Arthur Stanley Eddington: Science And The Unseen World: part 6

Let me play the role of materialist philosopher a few moments longer. The electric particles in obedience to the laws of physics have come together and built human brains. Still in obedience to those laws, they have by their evolutions brought about and stored in those brains the thoughts that make up the sum of human knowledge. Those unbreakable laws have decreed that to-night some of that accumulated knowledge is to be unloosed on you in the form of a lecture. I hope that you too will be good materialists and feel a due interest in the phenomenon that is proceeding, that observing the curious effects of Maxwell’s laws, the laws of thermodynamics and other physical causes that are leading to the emission of a modulated system of sound-waves.

But no; I was forgetting. That is how as materialists you ought to think of my lecture; but “ought” is outside natural law. I cannot expect more than that your brains will react towards the lecture in accordance with the unbreakable laws which govern them; and those who happen to fall asleep may claim that it was decreed by those laws.

This is, of course, a very old reductio ad absurdum; and he would be a very shallow materialist who has not appreciated the difficulty and persuaded himself that he has found an answer to it. I am not very curious as to how he surmounts the difficulty or whether his justification is valid. The upshot is that he connives at an attitude towards knowledge which does not treat it as something secreted in the brain by an operation of unbreakable laws of nature. It is to be judged in relation to its truth or untruth not in relation to any supposed theory of its origin.

Truth and untruth belong to the realm of significance and values. I am not able to agree entirely with the assertion commonly made in scientific philosophers that science, being solely concerned with correct and colourless description, has nothing to do with significances and values. If it were literally true, it would mean that, when the significance of our lives and of the universe around us is under discussion, science is altogether dumb. But there is this much truth in it. If we are to present science as a self-contained scheme, owing nothing to any judgments we may have formed by methods for which science does not take responsibility, then no doubt significances must be ruled outside its scope. This may be called the official attitude of science. Officially the scientist is just an adept at solving certain problems; he has no curiosity as to how these problems have come to be set; it is a complete surprise to him that mankind struggling after the eternal verities should take serious note of his pastime. But I think no one would venture to speak to a public audience on any scientific topic unless he were prepared to transgress beyond the official attitude. Imagine a speaker on evolution presenting a purely colourless description of the sequence of living forms and the struggle for existence, without ever hinting at an underlying significance for us of this change in our belief as to Man’s place in nature.

The religious seeker who pursues significances and values is often compared unfavourably with the scientists who pursues atoms and elections. The plain matter-of-fact person is disposed to think that the former are wandering amid shadow and illusion, whilst the latter is coming to grips with reality. I want therefore to give an illustration which will show that unless we pay attention to significances as well as to physical entities we may miss the essential part of experience.

Let us suppose that on November 11th a visitor from another planet comes to the Earth in order to observe scientifically the phenomena occurring here. He is especially interested in the phenomena of sound, and at the moment he is occupied in observing the rise and fall of the roar of the traffic in a great city. Suddenly the noise ceases, and for the space of two minutes there is the utmost stillness; then the roar begins again. Our visitor, seeking a scientific explanation of this, may perhaps recall that on another occasion he witnessed an apparently analogous phenomenon in the kindred study of light. It was full daylight, but there came a quick falling of darkness which lasted about two minutes, after which the light came back again. The latter occurrence ( a total eclipse of the sun) has a well-known scientific explanation and can indeed be predicted may years in advance. I am assuming that the visitor is a competent scientist; and though he might at first be misled by the resemblance, he would soon find that the cessation of sound was a much more complicated phenomenon than the cessation of light. But there is nothing to suggest that it is outside the operation of the same kind of natural forces. There was no supernatural hushing of the sound. The noise ceased because the traffic stopped; each car stopped because a brake applied the necessary friction; the brake was worked mechanically by a pedal; the pedal by a foot; the foot by a muscle; the muscle by mechanical or electrical impulses travelling along a nerve. The strange may well believe that each motion has its physical antecedent cause which can be carried back as far as we please; and if the prediction of the two-minute silence on Armistice Day is not predictable like an eclipse of the sun, it is only because of the difficulty of dealing with the configurations of millions of particles instead of with a configuration of three astronomical bodies. 

I do not myself think that the intermission of sound was predictable solely by physical laws. It might have been foreseen some days in advance if the visitor had access to the thought s floating in human minds, but not from any study however detailed of the physical constituents of human brains. I think I am right in saying that within the last two years there has been a change in scientific ideas which makes this more likely than the old deterministic view. But here I am going to grant our visitor his claim; to concede that even human actions are predicable by a –possibly enlarged – scheme for physical law. What then? Shall we let our visitor go away convinced that he has gotten to the bottom of the phenomenon of Armistice Day? He understands perfectly why there is a two-minute silence; it is a natural and calculable result of the motion of a number of atoms and electrons following Maxwell’s equations and the laws of conservation. It differs only from a similar optical event of a two-minute eclipse in being more complicated. Our visitor has apprehended the reality underlying the silence, so far as reality is a matter of atoms and electrons. But he is unaware that the silence has also a significance.

Often the best way to turn aside an attack is to conceded it. The more complete the scientific explanation of the silence the more irrelevant hat explanation becomes to our experience. When we assert that God is real, we are not restricted to a comparison with the reality of atoms and electrons. If God is as real as the shadow of the Great War on Armistice Day, need we seek further reason for making a place for God in our thoughts and lives: We shall not be concerned if the scientific explorer reports that he is perfectly satisfied that he has got to the bottom of things without having come across either.