are naïve ideas; the naïve assumption has always been, especially before science, but still today, that only comparable complexity explains complexity.

Thus many will find it hard to accept that, ultimately, only the goal of data reduction drives the hard sciences. Some will say, for example, that science seeks truth and reality,–what things are real and what are the true relations between real things. Thus, for example, they often expect and require of physics a description of true causes (what causes motion?), and of true essences (what is the essence of matter?). On the surface, physics seems able to supply these, but a more philosophic mind, which probes more deeply, becomes disenchanted as more careful explanations dissolve verbal descriptions of causes and essences into mere mathematical equations. The view being put forward here is that, yes, physics does seek truth and reality, but it also defines these concepts to suit itself, and, in the process, they become mere adjuncts to its fundamental biological goal of data reduction.

This view is borne out by the actual long term behavior of physics. Despite occasional statements to the contrary, physicists have effectively excluded any operative criteria of theory selection other than data reduction. Other criteria are eventually pejoratively branded as being metaphysical. The effect of this single minded pursuit of data reduction will be quantitatively and objectively demonstrated using the measure previously mentioned. This measure will show that data reduction has been, and is being, continually achieved.

In a sense, there is nothing new to the idea that data reduction is what science is about. Closely related principles have been suggested in the past: Occam’s razor ( It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.), 'parsimony', 'economy of thought', and even, simply, ‘simplicity’ or ‘elegance’. Data reduction, however, shifts explanatory emphasis from the aesthetic to the biological, and from the qualitative to the quantitative–in other words, it shifts explanation towards the scientific As a consequence, it achieves clearly demonstrable agreement with many facts. Only uncertain demonstrations are possible when dealing with aesthetic and qualitative principles.

This shift has been decisively aided by scientific developments of the last century. First, a science of the brain has been created. Particularly important here are now classic developments in neurology associated with names such as Barlow, Hubel, Weisel, and Gazzaniga. Second, information and computer science have been created; the relation between reduction and knowledge, and the measure of data reduction I am using are derived from work in these fields by names such as Shannon, Kolmogorov and Chaitin.

Finally, the advent of special relativity and especially quantum mechanics has dramatically exposed data reduction as the bedrock principle of science. Prior to these 20^th century developments, it was still possible to believe that metaphysical conditions could be placed on theories. For example, even some physicists argued in the late 19^th century that science should not deal with entities whose individual properties could not be directly measured, or that apriori conditions--concerning e.g. the structure of space and time, continuity, and classical determinism--were necessary and self evident. Similarly, it was possible to imagine that science was approaching a picture of the world that our minds could in fact picture, and that could be qualitatively described in ordinary language.

All this–the last vestiges of belief that science could be about anything but data reduction–has been swept away, and this especially by quantum mechanics. On the one hand this theory answers correctly (as far as we now know) all experimental test put to it; on the other hand the picture of the world it provides so violates basic intuitions that it is both unspeakable and unimaginable. We can speak of it only in paradoxes and we can only imagine it in our minds eye using false images.

The one thing quantum mechanics does correctly, is reduce data to laws and formula, and that has been enough. That suffices for it to be declared true by the scientific community–to be scientifically true. Even if quantum mechanics is eventually replaced by another theory, the historically demonstrated point will have been that physicists are guided in choosing theory purely by the criterion of data reduction, and in this sense, they have acted according to their inbuilt biology.

I am reducing science to the mere reduction of data, and am suggesting that at least some other forms of knowledge also amount to no more than reduction of other forms of data. Here, input to any processing system is called data, and data processing includes thinking. In particular, the various reasons man seeks to know are data for further thought. Thus, if all these reasons reduce to one,--data reduction,--then the reduction of all reasons to data reduction becomes itself an example of data reduction.

This last is a reductionist hypothesis that may seem highly unlikely, for there are many beliefs about knowledge-seeking that seem unrelated to data processing activities of the nervous system. For example, Keats stated that Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth, and Job, that The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding. The first relates the desire for knowledge to the search for beauty, the second, wisdom to an awesome awareness of the transcendent. Both have meaning, but neither seems related to data reduction.

