World Affairs

Vol. 6, Number 3 (July-September 2002)

Episteme: The Meaning of Knowledge in the Natural Sciences and our Experience of Reality
Hans-Peter Dürr

Both the scientist and the believer are searching for truth but arrive at it in different ways. Truth and reality are what we believe in not ‘what is’. Nature is uncertain and cannot be taken for granted since there is a constant process of creation in the world.

 

Introductory Remarks

This year’s Cultural Congress is devoted to the topic ‘In search of a lost God — The future of religion and faith in a secularised world’. Many people would question what a physicist has to do with this topic. But actually if one focuses on the intellectual and religious crisis in today’s world, a contribution by a scientist does not seem so out of place. For The world in which we live has been dramatically altered by the natural sciences and the technologies in their wake. An explosive growth of knowledge about the world has not only given humankind profound insights about the structure and the dynamics of the world but opened innumerous ways to manipulate their environment and hence the natural foundation of the Biosphere of the Earth in which the human species are existentially embedded. The imbalance induced by this development led to an intellectual and spirtual crisis.

We are not only in a ‘crisis of immanence’, because our immediate experience of being anchored securely in the transcendental — the ‘oneness’, the ‘non-twoness’ — risks being lost, but we are already in the midst of a second crisis which can be denoted as ‘exhaustion of the modern spirit’. This second crisis makes us increasingly aware of the fragility and inadequacy of our present secular, materialistic world view. The essence of the crisis is that, among all the luxuriousness and hustle and bustle of our everyday life — and by ‘our’ I mean here mainly those of us in the Northern, industrialised, so-called ‘developed’ world — we hunger for the spiritual and meaningful, and suffer from a feeling of being lost and lonely. What is even worse, we are not really conscious of the fundamental reasons for our frustration, and therefore are also not willing and able to take suitable remedy, and ‘to return home’. This resistance against doing what is reasonable in the true sense, results from a false understanding or faulty use of our reason. We envisage rationality in a narrow way, as an ability to gather knowledge — exact knowledge, as we often believe — about reality, the world, and to process it by critical thought, so that it is suitable for guiding our intentional actions better.

Our unshaken confidence of being able to base our life and actions on, indeed exclusively on, reason in the limited sense — i.e. not to include the other aspect of rationality which is evaluating, are value-steeped reason, in any major fashion — is mainly based on the impressive successes of modern science, in particular of the natural sciences, and the wide-ranging practical implementation of this knowledge in the form of modern technology.

As has happened so often in our history, we human beings fall into an old temptation: if we once succeed in grasping a little corner of the ‘truth’, then we take this corner for the one and only, whole truth. We regard all the affairs of the world only under this aspect of truth, and force whatever does not quite fit into this strait-jacket to come within this ‘truth’ with intelligence, cunning eloquence, and also with unconscious or conscious deception and coercion. This impulse arises not only from our stupidity and impatience, but also from the understandable and advantageous wish to reduce the impenetrable complexity of the world around us to something that is simpler and thus more easily perceivable and graspable for us. Thanks to these simplified conceptions of reality, and its intrinsic evolution, we succeed in alleviating the uncertainty of the future in many details, an uncertainty which we constantly feel as an existential threat, and indeed may have to experience and suffer as dramatic, painful, lethal reality at any moment. Indeed, it seems as if we might be able to improve and refine our primitive images of reality step by step until it finally allows us to eliminate all ‘uncertainty’. But we should realise, to always know exactly what awaits us in the future would be of almost no advantage to us. On the contrary: the one large, comprehensive uncertainty would be replaced by an even more depressing certainty of manifold failure, for which the certainty of a few scattered successes would hardly compensate us. However, the situation is altered fundamentally if, as many of us unquestionably believe, we humans really have the ability to act intentionally, and do not just imagine we do. Then we have in principle, by means of our knowledge and appropriate behaviour, the potential of avoiding the negative consequences predicted as being certain, and hence could increase our chances of survival substantially. In addition, we can attempt to force desirable consequences by deliberate manipulation of the world in which we live. Knowledge thus becomes an instrument of power, and gives rise to the hope, by progressive refinement, to sucessfully master, control, and finally ‘get a grip on’ the future in an ever greater degree.

In many cases, although usually only for a short time, we appear to succeed in this. Power derives its strength from simpleness, from the bunching of forces, not from their differentiation. But power is also transitory because of this simplicity. The momentary success of the ‘search for truth’ deludes us into fundamentalism. The grain of truth is inappropriately taken as absolute. Today, science and technology in combination with economics represent such a fundamentalism in a certain sense.

My article ‘Episteme in the Natural Sciences and our Experience of Reality’ (earlier presented as a lecture at the Austrian Academy of Sciences) seeks to face the question of how scientific insight and our scientifically-based knowledge relates to our most general and comprehensive experience of reality. The question is what can we really know? In considering it, a fundamental barrier to scientific knowledge will become visible: knowledge is limited in principle. This should not be evaluated as entirely negative. Knowledge is not everything. Limits to knowledge reopen areas that are only accessible to a believer; belief can mean more than temporary ignorance, more than a substitute in the absence of knowledge.

