The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin

Author:Lee Smolin [Smolin, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, and COSMOLOGY

The fundamental question of philosophy is thus precisely:

What is given to us?

—Stanley Rosen

The main problem philosophy faces at the present time is

how to have knowledge without faith .

—Paola Brancaleoni

S ince at least the seventeenth century, the writings of Western philosophers and scientists have rung with the ambition to have complete knowledge about the world. We see in the writings of physicists from Copernicus and Newton to Maxwell and Einstein the faith that the world is constructed on a rational basis, and that it is possible for human beings to represent this rationality in comprehensible language. And in the ambitions of the great philosophical system-makers, from Descartes and Leibniz to Kant and Hegel, we see the ambition to discover, from an exercise in pure thought, the whole meaning and shape of the world, at least as it is perceivable by us.

In the writings of most of these scientists and philosophers, we find also the belief that the world is rational and explicable because both it and our minds were made by a rational God. The ambition to comprehend the world is then the ambition to mentally take the place of God and see the world from the outside, as its creator did. For some, such as Newton, the religious underpinnings to the search for scientific knowledge are explicit, even celebrated. But even in Einstein, who denies belief in such an anthropomorphic god, one sees in so many writings and remarks his yearning to know the secrets of “the old one.” And, indeed, in his autobiographical notes, one reads of a lonely adolescent who, after a profound disillusionment with religion, discovered in science a search for transcendence and identification with the absolute more acceptable to a young secular European of the Nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

It was indeed this promise of transcendence that I found in Einstein’s writings that first captured me for physics. And, having started with a master and not with a textbook, I began reading the original writings of those who had invented the science I was struggling to make mine. Of course, to get anything out of the old books, with no background in general history, let alone the history of science, it was necessary to learn to skim, to read selectively, to take in what meant something to me and leave the rest uncomprehended.

As a secular child of a much different period, with more Marxism and mysticism in my upbringing than religion, I skipped over the references to God in the writings of Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, and Einstein. Only later, preparing to teach about them, did I reread these founders and discover how much their search for truth was a search for God.

The references to God in the founders of my science made no sense; they seemed so quaint, so unnecessary. Can there be any doubt that science is a better road to truth about nature than any received dogma? But, if this is so clear to us now, when we live amidst a

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