5. The Fatal Estrangement
And yet this new Pythagorean unity lasted only a short time, and was followed by a new estrangement which seems to us more irrevocable than any before. The first signs of this estrangement appear already in Kepler's own writings.
"What else can the human mind hold besides numbers and magnitudes? These alone we apprehend correctly, and if piety permits to say so, our comprehension is in this case of the same kind as God's, at least insofar as we are able to understand it in this mortal life." 4
"Geometry is unique and eternal, a reflection of the mind of God. That men are able to participate in it is one of the reasons why man is an image of God." 5
"Therefore I chance to think that all Nature and the graceful sky are symbolised in the art of geometry... Now, as God the maker play'd, He taught the game to Nature, whom He created in His image; taught her the self-same game which He played to her." 6
All this was wholly admirable and unexceptionable from the theologian's point of view. But in Kepler's later writings, a new note becomes discernible. We hear that "geometry provided the Creator with a model for the decoration of the whole world", 7 that geometry somehow preceded the Creation of the world, and that "quantities are the archetypes of the world." 8
There is a subtle shift of emphasis here, which conveys the impression that God copied the universe from geometrical archetypes which co-existed with Him from eternity, and that in the act of Creation He was somehow bound by blueprints. Paracelsus expressed the same idea in a less delicate manner: "God can make an ass with three tails, but not a triangle with four sides." 9
For Galileo, too, "the book of nature is written in the mathematical language ... without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it." 10 But Galileo's "chief mathematician" is called "Nature", not God, and his references to the latter sound like lip-service. Galileo takes the hyperstatization of mathematics a decisive step further by reducing all nature to "size, figure, number and slow or rapid motion", and by relegating into the limbo of "subjective" or "secondary" qualities everything that cannot be reduced to these elements – including, by implication, ethical values and the phenomena of the mind.
The division of the world into "primary" and "secondary" qualities was completed by Descartes. He further reduced primary qualities to "extension" and "motion", which form the "realm of extension" – res extensa – and he lumped together everything else in the res cognitans, the realm of the mind, housed in a somewhat niggardly manner in the tiny pituitary gland. Animals, for Descartes, are robot mechanisms, and so is the human body; and the universe (with the exception of a few million pea-sized pituitary glands) was now so completely mechanized that he could claim "give me matter and motion and I will construct the world". And yet Descartes, too, was a profoundly religious thinker, who deduced his law of the immutability of the total amount of motion in the universe* from the immutability of God. But since, given matter and motion, he would have created the same universe governed by the same laws, was the deduction from God's mind really necessary? The answer is contained in Bertrand Russell's aphorism on Descartes: "No God, no geometry; but geometry is delicious, therefore God must exist."
____________________
*
The forerunner of the law of conservation of energy.
As for Newton, who was a better scientist and hence a more muddled metaphysician than Galileo or Descartes, he assigned to God a two-fold function: as Creator of the universal clockwork, and as its Supervisor for maintenance and repair. He believed that the placing of all planetary orbits into a single plane and in such orderly manner, and the fact that there was only a single sun in the system sufficient to provide the rest with light and heat, instead of having several suns or no sun at all, were proof that Creation was the work of an "intelligent agent ... not blind or fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry." 11 He further believed that under the pressure of gravity the universe would collapse "without a divine power to Support it"; 12 and moreover, that the small irregularities in the planetary motions would accumulate and throw the whole system out of gear if God did not from time to time set it right.