The starting point for my thesis will be the surprisingly broadening of our world view as a result of the development of the natural sciences at the beginning of this century, triggered by the revolutionary discoveries in physics and the reinterpretation of its foundations they necessitate. It is astonishing that this profound transformation of our understanding of reality, almost a century after the pioneering work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein, has barely been reflected philosophically and epistemologically in our society and the sciences. And this not as a consequence of any failure of the new concepts. On the contrary, in the last seventy years since its interpretation, quantum physics, the name for this new development, has achieved an unparalleled triumph in all fields of physics and survived unchallenged to this day. It was above all, what initiated the unimagined technical developments that have set their seal on our age, for better or for worse. For example, nuclear engineering and modern information technology would not have been possible without the new insights. Although all these manifold, astonishing and vast consequences have been accepted scientifically, science still feels in some ways not up to the challenge of also accepting the exceedingly surprising concepts which alone make the new physics comprehensible.

There are many reasons for this. Above all, the breach the new physics demands is fundamental. It involves not just a paradigm change, such as Thomas Kuhn described in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. For this, new physics actually indicates that ‘Reality’, whatever we may mean by this, is basically not a tangible reality at all. Reality now manifests itself primarily as potentiality, as an ‘as well as’, that is, only as the possibility for the familiar realisation which expresses itself in phenomena that are object-like and and contingent to the logic of ‘either/or’. Potentiality appears as a oneness — a non-twoness or the Sanskrit ‘advaita’ — that cannot be separated or divided. In the context of our accustomed concepts, this sounds outrageous, indeed unacceptable. The world cannot be interpreted ontologically anymore. Nothing exists!

The path to the new concepts was accordingly laborious and painful. And every novice must take the same path again. The discoverers of the new physics, of quantum mechanics, Planck and Einstein, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for it, were themselves not willing to follow this path rigorously all the way. Although they recognised the inescapability of the conclusions, they hoped until the end for a conventional way out. It remained for the young physicists of the day, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, and others, under their revered teacher in Copenhagen, Niels Bohr, to shape the new world view into a consistent and, in a certain sense, convincing form. But if we look more closely, only a few of the physicists even today find reason in the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics they [the physicists] developed to revise their concept of reality. And this was not as a conscious act of refusal, but rather an unconscious repression of the so inconceivable, because ‘what must not be, cannot be’.

This wish was and is understandable, especially in the context of Western civilisation, which is oriented so strongly towards creative physical activity, to change, action, acquisition and expansion of power, and whose basic understanding of the world therefore involves conceiving of reality as tangible and object-like, in order to be able to manipulate and get a grasp on it for our own benefit in this materialised form. A pragmatic, positivist attitude, which purports to want to and to be able to dispense with any ‘ideology’ — in this context often including anything that goes beyond the directly graspable and quantitatively measurable — intellectually prepares the way for ignoring the essential philosophical propositions of quantum physics, without having to give up its practical conclusions. Furthermore, in our accustomed environment, the mesocosm we perceive directly, we are fortunately several orders of magnitude away from that microcosm where quantum mechanics forced itself on the searching physicists so irresistibly.

Sometimes it seems as if the great problems of our time are partly due to the fact that in the social sciences, in politics and in the economics, we are trying by means of the obsolete ideas of the nineteenth century to harness the new forces that have accrued to us on the basis of the entirely novel insights of the twentieth century. This would not be a reason to worry if it were only a matter of waiting patiently until the new concepts have also penetrated the social sciences and everyday politics, but in view of the unleashed potentials for multifarious impact on the ecosystem, the temporary inability to harmonise our actions with the appropriate ideas might easily expel humanity from the evolutionary process.

Yet the new scientific world view taking form would be very suitable for bringing the various branches of knowledge, such as the natural sciences and the humanities, closer together again. It enables belief and knowledge, religion and science to be seen as essential, and in a way complementary, elements of a comprehensive view. Belief is freed from its stopgap role, where it comprises only that which is still ‘not yet known’ at a particular time. In the new world view the knowable is limited in principle. Thus belief regains its full significance and independent value.

 

On Truth

Belief and knowledge are both oriented towards ‘truth’. But in each case, truth means something different. In the new view, neither of these two truths will still exist, in a certain sense, rather ‘more open truths’, will replace them in a subtle fashion.

I am speaking as a natural scientist. My motivation for becoming a physicist, and in particular for delving down to the atoms, the atomic nuclei, the elementary particles, after the depressing experiences of the Second World War and the collapse of the Third Reich, was the wish "... to recognise what holds the innermost of the world together ..." (J W Goethe) as a way to gain reliable truth not dictated by fallible human beings. A scientist analyses, dissects, fragments, in order to find the truth — and thus necessarily winds up with the smallest things. That on the way down to ‘the innermost’ level I encountered not only ‘philosophers’ such as Werner Heisenberg, but also nuclear physicists who built atom bombs, such as Edward Teller, was not my deliberate intent. But it was the reason and occasion for me to become a transdisciplinarian, a passionate ‘border crosser’ or ‘trespasser’. The intrinsic ambivalence of research became clear to me, how deep insights also lead directly to knowledge that can change our world decisively, even destroy it.

Believers are also seeking the truth. They seek it in religion. They approach it through contemplation, through meditative absorption; It is ‘The search for the lost God’ which also means the search for truth.