But evolutionary biology tries to explain all living phenomena,–and that does include knowledge-seeking,--in terms of natural selection, and data reduction fits easily into its scheme. That is, natural selection can easily explain the drive towards data reduction, and the latter in turn explains, as I intend to show, the drive for scientific knowledge. Data reduction then becomes part of the reductionist program of evolutionary biology in which even the sentiment that Truth is Beauty would have to be ultimately explained in terms of natural selection; this seems no less unlikely than doing so in terms of reduction.

Thus, even the idea that data reduction might be key to all, not merely some of man’s desire to know,–that all knowledge is in essence just highly reduced data,--may be untrue but cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is no more implausible on its face than any of the currently controversial attempts to understand all human phenomena on the basis of human biology and evolution. Whatever the case, attempting new problems, no matter how difficult or implausible on the basis of hypotheses which have been already found to be useful is the normal operation of science. And even less well established hypotheses that stimulate research programs serve a useful purpose. Difficult problems that test such hypotheses lead to their refinement or to their replacement.

Truth and reality form a common thread running from physics to metaphysics, and then, for each individual, from a metaphysics to a worldview. The thread runs from a metaphysics to a worldview because everyone uses standards by means of which they filter perceptions, and truth and reality are such standards. Even those who maintain that truth and reality do not exist must use them–for they themselves are tools of data reduction. Is it true there is no one truth? Is his reality really real?

The mind is compelled to make such judgements about its data input, to filter out irrelevant data. Will you seriously consider statements (data) about spirits, matter, natural law, good, evil, predestination, free-will,…, God, if they are not about real things or if the statements cannot be true? These are important judgements everyone makes. Thus everyone is an applied metaphysician; and every enlightened person should also be a conscious one.

Physics provides a clear and coherent meaning to concepts such as truth and reality and does so more effectively than the other hard sciences. This is due primarily to three interrelated factors: first, and most obviously, its concern with the most basic laws of nature, second, its uniquely challenging degree of abstraction, and finally, its simplicity.

This is a simplicity of both it and its subject matter. Physics studies nature’s simplest systems because only they can be studied to the depth necessary to reach the basic laws regulating their often complex behavior. Systems can only be simple when they can be effectively isolated from their environment. This is true of the system of physics itself; that is, its practice is a relatively simple object of study because it is relatively isolated from cultural influences. This last remark is a point of great contention nowadays, and will be discussed later in some detail.

Everyone, including their bitterest critics, has observed that workers in the hard sciences enjoy a unity found nowhere else amongst the intellectual disciplines. They use a uniform standard for judging scientific truth, and agree upon a large body of truth taught to all aspirants to their profession. All other disciplines have either long standing schools of thought fighting over their most basic truths, or continually changing dominant schools which each in turn extirpate their rivals. No one has ever thought to extirpate classical theories of mechanics, electricity, magnetism, gravity,… they are classic, taught to every student of physics, and are completely indispensable.

Workers in the hard sciences also hold to uniform standards of reality even though what they all consider to be real changes at times–or as we say, evolves via ‘scientific revolutions’. Because of this uniformity, these scientists quickly come to consensus and can then work together towards a vision of progress.

Through its unique relation to metaphysics physics achieves an educational importance that transcends both its utility and the aesthetic satisfactions of mere intellectual curiosity. It is analogous to that long given geometry which (in principle) was supposed to teach people ‘how to think’ (logically). As with geometry, what is important to learn is less theorems than attitudes: views that determines what physics is about.

There is little current understanding of this wider educational goal: this importance of knowing what the hard sciences, as represented by physics, are about. While most people believe that science is generally useful, powerful, and intellectually challenging, they are also virtually unanimous in assessing its limitations: it is about some things but definitely not about others. It stands tall, but only over a very circumscribed area upon their mental landscape. Few feel that the study of natural physical systems in depth has taught us about anything beyond those systems. The search for, and discovery of the most basic laws of nature, appears to most people to teach nothing about the nature of truth and reality.

Here, in contrast, I am proposing that physics, as a result of its especially deep examination of nature, has realized meanings and standards of truth and reality that are uniquely coherent as well as uniquely related to our biology. And I am proposing that though these standards may be neither necessary nor sufficient for all our perceptions,--we may wish to judge the truth and reality of our perceptions by standards other than those used by our senses and our sciences, or may have to supplement scientific standards when they seem inapplicable,--they do illuminate all our perceptions. And I suggest that an enlightened mind will seek to know these standards.

