The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [168]
The rules which evolved for the use of this model were derived from the nature of geometry and the system of thought it imposed. Logic and reason sprang from the use of angles and lines. These tools became the basic instruments of Western thought: indeed, Aristotle’s system of logic was referred to as the Organon (the tool). With it we were set on the rationalist road to the view that knowledge gained through the use of the model was the only knowledge worth having. Science began its fight to supplant myth and magic on the grounds that it provided more valid explanations of nature.
Yet myths and magic rituals and religious beliefs attempt the same task. Science produces a cosmogony as a general structure to explain the major questions of existence. So do the Edda and Gilgamesh epics, and the belief in Creation and the garden of Eden. Myths provide structures which give cause-and-effect reasons for the existence of phenomena. So does science. Rituals use secret languages known only to the initiates who have passed ritual tests and who follow the strictest rules of procedure which are essential if the magic is to work. Science operates in the same way. Myths confer stability and certainty because they explain why things happen or fail to happen, as does science. The aim of the myth is to explain existence, to provide a means of control over nature, and to give to us all comfort and a sense of place in the apparent chaos of the universe. This is precisely the aim of science.
Sixteenth-century medicine relied on the stars. When blood-letting was required, the patient’s astrological sign dictated where the point of incision would be.
Science, therefore, for all the reasons above, is not what it appears to be. It is not objective and impartial, since every observation it makes of nature is impregnated with theory. Nature is so complex and so random that it can only be approached with a systematic tool that presupposes certain facts about it. Without such a pattern it would be impossible to find an answer to questions even as simple as ‘What am I looking at?’
The structure is institutionalised and given permanence by the educational system. Agreement on the structure is efficient: it saves investigators from having to go back to first principles each time. The theory of the structure dictates what ‘facts’shall be, and all values and assessments of results are internal to the structure. Since theory ‘creates’facts, and facts prove the theory, the argument of science is circular. Commitment to the theory is essential to orderly progress. The unknown can only be examined by first being defined in terms of the structure.
The implications of this are that, since the structure of reality changes over time, science can only answer contemporary questions about a reality defined in contemporary terms and investigated with contemporary tools. Logic is shaped by the values of the time; for Abelard it is revealed truth, for Galileo experimental evidence. Language, too, changes: in the fifteenth century ‘earth’means ‘fixed, unmoving’; in the eighteenth century ‘electric’implies ‘liquid’; ‘space’before Georg Riemann is two-dimensional. Method is similarly dependent upon context: dialectic argument is replaced by empirical observation which is replaced by statistical probability. Science learns from mistakes only because they are defined as such by the new structure.
Buddhism is exclusively concerned with understanding the nature of existence, as in Western science. Unlike science, the Buddhist path to comprehension involves denial of the everyday world. Both philosophies, however, seek the single force which unites the universe.
In spite of its claims, science offers no method or universal explanation of reality adequate for all time. The search for the truth, the ‘discovery of nature’s secrets’, as Descartes put it, is an idiosyncratic search for temporary truth. One truth