The truths of the scientist and the believer are different, but they are attempting to give answers to what is the same question in the end. In a certain sense, they merely reflect our dual relationship with reality. The ‘I’ consciousness that observes the world, on the one hand, and the mystical experience of oneness (‘unus mundus’), on the other, characterise complementary forms of human experience. The one leads to a critically rational approach, in which people want to grasp (almost in the literal sense) the diversity of the world, to comprehend it with their own conceptual thinking. The other discovers it by a fundamental mystical attitude, trying by devotion and meditation to penetrate directly the essence of reality. ‘Complementary’ here means that both are possible, and complement and exclude one another simultaneously, like ‘space occupation’ and ‘interspace’, or in the familiar puzzle picture, the two facing profiles and the vase suspended between them. They are two kinds of ‘knowing’, the ‘graspable knowledge’ versus the ‘certainty about the inner cohesion’, the ‘exterior view’ with the separation of the observer and the observed, versus the ‘interior view’, which by its nature is always holistic, where the perceiving is at the same time the perceived undivided oneness. Experience means both: the exterior and the interior view.

The interior view is ‘closer, more inward, broader, more comprehensive, opener, holistic’ —although these words borrowed from the exterior view are quite inappropriate as rigorous concepts. But understood metaphorically, they may serve to point to an interior experience.

In the exterior view, we perceive the world around us, our fellow human beings, and ourselves in an external fashion. The exterior view is advantageous in life, appropriate to our grasping hand, which in turn developed from the specific structure of our world in which we are existentially embedded. Action is two-valued: I grasp or do not grasp, or I have or have not. The one excludes the other. Our perception of reality is of the same kind: to be or not to be. Our fragmenting thinking, our conceptual language have developed in this action-oriented world. Therefore our thinking is also two-valued: right or wrong, "tertium non datur". This two-valued order does not necessarily correspond to the structure of reality itself, however, but rather it is advantageous to us in the sense that it supports action that is important to our survival effectively. But in the final analysis, external experience is in turn only perceptible as internal experience, by spontaneous conviction. There too, there is only certainty if an inner voice says "It is so! Yes, I have understood." There is nothing that can be proven in all points; everything finally ends in immediate experience, which I simply experience as true, by identification beyond all dualism, by ‘idemity’ (Heinrich Rombach).

The indivisible interior view does not permit any two-valued distinctions. There is no knowledge, but no ignorance, either. Perhaps wisdom, subsuming both, as an indefinite interior sensing of exterior knowledge. And with an uncertainty that is not merely a lack of definition, but is what opens the possibility of perceiving a gestalt: intimacy, meaningfulness, sense, a structure of values.

Our conception of reality is deformed by the polarity of the exterior view: true or not-true? Truth is more general, it does not necessarily need this practically advantageous two-valuedness. Truth can be more open, can find expression in a ‘as well as’, without losing its certainty. We do not possess the language to express this, since language is primarily allocated to the exterior view. We imitate this ‘as-well-as’ by trying to feel its gestalt point by point, as if we were running a finger over it. The holistic ‘as-well-as’ appears in our critically rational conception as multifarious, adjacent ‘either/ors’, whose synthesis imitates the gestalt, without ever achieving its entirety and connectedness.

In the history of the West, these two differing fundamental attitudes, the exterior view and the interior one, have been in fertile interaction. They are reflected in the splitting up of knowledge and belief. Rationalism, and later the Enlightenment, deepened this split and declared the two-valued exterior view to be the only true view, that is, one appropriate to the structure of reality. It is the basis of our triumphant science. It has taught us to manipulate the world around us for our own benefit, and to develop knowledge systematically as an instrument of power for ruling over people and nature. The exclusiveness of our thinking, "If the one is correct, the other cannot be correct as well, therefore it must be wrong," has caused much quarreling and strife, unleashed disastrous wars, and brought vast suffering to humanity.

Modern physics has taught us that the structure of reality is essentially quite different from the dominant two-valued structure of the world directly accessible and, developed on the basis of our action and knowledge. The two-valued exterior view we have regarded as universal has only a limited validity. It is only a simplified image of a deeper reality (‘Wirklichkeit’) whose features are ‘revealed to us intimately’ or holistically percieved by the interior view.

 

On the Limits in Principle to Scientific Knowledge

Our experience of reality is richer than the experience which scientific findings reveal to us. This is obvious to people who have had mystical or religious experiences. But it also applies much more generally if we think of the manifold experiences that art in all its forms can provide to us. We become aware of it even more intimately and comprehensively if we are touched by those things that are so hard to grasp but immediately are understood when we are affected, which we symbolise with words like love, faithfulness, trust, a sense of security, hope, or beauty.

The impressive advances of the natural sciences reinforced the hope, cherished especially during the Enlightenment, that in the end and in principle, everything in the world might be accessible to human knowledge, and that the part that has seemed inaccessible so far only evades our rational insights because of its greater complexity. However, epistemology, (the theory of knowledge), born out of rational reflection, soon showed that a structured system can indeed evaluate subsystems, but not superordinate systems. Just as we cannot perceive the blind spot in our eye without a special trick, because we are accustomed to it from birth, we find it difficult to recognise the limitations of our accustomed insight without special indications. These limitations should not be regarded as merely annoying obstacles. Not to perceive information that is irrelevant for our survival is extremely advantageous in life.

These thoughts are intended to show that it is grossly inadmissible and wrong to equate our perception of reality with reality per se. But this is exactly what happens if we consider scientific knowledge as all-embracing.