This larger vision of physics is not new. It was widely held twice before: during the ancient Greek and modern European Enlightenments. These eras followed history’s two most fundamental scientific discoveries: respectively, that of mathematics, and of (modern) physics. Both Enlightenments were created by people whose worldviews were deeply and positively informed by those discoveries. That is at least what they believed.

The sign that Plato placed over the entrance to his Academy illustrates their belief:

as does his last lecture in which he

David Hume noted the parallel between the two Enlightenments:

I write in this tradition: this broader vision of the role of science–inspirer of worldviews. For ancient Greeks, the inspiration was primarily via the startling power of logic as revealed by the first mathematics. For modern Europeans, it was the equally startling success of experiment in exposing phenomena to mathematical analysis. To the first of these we owe much of the origin of philosophy as well as of the Apollonian spirit of Greek art; to the second, much of what is now called modernism. Together, they comprise much of Western civilization.

This introduction began with the idea of science as a form of biological data processing, and then suggested that all knowledge-seeking be viewed in this way. It then explained why physics has a special role in such a program. But in order that physics be believable in this role, criticisms of it have to be addressed. We cannot expect to infer broad conclusions about all kinds of knowledge-seeking from a narrow and incompletely realized form of it.

These criticisms divide into two categories. The first, composed of metaphysical criticisms of physics, has already been introduced. The second has physics allied with metaphysics, and they together with, in varying degrees, all science, all philosophy, all religion,…, in effect, all knowledge. In discussing the latter, Richard Rorty uses a definition of metaphysics in an essay that starts as follows:

A final vocabulary is a set of words suited to expressing a particular worldview. Not only does each worldview have its own vocabulary, but each is shaped by it. This emphasis on language will become critical.

Rorty defines an "ironist" as someone who doubts all final vocabularies, and sees no way to allay such doubts. Ironists are thereby put in a "meta-stable" condition:

They are meta-stable and must fluctuate because they are not coherent with themselves. If they wish to describe themselves, they must use a vocabulary the validity of which their vocabulary puts in doubt. The ironist accepts this incoherence, and believes it to be an inevitable part of the human condition.

Because of such incoherence, the ironist cannot take his or anyone’s metaphysical questions seriously; the ‘metaphysician’ (in the terminology of Rorty and Heidegger) can. The ironist cannot, and the metaphysician can, take questions about justice, science, knowledge, Being, faith, morality, philosophy seriously. Yet both ironist and metaphysician are necessarily applied metaphysicians because both must think in some vocabulary. They differ in that one is serious about it, the other, ironical.

Rorty uses the term ironist instead of the more general term, postmodernist, which he feels is over-used. Ironist emphasizes the style of expression, and postmodernist, the historical position, of a worldview. I will shortly introduce a term emphasizing underlying belief–an underlying ‘theology’ if you will. It points to a human type that has appeared throughout history, one that has always doubted, disliked, and disparaged the ideal of seeking to understand the world as cosmos.

Take away this ideal, which grounds both physics and metaphysics, and metaphysical critiques of the completeness of physics law, such as those previously discussed, become moot. They are superceded by more basic ones. For example, the ironist doubts the basic product of physics–natural law–is really ‘out there’ to be discovered, and the same for the mathematical objects comprising the laws of physics. Do they have real existence? Would they exist without us?

After all, as philosophers have long understood and modern science is now explicating in detail, phenomena are constructed, not reconstructed, from nerve signals within our brain. Should we then not have the (almost? completely? superhuman?) ability to interpret, or construct, phenomena in multiple ways, to thus subject reality to our will? Can we then not choose to use multiple ‘final vocabularies’ and therefore, take less seriously each of them along with their associated metaphysics?

How each ironist squares all this with the success of the hard sciences is a delicate question, often left purposefully unclear. Sometimes the irony is merely provocative. Particular cases are discussed in later chapters. However it is meant, they all would insist that, as they often put it, no one need be subject to the ‘hegemony’ of established science.

Or of established religions which, from their viewpoint, share many properties with science and are equivalently repressive. Since God was the traditional source of truth and reality when theology and metaphysics were one, this coupling of science and religion is not surprising. I am talking here of Western religion, for although all religions share roughly similar moral and ethical codes, only those of the West share the monotheistic theology that really couples to science.

