How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence

23 | Science is a mode of enquiry, not the last word. There are different world views, and they do not have to be commensurate, or agree with each other. And you don’t have to say one is better than another in all domains. But clearly if you want to build a rocket you will turn to physics, not theology.

And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can then approach … by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes.

William James (1842–1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience

24 | There are new theories to come that are beyond the reach of current technologies and of our current imaginations. In order to make progress sometimes a technological leap will come first, as it did when the telescope turned from plaything into scientific measuring instrument. Sometimes experiment comes last of all, as it did when Einstein re-imagined gravity as the geometry of space-time. He spent ten years working out the mathematics, leaving it to others to prove by experiment that gravity was indeed how he conceived it to be. When Einstein was asked what his response would be if experiment were to prove his theory false, he said he would feel sorry for the dear Lord.

25 | Experiments are generally hard to perform and require determination. No one would perform an experiment without already having some idea of what they are looking for.

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, begins with an act of the imagination.

Jonah Lehrer, writer

26 | For there to be progress in science there has to be some kind of understanding that comes in advance of the finding out: intuition. The history of science is necessarily full of instances in which insight comes first, ahead of proof in observation and theory. Where does, where can that insight come from? There must be various conduits of the truth if imagination sometimes gets there first.

In science the leap of imagination must be of the right kind and not too great a leap. Mediums and other sensitives also claim the ability to see ahead of the material evidence, but their methods fail when exposed to scientific, repetitive investigation. Their evidence is personal and anecdotal, not public and repeatable as science demands.

27 | On the radio I hear the announcer describe the discovery of new planetary system as ‘a rather wonderful poetic idea’. And why not?

28 | In a purely material world the immaterial is what we don’t yet understand materially; a dwindling pile in the to-do basket of science. If we wait too long the ink will have faded and the mystery will have become illegible. How long we are prepared to wait for material answers to material questions tests our faith.

We call the boat back in – Come in, number 87, your time’s up – only to find that the boat is too far out, and anyway, if we but knew it, the boat long ago rotted away and sank without trace.

29 | We don’t know what Nature is. There is that sifted-out part of Nature we call the material world, that ongoing conversation between science and the world, and then there is the world itself, in the largest sense, in which we are embedded. Most of us, most of the time, confuse the material world with the real world, whatever that is.

The scientific method sieves out the material world. The question is left open whether or not there will be anything left in the sieve afterwards, or indeed, if there is an afterwards. It seems increasingly likely that science may at best describe its own limitations, and not ‘everything’, as is sometimes predicted by its fundamentalists.

‘Freddy,

I’m told that there are left-overs in the larder. Have you any idea what to do with left-overs?’

‘You don’t have to do anything with them. They’re left over from whatever was done to them before.’

His father smiled and sighed.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels

30 | Materialism describes a world made out of logic and things that move. If it cannot be measured by a clock and a ruler, it lies outside scientific enquiry. That the whole world is capable of being measured requires faith, and there are days when my faith falters.

SECTION 6 (#ulink_532a939e-1a81-5923-b5da-5ff949b6f343)

What is the universe? (#ulink_532a939e-1a81-5923-b5da-5ff949b6f343)

What is the universe but the question what is the universe?

A line seen at an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History

That tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

George Eliot (1819–80), Middlemarch

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

Nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity, on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears.

John Gardner (1933–82), Grendel

In the Inflationary Multiverse, our universe could well be an island oasis in a gigantic but largely inhospitable cosmic archipelago.

Brian Greene, theoretical physicist

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Richard Feynman (1918–88), physicist

Our conception of the significance of humankind in and for the universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous.

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind

The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

David Deutsch

I don’t think it makes sense to give more importance to a mountain than an ant.

Joan Miró (1893–1983), painter

The stars are crushing, but mankind in the mass is even above the stars.

W.N.P. Barbellion (1889–1919), diarist

Once I was beset by anxiety … I could have cried out with terror at being lost. But I pushed the fear away – by studying the sky … I saw myself in relationship to the stars. I began weeping, and I knew that I was all right. That is the way I make use of geometry today. The miracle is that I am able to do it with geometry.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), artist

Now I see that great men have no other function in life except to help us see beyond appearances: to relieve us of some of the burden of matter – to ‘unburden’ ourselves, as the Hindus would say.

Jean Renoir (1894–1979), film director

1 | Now do we unburden ourselves of the weight of the material world pressing down on us? By confession, meditation, losing the ego, giving stuff away, selflessness? I wonder if the apparent joy of the weightlessness of being in outer space is in part the feeling of being unburdened, and not just of the downward pressure of gravity, but of the downward pressure of being; an intimation of what it might be like to let go of everything?

2 | Are we to lose our way amongst the immense indifference of things? Size is what the universe does. Nature iterates. Cut a sheet of paper in half, cut that half in half, and repeat the process thirty times. The piece of paper is now the size of an atom; except that, of course, as the size of an atom it would no longer be a piece of paper but an atom from which the paper was constructed; all the qualities that made it paper have disappeared. A further seventeen cuts to the size of a proton, and ninety-seven more to reach the smallest possible length that still has meaning: quantum length, 10

cm.

The original sheet doubled in size ninety times is as wide as the visible universe.