Let me illustrate this obvious statement with a parable by the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington. Eddington compares the scientist to an ichthyologist, (a zoologist specialising in fishes), who wants to study his world. To do so, he sails out to sea and catches fish. After many hauls of fishes and careful examination of his catch, he manages to discover the first fundamental law of ichthyology: "All fishes are larger than two inches!" He terms this a fundamental law, since he never found a fish in any catch that was shorter than two inches, and from this deduces a universal validity of his finding. On the way home, he meets his best friend, whom I will call the metaphysicist, and tells him about his great scientific discovery. His friend retorts: "That is no fundamental law at all! Your net is simply so coarse, that the smaller fishes always slip through the meshes." But the ichthyologist is not impressed by this argument at all and answers emphatically: "What I cannot catch with my net lies beyond the bounds of ichthyological knowledge in principle; it does not refer to an object of the kind defined as an object of ichthyology. For me, as an ichthyologist, what I cannot catch is not a fish."

Applied to the natural sciences, this parable means: in order to establish scientific findings, we scientists always use a net, although most of us are not really aware of the existence and nature of this net. This net symbolises not only the methodology, but above all the intellectual equipment with which we work scientifically. Our scientific thinking, like all thinking, is always fragmentising and analysing. We take apart everything we want to investigate and understand. And in our everyday world, this is indeed a very advantageous and successful method of dealing with complicated things. Our fragmentising way of thinking is not an accident, of course. It evolved slowly over a long phylogeny, not for the sake of its suitability as the motor of a complicated science of the great and the small, but first and foremost to give us human beings a chance of survival on this earth under the external circumstances prevailing here. To put it simply: our mode of thought is adapted to perceiving and grasping the apple in the tree with which we nourish ourselves, and not to the practice of nuclear physics. If we do the latter, we should not be surprised if the atoms essentially always look like little apples to us, because this is the only way in which we can visualise reality.

The philosophers have known that we always use a net when describing reality, that is, we necessarily use a reference system. But the relevance of this insight became dramatically clear when physicists tried to understand what the smallest components of matter were, which, to be ‘pure’ matter lacking form, had to be thought as being form-irreducible, something indivisible, and therefore named a-toms — today we equate them with the elementary particles or even smaller units. To their astonishment, they discovered that if one tracks down such a minute particle in experiments, then in one experiment it does act like a particle, but in another experiment on the contrary it behaves like a wave. So, depending on the method of measuring, the same ‘object’ manifests itself in two different ways, in fact in two different forms, which cannot be harmonised at all within our normal concept of an object. Of course, we are familiar with the fact that, if we stand in front of a house, we see two quite different two-dimensional images, depending on whether we are looking at it from the front or the side. We can easily reconcile these two views without contradiction by a three-dimensional concept of the house, in which the two images then correspond to different projections. By contrast, in the case of a microscopic particle, there is no way to unite the concept of a particle and of a wave in the form of, say, a ‘wavicle’, that allows us to visualise it, as well.

This example shows us that the metaphor of a fisherman’s net, that essentially only makes a selection (‘larger than two inches’) of the fish, and thus has the character of a projection, is insufficient to describe an observation. For the act of observation results in addition in a change in quality (particle or wave) of the observed, in a deformation of the inconceivable ‘Wirklichkeit’ (non-object-like reality) behind it. If we perceive something consciously, or to put it more strongly: when we study science, we thus use not only a net, but something more like a meat-grinder: we jam ‘Wirklichkeit’ into it, crank the handle, and at the bottom, various sorts of strands emerge, depending on the end-disk we are using. We conclude naïvely that reality consists of certain types of strands of meat. But this is not correct if I compare it with what was shoved in at the top. The result of our observation (the ‘strands’) is substantially a product of the particular kind of observation, of perception, of the act of knowing, and not a faithful image of the ‘Wirklichkeit’, the ‘actual reality’ concealed or suspected behind it.

So the experimental findings of modern physics — and there of all places at first in a field, mechanics, where everything was considered to be fairly simple and straightforward, and simple laws of nature could be derived convincingly — have forced us to the surprising insight: Everything that we regard as reality through direct observations or by abstraction from our perceptions, and describe in natural sciences as (material) reality, must not be equated in this form with actual reality (Wirklichkeit) behind it, whatever we may mean by that.

However, with this form of expression we are using the idealist approach of the metaphysicist, whom the positivist ichthyologist rebuts by saying something like, "You may be right, perhaps those smaller fish do exist in some sense, but why should I be interested? It is sensible and essential for human communication to restrict ourselves to those things on which I can communicate objectively and unambiguously with other people. And looking at it quite pragmatically, when I go to the market to sell my fish, nobody has ever asked me for a fish that I cannot catch." This last argument is very familiar today in particular: in business; things that cannot be exchanged and marketed have no value in principle.

The reduction of reality to what can be determined objectively is advantageous from the pragmatic point of view. There will be no disputes that cannot be settled. But it by no means follows that what is inconceivable in principle may not be essential for the reality we perceive personally. For we know: Man does not live by bread alone! We all experience daily that our immediate perception and experience is much richer and more comprehensive than what can be grasped and proven scientifically. Think about it: Does not most of what is really important and essential to us in life correspond to those "fishes that we cannot catch"? And why shouldn’t we think of this ‘certainty’ in a certain sense as a valid expression of a (more open) ‘knowledge’, although we cannot grasp it. Thus here we find again a possibility of allocating their own independent value to the religious, the numinous, and what can be experienced intuitively and artistically, and to give them an appropriate position in our personal life and within our society, in accordance with their importance, beside what can be proven scientifically.