In saying this, I am using monotheism in a purified sense closely associated with the 12^th century religious thinker Maimonides. Whether or not a person can be identified as a monotheist in this sense is influenced but not determined by religious affiliation or lack thereof. In fact, Maimonidean monotheism is often called radical agnosticism although he was hardly an agnostic in the usual sense of the word. Even atheists, depending on their beliefs, can qualify as hidden or effective monotheists in the sense I will be using the term. In order to emphasize this partial independence from religion, the term will be occasionally qualified as ‘philosophic monotheism’. The philosopher Lyotard noted, perhaps more aptly than he realized, that postmodernism is a kind of paganism. I will similarly use ‘philosophic paganism’ to designate the intellectual antithesis of philosophic monotheism.

Of all the ideas at the heart of science that organize themselves about philosophic monotheism, a basic one is certainly a belief in the existence of natural law independent of and external to man. It is natural to think of such law as having an author, but that can be ignored if it seems repugnant. The belief is not necessary as long as the result is the same. The assumption of an author-God, does nothing but collect further associations under one heading.

One of these associations is the belief that natural law can be discovered. A traditional theological form of this belief asserts that there is no ‘trickster’, no power independent of God, purposely confusing man. In a similar vein, Einstein remarked that God is subtle but not malicious. An example of a malicious trick would have been to provide false or misleading evidence concerning law ( e.g., the idea that the evidence for biological evolution is divine fakery). Confusion, although perhaps not malicious, would also arise from laws which applied here and not there, or then and not now: laws not fixed, or universal, or laws with odd and arbitrary parts to them (e.g. unexplainable constants). Thus, monotheism also suggests the universality of natural law. Again, although reducibility to, and discoverability and universality of, natural law seem to be naturally suggested by the concept of God, they do not require it.

Paganism challenges all these assumptions and more. Nietzsche, for example, even questioned the necessity for truth. He ended a discussion of it with this important point:

That is, those scientists who consider themselves free of both God and metaphysics are in fact free of neither. Their faith in science is sustained by a metaphysics that was originally theological. Today, if they often avoid the hypothesis of a God as cause, they nevertheless retain all its natural associations. They are, in effect, hidden monotheists.

Thus antipathy towards science and its worldview is not an intrinsic characteristic of religion. Science and philosophic monotheism actually share a common metaphysical antagonist associated originally with paganism. This important point will be discussed at length. Getting it right can be tricky. Just how tricky is illustrated by the preceding Nietzsche quotation. The idea that God is the truth, that truth is divine, which Nietzsche correctly identifies as having been infiltrated into Christianity through Plato, should have been identified as a pagan idea--one of many characteristic of ancient Greek and of much subsequent philosophy. As such, it will appear that it contains hidden implications ultimately antagonistic to science.

The last two sections have described certain types. The pagans look upon all forms of knowledge as word play: change the vocabulary used in the play, change the pieces you move about, and you get different games: different perceptions and views. Then there are the monotheists, who do not give such authority to man. Here, and in the next section, I will introduce certain psychological factors that go along with these attitudes.

Nietzsche and Maimonides start from the same theological point: God is neither Good nor Love nor Truth nor anything humanly conceivable. Each then moves to different conclusions, one paganism, the other monotheism. They can do so because their conclusions are not determined by logic alone. Their conclusions distinguish psychological reactions to the realization that we cannot comprehend absolutes–neither those named God, nor absolute truth, nor absolute reality. Nietzsche claims monotheism is an optimistic and cowardly reaction to this realization, and that paganism is pessimistic and brave. I will suggest that monotheism requires equal bravery, but the main point here is that the choice between the two is psychologically determined.

Judgments of this type are always uncertain, but the relative rarity of pure monotheists indicates that most people find,--or would find if they fully understood it,--that taken pure, monotheism is psychologically difficult to bear. It implies that God does evil as well as good, is unjust as well as just, and causes us to act and feel as if we have free-will without truly giving it to us. Few can bear a God who transcends man so completely, who’s nature is so hidden, that It acts so incomprehensibly according to familiar human terms. A God beyond any human vocabulary.

