The Mythology of the Modern World

I'd like to explore the mythology behind what we call the "scientific worldview." Just to clarify, when I speak of "mythology" here, I don't necessarily mean something that is false. Myths are rather metaphorical motifs by which we make sense of the world around us. Many people today imagine that what is propagated as the "scientific worldview" is based purely on empirical research, and has no untested assumptions or metaphorical ideas behind it. In response to this, I would like to give a genealogy of the modern worldview known as "scientific materialism."

We begin with Thales, the earliest recognized Greek philosopher. He was the first to try to explain the world without reference to traditional mythological explanations. He developed an alternative mythology which did not appeal to personal deities, but instead involved a theory of matter and form. Next, we come to Pythagoras, who saw all the world as an expression of mathematical equations. Many physicists today, when you scratch the surface, are still essentially Pythagoreans.

We then skip to Parmenides, who used logic to try to prove that change is an illusion, and that the one true reality is eternal and unchanging. His followers were impressed with his logic, but couldn't quite accept his conclusion. Instead, they all tried to figure out which aspect of reality was eternal and unchanging. For Plato, it was the eternal forms. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that there is a reality hidden to the senses but accessible to reason, of which the world of appearances are like shadows on a cave. It is from this idea that we get the idea of eternal, unchanging laws of nature.


Next we come to Aristotle, who more or less established the sciences as we know them. While Plato saw universals as encapsulated in another realm of eternal forms, Aristotle believed that the universal was embodied in the particular, and that we must study particular phenomena to get at their essence. He was a supreme taxonomist, creating categories for knowledge that we use to this day. He analyzed causality and found four types of cause: material, efficient, formal, and final. He saw the universe as an organism, with a "great chain of being" tying everything together in a hierarchy from minerals to plants to animals to humans up to what he called the "prime mover." Aristotelian science would dominate for over a millennium, and the birth of modern science can in large part be understood as a reaction against the Aristotelian paradigm, but his system of logic and taxonomic categories remain highly influential to this day.

For the atomists, such as Democritus and Lucretius, atoms were the eternal, unchanging reality. They were fixed in number and took on ever new and changing arrangements, while being eternal and unchanging in themselves. Interestingly, this is where the theory of the conservation of matter/energy comes from. It is a largely untested assumption based on the idea of atoms as eternal and unchanging, and given the fact that scientists find the need to invent new concepts like dark matter and dark energy, perhaps it's not as sound an assumption as we think.

Fast-forward several centuries, and we come to Descartes, who rejected the Aristotelian model of an organic universe in favor of a mechanistic universe. He was inspired by the novel wind-up machines that had become fashionable in his age. The idea of the universe as a machine had strong theological motivation. The universe as organism suggested one in which beings within the universe had their own formal and final causes, and Descartes felt that this placed too high a limitation on God. Descartes took very seriously the notion of divine omnipotence, and felt that this was more consistent with a machine universe operated by God. God was the one entity who gave final cause to everything. Everything else in the universe other than humans. Humans alone were uniquely granted the gift of the rational mind, and their ability to reason correctly was ensured by an omnipotent creator who would not deceive His creations.

The machine metaphor still dominates modern views of science, even as the divine watchmaker has been ushered out of the room. In fact, both secular and religious worldviews today remain largely Cartesian. Around the same time as Descartes, Isaac Newton described the laws of physics that remained a cornerstone of science for centuries. Newton's cosmology essentially combined a Platonic view of the laws of nature with an atomistic view of matter and a Cartesian view of causality.

God was ushered out of this mechanistic picture by conceiving the universe itself as eternal, like a perpetual motion machine. This picture was upset by Georges Lemaître, who proposed what was later labeled by its opponents as the "Big Bang Theory," suggesting that the universe had a beginning and has been expanding ever since. It's nothing short of a miracle that this theory came to be accepted within less than a century of its being proposed, particularly since its originator was a Catholic priest, and it seemed to re-open the possibility of the universe having a creator. So averse were physicists to this possibility, that they have resorted to all kinds of wild speculations involving alternate universes and multiple dimensions. They might have saved themselves the trouble by returning to an organismic view of the cosmos like that of Aristotle, but that ship had sailed, and the mechanistic universe was firmly ingrained in their consciousness.

In summary, here are a few of the assumptions people mistake for empirically verified phenomena:

1. The universe is governed by eternal, immutable laws. (Platonism)
2. All the matter and energy in the universe was fixed in quantity from the moment of the Big Bang. (Atomism)
3. Material and efficient cause are the only forms of causality that are real. (Cartesianism)

I could go into other assumptions such as those involving the mind-body problem, but I think I've rambled long enough. My goal here was simply to show that much of what is considered the "scientific worldview" is actually metaphysical rather than scientific, and based on metaphor more so than experiment. And in fact, there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown how conceptual metaphors govern the vast majority of our ideas. We can't help but think in metaphors. But what we can do is examine the metaphors we currently use and see if they're adequate to the data we find. Paradigm shifts often involve shifting to a more useful metaphor, after finding that a previous metaphor is too confining to adequately describe what it seeks to describe.