Paths From Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring by Arthur Peacocke

Author:Arthur Peacocke [Peacocke, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy & Social Aspects, Science, Philosophy, Cosmology, Comparative Religion, Religion, General, Christian Theology
ISBN: 9781780744599
Google: mVrFAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2013-10-01T21:10:57+00:00

Predictability and causality

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Donne (in his Anatomie of the World) lamented the collapse of the medieval synthesis – ‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerance gone’ – but after that century nothing could stem the rising tide of an individualism in which the self surveyed the world as subject over against object. This way of viewing the world involved a process of abstraction in which the entities, structures and processes of the world were broken down into their constituent units. These parts were conceived as wholes in themselves, whose lawlike relations it was the task of the ‘new philosophy’ to discover. It may be depicted, somewhat oversuccintly, as asking, firstly, ‘What’s there?’, then, ‘What are the relations between what is there?’ and finally, ‘What are the laws describing these relations?’ To implement this aim a methodologically reductionist approach was essential, especially when studying the complexities of matter and of living organisms. The natural world came to be described as a world of entities involved in lawlike relations that determined the course of events in time and so allowed predictability.

The success of these procedures has continued to the present day, in spite of the revolution necessitated by the advent of quantum theory in our understanding of the subatomic world. On the larger scales that are the focus of most of the sciences, from chemistry to population genetics, the unpredictabilities of quantum events at the subatomic level are usually either ironed out in the statistics of the behaviour of large populations of small entities or can be neglected because of the size of the entities involved, or both. Predictability was expected in such macroscopic systems and, by and large, it became possible after due scientific investigation. However, it has turned out that science, being the art of the soluble, has until recently tended to concentrate on those phenomena most amenable to such interpretations.

The world is notoriously in a state of continuous flux. As Heraclitus said in the fifth century BCE, ‘Nobody can step twice into the same river.’ It has, not surprisingly, been one of the major preoccupations of the sciences ever since to understand the changes that occur at all levels of the natural world. Science has asked, ‘What is going on?’ and ‘How did these entities and structures we now observe get here and come to be the way they are?’ The object of curiosity was both causal explanation of past changes in order to understand the present and also prediction of the future course of events, of changes in the entities and structures that concern us.

The notions of explanation of the past and present and predictability of the future are closely interlocked with the concept of causality. Detection of a causal sequence in which, say, A causes B, which causes C, and so on, is frequently taken to be an explanation of the present in terms of the past. It is also predictive of the future, insofar as observation of A gives one

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