The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [10]
But these three kinds of history show us that in science the real work of explanation is not achieved by the chronology—the before and the after, the earlier and the later. The events that make up reality are ordered by processes that are completely reversible. With only one exception, the most basic laws of physics work the same way forward in time as backward. As far back as Isaac Newton’s discoveries in the seventeenth century, scientists have recognized that the fundamental laws that stitch up every sequence of events—big and small—don’t care about time order! That means that when it comes to science’s understanding of reality, stories have to give way to equations, models, laws, and theories in which there is no preferred time order of events from earlier to later.
Think about how the dinosaurs became extinct. Over the last 50 years, a vast amount of evidence has revealed what really happened. The evidence from geology, paleontology, climate science, and several other independent lines of inquiry suggest that 65 million years ago, a large asteroid hit the Yucatán peninsula with the force of about 100 trillion tons of TNT and kicked up enough dust to produce several atmospheric changes that blocked the sunlight for at least a year. The result was the disappearance of most of the herbivorous dinosaurs’ plant food, leading to their starvation. Then came the death of their carnivorous predators and their eventual conversion to petroleum. But what makes this the right story of why the dinosaurs disappeared? It’s because the basic links in this chain of events are forged together by a set of fundamental laws of chemistry and physics. But these very same laws could have produced exactly the reverse sequence of events. It’s perfectly compatible with the laws of motion—Newton’s, Einstein’s, even the laws of quantum mechanics—for each and every atom and molecule in the whole vast process to move in exactly the reverse direction. Starting from the petroleum, the atoms and molecules can move in trajectories that produce the dinosaurs from their rotting corpses, that grow the plants back from straw into bloom, that send the atmospheric dust clouds back down to fill up the crater in the Yucatán, and that reconstitute the asteroid and even push it back into space. I know it sounds absurd, but it’s true. The basic laws of motion that govern everything that happens to everything in the universe work both ways. They are what hold everything together. They tell no stories because they are completely indifferent to which event is the beginning and which is the end, so long as the sequences are mirror images of one another. What’s more, there is no story anyone can tell about why the basic laws are true.
Scientism doesn’t have an easy task. Mother Nature built our minds for other purposes than understanding reality. She was trying to solve the problem of equipping us to work with one another. Solving that problem ensured that when it comes to the real nature of the world and our place in it, most people just wouldn’t get it. That means that scientism’s answers to life’s persistent questions are going to be hard to accept, and not just because they come without a sugar coating. The answers science provides—based on time-reversible laws—just can’t be turned into stories with plots. Scientism has to face the fact that most people aren’t going to have the patience for the full answers that science gives to these questions.
Despite all that natural selection for preferring stories, some of us have managed to get past the biggest conspiracy theory of them all: the story of how God put us here. We have the capacity to break through and understand the real answers that science provides.