Many people today challenge this view, and regard the present situation as only an intermediate stage of a continuously accelerating intellectual evolution, which no secrets will withstand in the long run. They would object to our parable of the ichthyologist as being too primitive to apply to our reality. Humanity is a much more intelligent and imaginative ichthyologist, they say, who would very soon learn to fish with finer-meshed nets as well. And they are certainly right. Clearly the net is too simple as an allegory here. But this does not change the fundamental proposition that whatever we do, we will need some kind of net in order to fish. We cannot describe the reality we speak about in the exterior view without a net, and thus we are always within this limitation. Nets, which make provable knowledge possible, at the same time define the limits in principle of this knowledge. Science is based on fragmentising thinking.

What is called ‘exact’ or ‘quantifying’ science goes even further. Like our ichthyologist, it formulates propositions such as: A fish is larger than two inches. The statement is in essence only ‘two’, a number in a relation between a fish and a piece of wood that serves as a yard-stick. The ‘scientific’ statement here does not say anything about what a fish and a piece of wood are, neither of which I understand. The statement restricts itself to ‘how’ the two are ‘related’ and leaves out the ‘what’. This restriction makes possible quantification and precision measured by numbers, and as a further consequence, the mathematical formulation of the exact natural sciences. Although modern science demonstrates impressively that very much of the ‘what’ can be explained in terms of a ‘how’, a relationship, it is not hard to see that the thus reduced description of reality only reflects the greater reality in which it is embedded in a very qualified sense. This insight is important for a constructive dialogue between the natural sciences and religion. On the other hand, it is also a valuable hint that religion, in its understandable effort to formulate its messages more emphatically and memorably, and the associated tendency to fix metaphorical pointing allusions in unambigously comprehensible, graspable form, necessarily misses its real goal.

 

From the Classical Atomistic World View to the Modern Holistic One

A distinction between the scientifically recognisable and describable reality, and the ‘Wirklichkeit’, partly accessible by more general experiences may sound convincing. But it remains unsatisfactory as such, due to the uncertainty of how the scientific reality appears embedded in the ‘Wirklichkeit’, the actual reality. But the relationship between scientific and actual reality is still not arbitrary, no ‘anything goes’, no blind, unstructured plurality, that symbolises absolute shallowness goes. On the other hand, we should not expect to find a conclusive answer within the framework of our thinking to the question of what this structure of relationships is based on. For, a superordinate structure can never be synthesised and understood completely and definitely from its subordinate part structures: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore, a deeper understanding requires that we start with the whole. At first, only our interior view through meditative contemplation and an intensive dialogue with others who have taken the same path seems to give access to the whole. But an inquisitive look over the boundary of the knowable that modern physics shows us may offer another access of a different kind. Let me take you on a brief journey to this border.

In our parable of the ichthyologist, it is the ‘net’ that makes knowledge possible in the first place, and at the same time imposes the limitation in principle. In the parable, the net is still an outsider, whose origin remains unclear and arbitrary. But it is not, of course. It was chosen in the final analysis by the fisher in his will to survive, as the most successful method among many other fish-catching devices. So the net is also a part of the whole and of its specific structure, to which both the fish world and the fisherman belong. It is therefore enlightening to cast a glance at the relation which the parts are supposed to have, to their whole in modern physics, which is radically altered from that of classical physics.

The world as described by the old, ‘classical’ physics exists in space and time. But space and time play quite different roles. The world shows a peculiar layering in time, as if it were a deck of playing cards. In the momentary ‘now’ which we call the present, one playing card lies face-up in front of us, a three-dimensionsal space, a field of experience that we can feel spontaneously with our senses — and only this present space is directly accessible to us, immediately perceptible by our senses. But this current field of experience is covered up again at once by a similar space of the next present, so that I no longer see the past space. I am still partially aware of the past space as a feeble footprint in the new one. It is as if I had taken the next card off the great deck of the space-time world, turned it up, and placed it over the old one. And in the next instant, this card is also covered up by the following one. So the space-time world, reality, strangely enough does not display itself to us as a whole, but only slice by slice, card by card, step by step, in a sequence that we name ‘time’. We do not really understand why the ‘Good Lord’ does not allow us a look into the temporal dimension of his creation, like into spatial extension, in other words He does not put all his cards on the table, but only shows us one card — and that only once — in each instant. Of course, we are desperate to know what is hidden in the deck of cards that has not been turned yet. For those cards contain everything the future will bring us of joy and sorrow.

Human beings are clever, and some of them have a scientific brain. They look carefully at the card turned up at the moment, and then the next one, and the one after, and so on, and discover to their delight a certain regularity. For example, there is an ace of hearts, the next card is a two of hearts, the next ones are a three and four of hearts. And thus they believe they have made their first great discovery: "It’s simple, the world is made of hearts," because every card turned up is a heart. Soon afterwards, they discover another regularity, namely that in each instant the number of the hearts increases by one. For this reason, an especially inquisitive researcher makes the daring prediction, "I predict that the next card will be the seven of hearts," and indeed it is the seven of hearts. And then the eight of hearts appears, as expected. And the prophetic genius receives his well-earned Nobel Prize. The world seems to be understood, the structure of reality seems to have been deciphered, and creation, and the deck of cards, comprehended: the world consists of hearts in an increasing progression. Fat textbooks are written, and everything goes well until after the ten of hearts, then comes a surprise — a jack of hearts. A brief shock: "Oh, the law of nature is not quite right," it certainly seems lengthy and puzzling until an Einstein appears and improves the law of nature appropriately, "It is a bit more complicated ...", and so rethinking is necessary, until a more-or-less satisfactory description has been concluded. This is severely simplified, and I have omitted the fact that the sequence of improvements in fact results not only in a quantitative improvement of the predictions, but also a qualitative improvement. The success of the natural sciences was and is triumphant: the laws of nature are believed to have been largely deciphered. And this not only means an increase in knowledge: "We know what is in this deck of cards!", but also makes us into prophets. We can predict what will happen in the future. And thus we think we can organise our life more advantageously, by trying to avoid dangers in accordance with these indications, and to manipulate our environment suitably.