The normal instinct is not to bear but to give way. The classic example of this is the Book of Job where the original poetry, a message of hard and pure monotheism, is padded fore and aft with a soft adulteration of pagan prose. More generally, paganism enters religious belief in ways ranging from humanizing God, to blurring the distinction between man and God, to denying or ignoring the transcendent altogether, to, almost inevitably, effectively deifying man.

Plato deified mind; more commonly, supernatural powers are ascribed to it. The Greeks took pride in the human mind; the Jews emphasized its limitations. Theology is a Greek word, and the name of a vocabulary they invented. Using it, they discoursed about divine attributes with confidence. The Jews, in contrast, knew neither God’s form nor name. To be able to discern God’s attributes is to certainly be able to discern Its (or Nature’s) laws. Thus Greek confidence inspires us to search out these laws, and the Western tradition has been to praise them for having done so and having passed on their confidence to us.

The fear and pride discussed here, both characteristic emotional reactions to monotheism, both appear in similar reactions to science.

Major themes introduced so far have been as follows:

• The view of science as biological data reduction.
• The clear, operational meaning of truth and reality within science as shaped by its biological task of data reduction.
• The wider value of understanding this meaning, and physics’ unique and historic role in providing it.
• The metaphysical obstacles to acceptance of the foregoing.
• The existence of even deeper than metaphysical obstacles.
• The relation of the latter to questions of theology and psychology.

This section concerns a group of related problems that have been lurking in the background of the discussion so far but, because they are so entangled with the preceding themes, have not been addressed until now. They concern the role and adequacy of mathematical explanation, something basic both to physics and to this discussion. Galileo said that the book of Nature was written in number. Although people feel that, generally speaking, they understand this idea, few can really fully accept it. I will first show that they do not, and then discuss why not.

Consider an explanation of a concept in physics. One type of explanation relates concepts directly to phenomena. For example, when experimentalists measure a current they conceptually connect it to a phenomenon. This connection gives us an operational meaning to current which amounts to just a description, in ordinary language, of the construction and use of an ammeter. It is an explanation like: current is what you read off of an ammeter constructed and used as follows… .

This kind of explanation is practically limited to directly measurable concepts like current. It becomes far too complex to be useful for more abstract concepts. And even when it can be used, it is not what people really want. When they ask what current "really is", they usually want a definition in terms of simpler and more basic concepts ( e.g. a current is a moving stream of charges).

A definition of this type could come from the theory of quantum electrodynamics. It provides a mathematical expression for current in terms of ‘wave operators’ which are basic concepts within that theory. Such a definition is also operational, but relates to operations performed by theoreticians rather than experimentalists. Current gets its meaning from its mathematical expression and use.

Such a definition is entirely in terms of the symbolic vocabulary of mathematical physics. It can only change by being deepened and broadened by a new theory. The new definition must include the former one as a special or limiting case. This is so because the formula of physics are equivalent to vast quantities of data: they reduce these data to relatively few symbols, and are thereby constrained by them. The data can be reconstructed from its reduced form essentially through pure mathematical manipulation. In fact, it can be done on a computer.

When theories change, verbal descriptions often radically change. That of current has radically changed over the past two centuries. But formula involving current, valid then, such as Ohm’s law, are still valid today. Meaning is defined by use, use by formula, and formula are not changed by words. Thus the true meaning of current is given by a theory dependent, mathematically phrased definition, which is unedifying to nearly all but physicists–that is, to all but those who actually use it. This situation, already suggested by Galileo’s maxim, is deeply unsatisfying and ultimately unacceptable to most thinkers.

On a casual level people always seek explanations of physical concepts in everyday language. They accept necessary technical words, like electron and charge, but expect them to be sensible: they want to be able to make sense, perhaps even form a visual image, of them. Phenomena should be qualitatively understandable in terms of them. In fact, one often hears that the role of mathematics, or of quantity, in physics is only to make things "more precise"; that an essential understanding of nature can be entirely verbal and qualitative.

The casual opinion of people is not so significant. What is significant is that it is just the surface manifestation of a deeply held philosophical belief. Philosophers do not merely seek but usually demand verbal explanations. They demand that mathematical physics be fully translatable into words; that an essential understanding of physics should ultimately be conveyable by words. But mathematical symbols and words, form distinctly different vocabularies, mathematical expressions and sentences make up different languages, and as the discussion concerning vocabularies suggested, vocabularies influence and constrain the ideas they express. Ideas are different in different vocabularies.

