Science's Modest Ambition
Although we are rightly
impressed by the many things that science can account for satisfactorily, we
should also recognize that this great success has been purchased by a degree of
modesty of ambition. Science limits itself to considering only certain kinds of
experience. Broadly speaking, its concern is with the impersonal dimension of
reality. Galileo had the brilliant idea, followed so strictly by successive
generations of physicists, of confining attention to the primary quantities of
matter and motion, and to set aside what he called the secondary
characteristics of human perception, such as color. This neglect of what the
philosophers call qualia (that is to
say, feelings such as seeing red or judging someone to be trustworthy) was an
immensely successful technique of investigation. It would, however, be a very
bad mistake to equate Galileo’s methodological strategy with an act of
ontological judgment - that is to say, a verdict on the nature of reality. Such
a confusion would, in my view, result in a woefully inadequate metaphysics.
Physics may tell us that music is vibrations in the air, and neurophysiology
may describe the consequent patterns of neuron excitation that result from
those airwaves impinging on the eardrum, but to suppose that this discourse is
adequate to the phenomenon of music would be totally misleading. The mystery
and reality of music slips through the wide meshes of the scientific net.
Metaphysics cannot tolerate
such an impoverished scientism, for its grand aim is truly to be a Theory of
Everything, obtained, not by Procrustean truncation of experience until it has
been reduced to a scale so limited that it can be condensed into a formula that
can be written on a T-shirt, but by taking absolutely seriously the
many-layered richness of the reality in which we live. It will not grant an
automatic priority of the objective over the subjective, of the impersonal over
the personal, of the repeatable over the unique.
Interestingly enough, some
of these wider issues that a true metaphysics must consider relate to questions
that arise from our experience as scientists, but which go beyond the merely
scientific. They center round two great metaquestions: Why is science possible
at all? Why is the universe so special?
Contributed by: Sir John Polkinghorne
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