The difficulty in all this is that we must all suddenly ask ourselves "Am ‘I’ myself inside the deck, or am ‘I’ outside it?" For if I am inside it myself, I cannot manipulate anything, because it is already determined what I will do tomorrow and the day after. This idea is not compatible with our proud image of a human being, which is understandable enough, since we want to regard ourselves as free beings, able to make decisions. So we build the intellectual construct, that humanity being the crown of creation, is partially located outside of the creation determined by laws, outside of nature, because humans have minds, and are the chosen rulers over nature, by virtue of their intellectual abilities. Made in God’s image, human beings can play with this deck of cards, rather like God in this concept. This is a caricature, of course, but it does describe a way of regarding and dealing with the world in which we live that is common today: we manipulate the world as a part of creation, in which we do not include ourselves. The non-human world around us, nature, is supposed to function like a clock. We only really need the Creator at the beginning in order to create the clock working with His laws of motion, and to set it going, as well as to create man and give him dominion over the earth. Then He is out of a job, because everything runs as fixed, or directed by humans, an orderly course.

Nature is material. We can take it apart without it losing its material properties. We speak of the smallest particles that cannot be broken down further, atoms, which are infinitely hard, so to speak. They are supposed to have the characteristic of always remaining identical with themselves over the course of time. Thus the temporal continuity of matter ensures a continuity of the world. The observable changes in the world occur by rearrangements of these smallest particles. So we have the view that substance, and matter, are primary, they remain the same; the form, the shape, on the other hand, are secondary, arising from the structure of relationships of matter, from their interactions, and change constantly over the course of time. This is the old classical point of view.

The modern view is entirely different. It has concluded that the world in its tiniest aspects is not simply a miniature version of the world we see around us, that it does not have the structure of a Russian matryoshka doll, revealing smaller and smaller versions of essentially the same thing when one takes it apart. An atom is not a small apple, so to speak, not an object like a minute grain of sand, and not a miniature solar system, either. No, nothing of the sort: if we keep taking matter apart, in the end there remains nothing that resembles matter. In the end, in fact, there is no more matter at all. There is only form, shape, symmetry, relation. Matter is not made up of matter!

Does this mean that: There is primarily matter which, secondarily, interacts and arranges itself in different form. Or that there has been a reversal: relationship is what is primary, matter is secondary. Or matter is a phenomenon that only appears in a certain cruder view. Or matter is solidified form. We might also say: at the very least, there remains only something (in fact nothing) that is more like the spiritual — holistic, open, lively: potentiality. Matter is the slag of this spiritual — divisible, bounded, determined, reality. In potentiality, there is no one-to-one cause-and-effect relationship. The future is essentially open. It is only possible to state probabilities for what ‘becomes slag’, what really happens. There are no indestructible particles that remain identical to themselves; instead we have a ‘fiery seething’, a constant coming into being and passing away. The ‘world is created anew’ at every moment, but in the face of, in the ‘field of expectation’ of the departing world. The old potentiality in its entirety gives birth to the new and shapes new realisations, without determining them specifically. In this continuing process of creation, entirely new things, never seen before, are created all the time. Everything is involved in this creative process, not only ‘things’. The interaction follows certain rules — it is described physically by a superposition of complex-valued waves that can reinforce or weaken one another. It is a positive-sum game, where cooperation leads to reinforcement, and — an interesting point — that can imitate a teleological orientation (Hamilton’s principle of least action). The temporal process is not simply evolution and development, an ‘unfolding’ of what already exists, of everlasting matter that merely takes a new shape. It is genuine creation: transformation of potentiality into reality guided by the realisations before.

This may be bad news for those who want to manipulate nature and in the end get it firmly ‘in their grip’. For we actually cannot know exactly what will happen in the future under specified conditions. And this, it should be noted, not because of still incomplete knowledge, but as a consequence of "both one and the other" structure of potentiality, which has the loose linkage of a stream of consciousness, its realisations resembling more a chain of thoughts.

But it is good news for all those who consider and experience humanity as part of the same single overall ‘Wirklichkeit’, actual reality, without the incorporation of everything into one having to reduce humanity and other living creatures into lifeless machine parts. Nobody can manipulate the world in which we live absolutely reliably any more, but everyone and everything can participate to a certain extent creatively in shaping the future.