The difficulties this leads to are illustrated by comments of a philosopher, who noted that the 'electron' found in Bohr's atomic theory–a particle that ‘quantum-jumped’ between planetary orbits around atomic nuclei–so differs from our concept of it today, that the earlier word cannot be said to refer to anything recognizable. Thus, it doesn’t refer to anything from the standpoint of the present theory ....(Bohr then) wasn’t referring to anything...

Someone talking about a non-existent, a figment of the imagination, should be talking nonsense, yet Bohr’s theory is not nonsense. It is still being taught at introductory levels, and the expressions for atomic spectra derived from it are as useful today as they were in the early 20^th century when it was created. The implied judgement concerning this theory based on its description in ordinary language–the verbal gloss physicists put upon their mathematics--is highly misleading.

A more subtle illustration of the philosopher’s demand is Thomas Kuhn’s statement that Newtonian dynamics cannot be derived from a theory which satisfies special relativity. This despite the fact that Newtonian equations are in fact so derived. The derivation is valid in systems in which all particles move slowly compared to the velocity of light. Certain terms in the relativistic equations of motion for such a system become negligibly small when particle velocities become very small, and when these are dropped, the equations become Newtonian. Physicists generally say that this demonstrates that Newtonian dynamics is a special case of relativistic dynamics. Kuhn, on the other hand, says:

It suffices for the physicist that the equations alone become Newtonian in order that the theory become Newtonian but not for Kuhn; he requires a verbal reinterpretation for an acceptable derivation.

Kuhn is technically correct. Newton had a vocabulary of absolute space, absolute time, fixed mass, and so on, which undergoes a radical change when we get to Einstein. But the physicist considers this of secondary, the philosopher, of primary, importance. The physicist understands that verbal interpretations are necessary--but not primary. The reduction of data to theory depends solely on the equations with which we calculate. Kuhn, on the other hand, agrees with most people that real knowledge is not to be found in mere equations--"calculational recipes". Surely, they say, knowledge and understanding mean more than just the ability to calculate.

Exacerbating the situation for philosophers is the fact that since the advent of quantum mechanics, the verbal explanations of physics, which they expect to provide such meaning, have become increasingly strange and difficult to understand. They have become very ‘unreasonable’. Physics nevertheless continues along these lines because data reduction, not reasonableness, is its ultimate driving force. Physics’ course is, of course, reasonable within the scientific worldview, or more broadly, within that of monotheism; but not within that of paganism.

These remarks help explain the ambitious range of this book--why it cannot be merely about science and data reduction, but must also discuss belief systems of the widest possible compass. Without some understanding of monotheism, science will remain a useful but shallow enterprise to pagans, no matter how well described and how great its success; mutatis mutandum in the absence of an understanding of modern anti-scientific paganism by monotheists.

Returning again to Galileo’s maxim, if the book of nature, at least as it can be read by man, is written in number, then there are no words in it. Nature needs no words, but we do. We must translate mathematics into words in order to connect the book to the phenomenal world. Ordinary language provides a kind of meaning to the mathematical expressions of physics without which they could not be used; but as necessary as it is to us, it is a secondary meaning, a gloss upon the book of nature. Like all translations, it is changeable and can never convey the full meaning of the original.

This is the physicist’s view of the matter. The metaphysical philosopher will question this view by asking how Galileo knew the book of nature was written in number? Was he not just making a rhetorical statement, and a broad assumption based on narrow experience? On the other hand, the pagan philosopher will ask how Galileo knew that there is a book of nature at all, or that there is a single book, or will claim that Man can write this book. These questions return the discussion to theology.

Suppose there is no book of nature. Then nothing prevents multiple interpretations of phenomena from being possible; without an external source, authority reverts to humans. And since no laws are out there (in a book of nature), independent of us, meanings become whatever we wish, and are expressible in whatever language we wish. All vocabularies become our free creations and playthings.