Newton was a crank theologian like Kepler, and like Kepler addicted to chronology; he dated the Creation from 4004 B.C., after Bishop Usher, and held that the tenth horn of the fourth beast of the Apocalypse represented the Roman Church. He desperately tried to find a niche for God somewhere between the wheels of the mechanical clockwork – as Jeans and others later tried to find it in Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy. But, as we have seen, such mechanical addings together of two fully grown specialized disciplines never work. The Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the solar system showed that its orderly arrangement could be explained on purely physical grounds, without recourse to divine intelligence; and God's alleged duties as a maintenance engineer were derided as absurd by Newton's own contemporaries, foremost among them Leibnitz:
"According to their [Newton and his followers'] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making is so imperfect according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it as a clockworkmaker mends his work... And I hold that when God works miracles, He does not do it in order to supply the wants of Nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God." 13
In a word, atheists were the exception among the pioneers of the scientific revolution. They were all devout men who did not want to banish deity from their universe, but could find no place for it – just as, quite literally, they were unable to reserve sites for Paradise and Hell. The Chief Mathematician became redundant, a polite fiction gradually absorbed into the tissues of natural law. The mechanical universe could accommodate no transcendental factor. Theology and physics parted ways not in anger, but in sorrow, not because of Signor Galileo, but because they became bored with and had nothing more to say to each other.
The divorce led to consequences which are familiar to us from similar occasions in the past. Cut off from what was once called the philosophy of nature and now exact science, theology continued in its own specialized, doctrinaire line. The age of Benedictine, Franciscan, Thomist, Jesuit leadership in research was past. To the inquiring intellect, the established churches became venerable anachronisms – though still capable of giving sporadic uplift to a diminishing number of individuals at the price of splitting his mind into incompatible halves. Whitehead's admirable summing up of the situation in 1926 is even truer today, a generation after he wrote it:
"There have been reactions and revivals. But on the whole, during many generations, there has been a gradual decay of religious influence in European civilisation. Each revival touches a lower peak than its predecessor, and each period of slackness a lower depth. The average curve marks a steady fall in religious tone... Religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
"... For over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive. The period has been one of unprecedented intellectual progress. In this way a series of novel situations have been produced for thought. Each such occasion has found the religious thinkers unprepared. Something, which has been proclaimed to be vital, has finally, after struggle, distress, and anathema, been modified and otherwise interpreted. The next generation of religious apologists then congratulates the religious world on the deeper insight which has been gained. The result of the continued repetition of this undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas
have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development...
The religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put theologians into a most unfortunate state of mind. They were always attacking and defending. They pictured themselves as the garrison of a fort surrounded by hostile forces. All such pictures express half-truths. That is why they are so popular. But they are dangerous. This particular picture fostered a pugnacious party spirit which really expresses an ultimate lack of faith. They dared not modify, because they shirked the task of disengaging their spiritual message from the associations of a particular imagery...
... We have to know what we mean by religion. The churches, in their presentation of their answers to this query, have put forward aspects of religion which are expressed in terms either suited to the emotional reactions of bygone times or directed to excite modern emotional interests of nonreligious character...
Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest." 14
6. The Vanishing Act
To the other divorced party, science, the parting of the ways seemed at the beginning to be an unmitigated boon. Freed from mystical ballast, science could sail ahead at breathtaking speed to its conquest of new lands beyond every dream. Within two centuries it transformed the mental outlook of homo sapiens and transformed the face of his planet. But the price paid was proportionate: it carried the species to the brink of physical selfdestruction, and into an equally unprecedented spiritual impasse. Sailing without ballast, reality gradually dissolved between the physicist's hands; matter itself evaporated from the materialist's universe.
This uncanny vanishing act began, as we saw, with Galileo and Descartes. In that famous passage in The Assayer (see p. 469), Galileo banished the qualities which are the very essence of the sensual world – colour and sound, heat, odour, and taste – from the realm of physics to that of subjective illusion. Descartes carried the process one step further by paring down the reality of the external world to particles whose only quality was extension in space and motion in space and time. At first this revolutionary approach to nature looked so promising that Descartes believed he would be able to complete the whole edifice of the new physics by himself. His less sanguine contemporaries thought that it might take as much as two generations to wrest its last secret from nature. "The particular phenomena of the arts and sciences are in reality but a handful," said Francis Bacon. "The invention of all causes and sciences would be the labour of but a few years." 15
But in the two centuries that followed, the vanishing act continued. Each of the "ultimate" and "irreducible" primary qualities of the world of physics proved in its turn to be an illusion. The hard atoms of matter went up in fireworks; the concepts of substance, force, of effects determined by causes, and ultimately the very framework of space and time turned out to be as illusory as the "tastes, odours and colours" which Galileo had treated so contemptuously. Each advance in physical theory, with its rich technological harvest, was bought by a loss in intelligibility. These losses on the intellectual balance sheet, however, were much less in evidence than the spectacular gains; they were light-heartedly accepted as passing clouds which the next advance would dissolve. The seriousness of the impasse became only apparent in the second quarter of our century, and then only to the more philosophically-minded among scientists, who had retained a certain immunity against what one might call the new scholasticism of theoretical physics.
