Sorting the Physics from the Metaphysics

[unkleE]

Humphrey

Thanks for your post of this name on the blog. It raises many issues, and I want to follow through just one.

In the several books I have read on the fine-tuning "problem" and the multiverse, it is several times said (e.g. by Susskind, Davies and Rees) that while it is possible that God is the source of the fine-tuning, he is not an explanation science should or can pursue. (Actually Davies says something slightly different, but he still discusses the God issue.)

But if God does exist, this appears to be closing one's eyes to the possible truth.

(A similar issue arises with the ID claim that God was needed to start off life on earth, but there it is easy to see why even christian scientists will want to seek out the mechanisms by which God accomplished this, understood in terms of what came before, and effectively assume methodological naturalism for as long as they can. But with cosmology, nothing came before the creation of the universe at the big bang, or further back, or, if one believes in an eternal universe, it cannot be explained in terms of any other physical process. So cosmology seems to me to be different to ID in many ways.)

There are only two possibilities: either (1) a God exists who is the cause of the universe, or (2) such a God doesn't exist.

If 2 is correct, we will end up in a mystery, no matter how far back we go, we either come up with an infinite chain of events with no way to get back to the cause, or a first event which cannot be explained in terms of anything else. Science will keep on trying, but surely there will be no ultimate satisfaction. Does anyone here think otherwise?

But suppose, as many of us here believe, God does exist, and he did cause the universe beginning at the big bang, or the multiverse, presumably beginning at an even bigger bang, or something. In this case he is the ultimate explanation, and again science will be unable to find and deal with that explanation.

So it seems that whatever the truth is, science will be unable in principle to discover ultimate explanations. But scientists will keep on trying, and most will keep on refusing to allow metaphysics into their science. And so their truncated search for truth will be ultimately futile, though very interesting and illuminating along the way.

I wonder then if there is any way to open this impasse up a little. Smolin's suggested principles (listed in the blog) are a possible way forward - once one accepts some non-scientifric assumptions or principles, who knows where it might end? His principles seem to define a set of beliefs that (if I understand it correctly) philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga call "properly basic" - i.e. beliefs which cannot be proven because they are considered to be the ultimate truths on which all other facts and beliefs rest.

But as christians, can we be constructive and suggest some further metaphysical principles? Can we expand Smolin's principles to challenge the positivism that is assumed in most science these days? Is there a way to bring metaphysics back into science, or at least in close association with science? Is it possible to develop an epistemology that includes the positivism of science, but goes beyond it, while still being acceptable to scientists? (I guess the future discussion of Smolin's principles may give an indication of that.)

I don't think I'm clever enough, or maybe not knowledgable enough, to really express what I'm grasping at here, but does anyone else have an inkling of what I'm trying to get at? Is there something here we could profitably discuss?

[humphreyclarke]

I guess the point of imposing Smolin's limitations is that science has had the enormous success it has had by narrowing it's scope and its ambitions. One of the problems with these competing theories of everything and multiverse scenarios is the problem of falsification. Until you can test these hypotheses (and the most concerning aspect of this is that there doesn't appear to be a way of doing that) then all you have is some interesting metaphysical specualtion and some interesting mathematics. That's not to say that the multiverse doesn't exist, just that right now there isn't a lot we can say about it (not least because we can't infer from our universe what its meta-laws and structure are meant to be, or how the thing is supposed to work if time is only an emergent property of it). Like God it is something beyond the reach of science. The only purpose I can see in multiverses is as a kind of an answer to the fine tuning argument, but as we are aware, it just creates another design problem and turns reality into some kind of sick joke.

It think, as regards metaphysics and science, it is better to keep the two separate and ensure people understand the differences. You can see this most plainly with methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism where the two are often conflated. Rather than either the theist or atheist claiming that their particular 'Weltanschauung' is endorsed by science, they would instead have to say 'the scientific evidence is this, my interpretation of this is that the best metaphysical explanation is P'. Similarly I think it needs to be shown that other forms of human epistemology are valid, not just the scientific method which is blind to meaning, value, morality, purpose and transcendence. Otherwise you end up with people denying these are real.