Abstract
This latest offering from the distinguished Oxford physicist Andrew Steane sets out to free science from its appropriation by the proponents of an entirely secularist or naturalist worldview. The book is motivated by the passionate belief that science is ‘part of our common inheritance … not the property of just one [wholly secularist] world-view calling itself science’ (p. 1). In order to achieve the proposed liberation of science, Steane argues that it needs to be freed from certain widely promoted but wholly mistaken conceptions of its scope.
The first of these misconceptions, fuelled by the misleading language often used by physicists themselves when talking to the general public about their theories, is that science can ‘explain how there can be a physical universe as opposed to no physical universe’ (p. 2). It is common, for example, to find scientists talking about particles popping into existence from random fluctuations in a quantum vacuum. But to begin with, the term ‘random’ is highly misleading. Extrapolating back from the cosmic microwave background radiation we now observe, together with the present distribution of galaxies, suggests, Steane argues, that the early universe, so far from being a ‘swarm of random oscillations’, was in fact marvellously structured, like an ‘intricately foliated multi-dimensional unfolding set of rose petals’ (p. 52).
Furthermore, although what physicists call a ‘quantum vacuum’ may have no net motion, it is not nothing – it has a ‘rich internal structure’ (p. 20). Quantum fluctuations are ‘behaviours of quantum fields that are already in existence’ (p. 44). In short, the ancient maxim ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) still stands, and even the most sophisticated equations of modern quantum physics do not provide the slightest reason to think that it has somehow been superseded. Theoretical physics, for all its wondrous achievements, ‘can only describe and show links between one mathematical concept and another’, but ‘a mathematical abstraction does not, in and of itself, imply anything at all about physical existence’, any more than the rules of chess can somehow cause there to be chessboards and chess pieces (p. 55). The analogy is perhaps not entirely apt, but the fundamental point is sound: an abstract equation cannot magic something into existence.
Having dealt with these widespread misconceptions about the scope of physics, Steane turns in the latter part of the book to the role of biology. Here, unsurprisingly, his chief target is the work of Richard Dawkins, which has so firmly planted into popular consciousness the ideas of the ‘blind watchmaker’ and the ‘selfish gene’ that many now take it as ‘established by science’ that biological evolution is entirely without aim or purpose, and that we are merely gene survival machines whose behaviour and experience are largely explained by evolutionary genetics.
Steane does not dispute the evolutionary story about how our human capacities have emerged. But he makes the crucial point that when we make use of those capacities – for example, when we judge that two and two make four, or that murder is wrong, or that a given work of art is beautiful – the soundness of our judgements has ‘nothing whatever to do with genes or anything else in biology’ (p. 120). If we accept Steane’s assumption that our value judgements, like our mathematical judgements, reflect, when they are sound, objective truths, his conclusion is both simple and compelling: biological evolution may furnish us with the relevant cognitive powers, but it ‘does not create’ the truths in question (p. 123). The philosopher Thomas Nagel (not mentioned by Steane) describes our minds as ‘instruments of transcendence, able to discern objective reality and objective value’ (Mind and Cosmos, 2012). Steane’s eloquent plea, in effect, is that we should acknowledge this remarkable aspect of our human nature, and not follow the reductionists down the road to making human beings less than what they so evidently are.
In his closing chapters Steane reiterates his central point that the idea of a random and purposeless universe, while it may be true, is not based on science. With emotional power and eloquence he allows us to glimpse his own worldview, one that fully respects the spirit of scientific inquiry, but acknowledges ‘the turn of the heart … towards the eternal’ (p. 141). If this is to be called ‘God’, the label is used ‘with some hesitation’ (p. 142), for what is meant is not some ‘supernatural accessory’ (p. 139) but ‘a unity and creativity which is able to encourage, mould, forgive, require, aspire and affirm’ (p. 142). This is not a scientific conclusion, but Liberating Science has made a powerful case for holding that nothing in science refutes it.