Compared to the modern physicist's picture of the world, the Ptolemaic universe of epicycles and crystal spheres was a model of sanity. The chair on which I sit seems a hard fact, but I know that I sit on a nearly perfect vacuum. The wood of the chair consists of fibres, which consist of molecules, which consist of atoms, which are miniature solar systems with a central nucleus and electrons for planets. It all sounds very pretty, but it is the dimensions that matter. The space which an electron occupies is only one fifty-thousandth in diameter of its distance from the nucleus; the rest of the atomic interior is empty. If the nucleus were enlarged to the size of a dried pea, the nearest electron would circle around it at a distance of about a hundred and seventy-five yards. A room with a few specks of dust floating in the air is overcrowded compared to the emptiness which I call a chair and on which my fundaments rest.
But it is doubtful whether it is permissible to say that the electron "occupies space" at all. Atoms have the capacity of swallowing energy and of spitting out energy – in the form of light rays, for instance. When a hydrogen atom, the simplest of all, with a single electron-planet, swallows energy, the planet jumps from its orbit to a larger orbit – say, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars; when it emits energy, it jumps back again into the smaller orbit. But these jumps are performed by the planet without it passing through the space that separates the two orbits. It somehow de-materializes in orbit A and rematerializes in orbit B. Moreover, since the amount of "action" performed by the hydrogen electron while going once round its orbit is the indivisibly smallest quantum of action (Planck's basic constant "h"), it is meaningless to ask at what precise point of its orbit the electron is at a given moment of time. It is equally everywhere. 15a a
The list of these paradoxa could be continued indefinitely; in fact the new quantum-mechanics consist of nothing but paradoxa, for it has become an accepted truism among physicists that the sub-atomic structure of any object, including the chair I sit on, cannot be fitted into a framework of space and time. Words like "substance" or "matter" have become void of meaning, or invested with simultaneous contradictory meanings.
Thus beams of electrons, which are supposedly elementary particles of matter, behave in one type of experiment like little pellets, but in another type of experiment they behave like waves; conversely, rays of light behave sometimes like waves and at other times like bullets. Consequently, the ultimate constituents of matter are both substance and non-substance, lumps and waves. But waves in, on, of what? A wave is movement, undulation; but what is it that moves and undulates, producing my chair? It is nothing the mind can conceive of, not even empty space, for each electron requires a three-dimensional space for itself, two electrons need six dimensions, three electrons nine dimensions, to co-exist. In some sense these waves are real: we can photograph the famous dart-board pattern they produce when they pass through a diffraction grate; yet they are like the grin of the Cheshire cat. "For ought we know," says Bertrand Russell, "an atom may consist entirely of the radiations which come out of it. It is useless to argue that radiations cannot come out of nothing... The idea that there is a little hard lump there, which is the electron or proton, is an illegitimate intrusion of commonsense notions derived from touch...'Matter' is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't." 16
These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional nonspace, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial "waves of probability" marking out "disturbed areas" where an electron is likely to "occur". "They are as immaterial as the waves of depression, loyalty, suicide, and so on, that sweep over a country." 17 From here there is only one step to calling them abstract, mental, or brain waves in the Universal Mind – without irony. Imaginative scientists of such different persuasion as Bertrand Russell on the one hand,
Eddington and Jeans on the other, have indeed come very near to taking this step. Thus Eddington wrote:
"The stuff of the world is mind-stuff. The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it rise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. Besides the direct knowledge contained in each self-knowing unit, there is inferential knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world." 18