Vocabularies commonly equate the power of science with proof of its truth. But why, if there is nothing constraining us to do so? This is not to deny the utility of science--proof of that keeps flowing from science’s endless cornucopia of benefits. But do we not have the freedom to interpret that proof as mere utilitarian pudding? Can we not interpret phenomena and create truths and their vocabularies as we will. If no authority effectively exists external to man (effectively meaning having an observable effect beyond being the putative basis of existence), then, as Nietzsche pointed out, the superior mind, the overman, will arrive at such ideas; the free spirit will continually test and seriously entertain them, however impractical, unsettling, dangerous, irrational, inconsistent, and unstable they may be.

The existence of an authority external to man is a question closely tied to the fundamental question of existence mentioned earlier: Why is there anything rather than nothing? Of those who appreciate its significance, there are those who consider it to be a valid, even if unanswerable, question, and those who refuse to take it seriously if only because it is unanswerable. Here, unanswerable does not mean without an answer, and it means more than being unable to be answered by humans; it means an answer that cannot be made sensible to humans.

There are two heroic reactions to this--heroic in their unflinching honesty: that of Nietzsche and of Maimonides. The former says that the God incomprehensible to us is meaningless to us; that what is meaningless to us can set no bounds upon us; that we are free from any authority but our own; that we only need the courage to walk away from our imagined and self imposed chains. Nietzsche dares us to dare.

A full realization of our inability to make either sense or nonsense of the fundamental question of existence can, on the other hand, create the most profound comprehension of human limitations imaginable. When it does create this kind of humility, one has arrived at the heart of Maimonides’ philosophic monotheism.

Both of these reactions–that of true monotheists and of true overmen--are equally uncommon. What is common is the unheroic mix and match between them that constitutes most worldviews: a pasticcio of comforting metaphysics such as that pasted over and obscuring the glittering, diamond hard message of Job.

In the absence of an authority other than human, or of a book of nature, there is nothing to oppose the idea that there is no meaning to, or law governing, phenomena except as humanly constructed, or to oppose the idea that all experience is essentially linguistic, or that there is no way to think about the world except by using our language. These are all part of a view in which science fails in both its humanity and sublimity. Its mathematical language is intrinsically foreign to the greater concerns of all that meaningfully exists: the mind of man.

Monotheists, on the other hand, are too cognizant of human limitations to put man at the center of the universe, and in particular, to require the heavens to sing in human speech. They see the limitations of the mind and its senses as densely interwoven in the fabric of the language formed to describe everyday phenomena. The human language of words is as limited as the human.

Thus, just as Job finally understood that he could not learn why evil flourishes, that categories of good and evil are, as far as he could know, not even relevant to the structure of the Cosmos, so also have physicists had to learn to accept the ever greater abstractions of physics to which the categories of language are increasingly unsuited. In both cases this has been a forced acceptance, a forced humility. The physicist can either follow where data reduction as expressed in the mathematical description of nature leads, or stop doing physics.

Other sciences have not as yet reached–and perhaps by definition of what constitutes physics, never will reach–the levels of abstraction at which these fundamental considerations become important. We know, from Job and elsewhere, that religious thought has also at times reached these levels. And the history of religion teaches us that the view from these peaks of understanding has been too terrible for most to bear, and the atmosphere, too rarified for most to live by. The equally high–and close by!--peaks over which Nietzsche strode, offer equally fearsome prospects.

Two kinds of priests enter the holy of holies. Both see nothing, but each withdraws with opposing conclusions. They cannot change, but should know something about each others minds.

Science must first of all view itself scientifically, and this means that, as the creation of biological systems, it must be explained biologically. And in fact this explanation--a form of reduction to biology--is neither particularly surprising, or even new. The purpose of science is an extension of that the brain, and the basic product of both is the creation of connections. The latter are presented here as reductions because that is their purpose and effect. The explication of the concept of reduction within science, and its connection to reduction in other areas, is one major topic of discussion.

But science must also be viewed at higher than biological levels of organization. It is connected to all large systems of thought, and all contribute to its understanding. Psychology and the history of technology are two examples of disciplines illuminating science and there will be some discussion of them. No discipline is more important in this regard, however, than theology/metaphysics. It is through this kind of theology that science touches upon our deepest concerns. This is the second major topic of discussion.

The central conclusion of the theological discussion is that science's limitation to, and focus upon reduction fits in very well with the worldview of Western monotheism, whereas both science and monotheism conflict with a continuing tradition stemming from ancient paganism. Thus I name monotheism and paganism as the two antagonists of this story.