With reference to our former comparison of the world to a deck of cards, this means that this suspected deck of turned-down, ready-printed cards, that supposedly determines the future, does not exist. So ‘the Good Lord’ is not hiding anything from us for some dubious purpose. Instead, each card is only painted at the instant in which it is turned up. And everything that exists in the world, indeed everything that is inherent in it as potentiality, is involved in the process of painting the new card, so to speak — including us! There are no strict rules of painting, but there are rules of interaction. Therefore, the result remains undetermined, but is still not arbitrary. ‘Paintings’ are created in which old habits are followed and successful works are copied. Peeking at compositions of the old cards happens, and some things are simply copied, which we then call matter: well known and reliably present. Matter is sclerotic spirit or anarchic spirit, that follows the old deterministic laws on average in its general disorientation, and has thus been eliminated from the actual process of genuine creation. But this matter is not useless. It provides solid bricks and reliable tools for building ‘cathedrals’, living creatures under the direction of the not yet enslaved spirit. It decorates the stage on which the next act of the drama of creation will be played. The essential part of this play is not the arena, the backdrop, and the permanent fittings, but what is still open, what shapes up and can still be shaped. We ought to concentrate on this living open part, on the roles that have not been assigned yet in the creative positive-sum game. Here, it is still possible to join in.

These new findings provide us with a transformed world view. The old (classical physical) world view began with a multitude of separate objects: atoms or some kind of independent and unlinked ‘particles’ that, due to interactions, stage by stage construct overall systems, so that they may be regarded, as their name implies, as parts and sub-parts of these systems. The whole evolution of the world, starting from the ‘big bang’ about twenty billion years ago, when such ‘particles’ were formed, can be seen, to put it simply, as a process of increasing ordering of the multitudes into more and more complicated systems and associations of systems, all the way to the highly organised differentiated structures of living creatures and human beings. It remains an open question how such complex structures expressed in forms we call life and consciousness could arise from the multifarious conglomerations of originally isolated matter, just as a computer, no matter how large and sophisticated, cannot ever be the same as a living being. In this view, the requirement of a definite goal, a pull from the future seems indispensable to understand the process of creation.

In contrast, the new world view is essentially holistic, not atomistic: actually, there only exists oneness, the undivided, the inseparable. But this way of putting it is incorrect because the terms ‘existence’, ‘being’ and ‘beings’ are still too closely oriented to our experience of material reality in its ontic character. Instead the indivisible unity refers to a process, to potentiality, not just the possibility, but also the ability to create reality. The temporal evolution consists of a continuing process of differentiation of this indivisible by ‘erecting boundary fences’ (physically speaking: destructive interference and even annihilation of potential waves), similar to the division of a cell into more than one cell by the formation of separating cell membranes. This imitates the coexistence of independent subsystems that act as parts of the overall system, and of which this overall system appears to be ‘composed’. But this is never the case, because the interconnection is much deeper than superficially perceived (as e.g. suggested by the separating membranes), just as the visibly separate white caps on the crests of stormy seas do not justify the view that the ocean is composed of waves and white caps. What creates ‘meaning’ in the interaction of the as-if-parts always arises from the whole that includes them. This whole, this oneness, is always there, whether the ocean is ‘empty’, i.e. extends smooth and calm, or ‘full’, i.e. forms highly differentiated waves in a storm. The interaction and superposition of the waves leads to an orientation that looks as if there was a predetermined goal.

Nor should we human beings when together imagine that we are really separated parts of this ‘Wirklichkeit’, loosely held together by a few optical, sonic and other signals that we sense physics can identify, which we toss back and forth to communicate. We are all parts of this same oneness — no, this is the wrong way to put it, because there is no suitable meaning to ‘are’ and ‘parts’ — better perhaps: we all live in the same potentiality which is our common ground of being. And we perceive this. How could a few words and sentences, with their impoverished, countable information content, unfold so richly in our individual consciousnesses otherwise? In a world oriented mainly to energetic action, it is indeed a useful approximation to define human beings simply as separate individuals who interact by means of external forces — carried by fields of energy. We see today more and more clearly that this approximation is very incomplete from the destructive consequences of our resultant unreasonable dealings with one another and our environment, which neglects the fact that this environment is not something external, but forms our own natural life support system, constituting in a way our bigger self.

So we have a grand world view that owes its richness to its inherent openness, that is, to the fact that it is actually not a world view in the old sense at all. It expresses a basic relationship: everything is rooted in an indivisible potentiality that has some features of a holistic spirit. It is no reality, but relates to reality somewhat as a premonition, as hope, and will, relate to the concrete action that may possibly result from it. The indivisible is reflected in a fundamental community. Evolution in the real sense as the process of solidification, runs in the direction of differentiation and emancipation and of approximate division. The occurrence of consciousness in each of us is also a division effect: I separate myself in a certain limited fashion from this indivisible reality, and suddenly experience myself and the other, the world, as two different things, where the one — the I, the mystic I, the self — now faces the world and regards it from outside, as in a mirror as well. The exterior view is added to the interior view, a coexistence that simulates a duality.

 

Consequences for the World in Which We Live

In conclusion, let me return to the basic question, which is raised implicitly in the topic ‘The future of religion and faith in a secularised world’. As a physicist, I consider myself an active representative of that secularised world. As a human being, I feel allied to the more comprehensive. This will give me the chance of adding a few words of caution to the description I have presented, in which I neglected some important critical details.

The main criticism is directed to the question to what extent the deep insights of an atomic physicist, which he has obtained in his microcosm, are suitable at all to us human beings and the world in which we live. We know all too well that someone who has a good hammer sees the world as being full of nails. Thus many people object to my ideas by saying, "Some atomic physicist is babbling on about God, man, and nature, because at the lowest level of his material reality he discovered an unexpectedly strong intermeshing and coherence, a holistic unity of the world. But these structures of the microcosm do not play any role at all in the much larger mesocosm in which we live. For we know from everyday life that the approximation of an object-like matter, its divisibility, diversity, and independence works wonderfully. Our tried-and-proven, highly successful technology is based on this, after all".

In a general way, this is certainly right. The laws of the microcosm do indeed have difficulty in penetrating the mesocosm in a notable fashion. This is due to the vast numbers — trillions of trillions — of these exotic micro-entities that are contained in objects of our mesocosm. So the lifelike open play of the substructures simply averages out completely as a rule.

We may compare this with an anthill, which is full of motion if we look closely. But seen from a distance, it appears to be static. That this teeming mass does not find expression on the large scale is, of course, due to the simple fact that for each ant running in one direction there is always another one running in the opposite direction, so that there remains no movement of the whole on average.

So our mesocosm is a statistically averaged-out microcosm. The fact that this averaging-out functions so completely is largely due to what is known as the ‘Second Law of Thermodynamics’. The most difficult part of this important fundamental law of physics is its name. For it simply states: In the future the more probable happens more probable. This has the important and impressing consequence, that essentially in a system left alone, every peculiarity, every distinguished aspect, is destroyed in the course of time and dissolves into disorder. You can observe this every day on your desk. For a reason you do not understand, it always gets more disordered, and never more orderly — that is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is why we do not understand how in nature with a strong tendency towards disorder, it can happen that disorder did not win out in the evolution of such highly differentiated systems as human beings, or the wide variety of organisms of the biosphere. What happened there? Did nature get a special exemption from the Second Law for its living section from some higher power, after all?

According to our current understanding, there is no such special exemption. Non-living and living nature are based on the same kind of pre-matter, which is basically not matter at all, and follows this much more openly and, as it were, living dynamics. But this pre-matter can organise itself in different ways.

In one case, the organisation occurs in an entirely unordered and uncorrelated fashion. Then the resulting overall system becomes dull, boring and apathetic. It bears the features of non-living matter. We appreciate this solidified form, this slag, for its reliability. For example: this table in front of me — I turn away from it — turn back to face it — and it is still there, in the same shape, at the same place — nothing else occurred to it in the meantime. We appreciate matter for its constant willingness to be manipulated by us without resisting. It serves us as a tool and building material. And we appreciate that: something reliable that obeys us unconditionally, and does not develop its own will.

But if that pre-matter forms itself into an overall system in a more sophisticated, ordered, differentiated fashion, then structures can arise in which the fundamentally embryonically alive aspect also finds expression in the mesocosm, and becomes a living organism. The impressed potentiality becomes macroscopically visible. However, this requires an enormous amplification. The overall system must be far removed from its equilibrium state to avoid its intrinsic liveliness being averaged out.

Imagine a pendulum: a suspended, moving rod with a weight at the bottom. When pushed, it oscillates in a predictable and calculable way around its lower stable equilibrium position. But if I turn the rod with its weight far away from the lower stable equilibrium to the topmost position, then there is another equilibrium position, but an unstable one. We do not know whether the pendulum will fall to one side or the other. At this instability point, the inherent liveliness of the system can become visible, because it depends on minutely small disturbances whether it follows the one course of motion or the other. This is only a simple example. The natural sciences know of many systems with such embedded dynamic instabilities. They lead to what is called ‘chaotic’ motion. Small changes in the causes result in extreme differences in the consequences here: the flap of a butterfly’s wing can trigger a typhoon!

Life — living macroscopic organisms — require structures near inherent instabilities. But instabilities collapse. In order to maintain them in a precarious balance for a long time, they must be re-adjusted constantly. This requires an ‘intelligent’ supply of energy. These systems need an ‘ordering, balancing hand’ all the time. So this situation does not contradict the Second Law, the dominant tendency to disorder. For it is also our ordering hand that can restore order to our desk again and again every weekend. For this work capable energy is required: it is provided by the hand. But the hand must not only busy itself, it must also watch what it is doing, it must be intelligent, or better, be guided by some perceptive, intentional intelligence, otherwise it will only accelerate the process of disordering.

Therefore, living systems require food, stored solar energy, but also intelligence, a ‘spiritual’ guidance, that in principle is always grounded in the immaterial foundation of form, and has differentiated more and more highly into complex branchings by means of a positive-sum game over the billions of years of the evolution of the biosphere. The highly-ordered energy irradiating from the sun is the motor of the development of life on earth in the final analysis. But it only becomes an ordering hand if its energy is guided by the creative potentiality in the background, which can penetrate into the mesocosm because of inherent instabilities. Our present environmental crisis is very much related to the fact that we do not appreciate this deeper connection. We still let the obsolete idea guide us that we as human beings with minds are apart from a purely material nature, which is only a tool, quarry, and garbage dump for us. We do not recognise the fact that we are a ‘part’ of a common, larger complex system, and are integrated into it in a highly sensitive way. This larger complexity is based on an indivisible potentiality which remains ‘incomprehensible’ to us. But potentiality also offers the possibility of solidifying as reality in ‘parts’, and leading to what we perceive as the external creation in our exterior view and with our senses.

Does this holistic potentiality, this indivisible original liveliness, to which I only have direct access by the interior view, not have a deep kinship with the divine of which the religions speak? The creator is identical with the very foundation of the creation. But what we usually experience as the creation through the exterior view is only the material slag of this spiritual original dynamics.