Science fulfills an existential purpose. It serves to help us find our way by recognizing regularity – and hence predictability – in the events surrounding us. The need for such regularity and predictability dominates us to such a degree that we even invent it when we cannot discern it from the things themselves. People in earlier times believed that spirits and gods caused volcanoes to erupt, droughts or diseases, or that sacrifices and prayers could persuade them to avert such evils. That is they invented a fictious causality being unable to recognize true causes. Then people knew relatively little about the objectively existing order of nature. It was understood only to the extent that was essential for the survival of the species: hunting animals or growing plants required a careful understanding of existing natural laws. Humanity has only moved beyond this elementary stage since the enlightenment und subsequent Industrial Revolution, but then this happened at a very rapid pace. Science is now capable of artificially creating new life forms in the laboratory and fundamentally altering existing ones with the help of genetic manipulation. Human voyages to distant planets, which were previously only conjured up in fairy tales and myths, have turned into a real possibilities.
No longer does the modern Moses receive the book of laws from the hands of God. He himself has one by one deciphered the nature’s regularities. In principle, there seems to be no limit to this path of discovering ever new laws, because nature itself is in constant evolution. Science thus becomes the only worldview that allows for an infinite extension of verifiable knowledge. At the height of scientific optimism in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was even assumed that humans only needed to explore reality long and deeply enough to recognize all events in nature as determined by laws. The French mathematician Simon de la Place even found a final formula for this conviction. „An intelligence,“ he said, „that at a given moment comprehended all the forces that govern nature and, moreover, the respective position of the elements of which it is composed, would – provided it were large enough to subject all these data to analysis – equally comprehend in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the smallest atoms: nothing would be uncertain for it. To it the future and the past would be clearly visible“ (Laplace 1886, vol. VII, p. VIS.VI). According to this classic formula, there can be no effects among specific phenomena that do not follow from equally specific causes. The definition of scientific progress therefore assumes that over time human knowledge will uncover more and more laws, so that at the end of this process, nothing will remain “uncertain”, because nothing will escape predictability and controllability.
This optimistic belief in the complete predictability of nature was first shaken by the discoveries of quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, chance was discovered and is, in our time, praised by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Anton Zeilinger as the greatest invention of modern times. In the subatomic realm, research was confronted with phenomena in which a specific effect, such as the decay of a radium atom, obviously had no specific cause. In the quantum realm, an effect is no longer “determined” by preceding or accompanying causes. That is precisely why it is called a “random” phenomenon.
This discovery represented such a tremendous break with the “deterministic” worldview that until then had been the official creed that some of the greatest physicists – Albert Einstein, for example – did not want to accept it. Einstein insisted that “God does not play dice.” How did he know that for sure? In fact, classical physics, like its challengers from the field of quantum mechanics, claimed far more than they actually knew or were even able to prove. What’s more, quantum physics did by no means necessarily contradict classical physics. Heisenberg, for instance, insisted: “Logically speaking, it is entirely possible to search for the emission of an alpha particle after some … /preceding/ process, i.e., for a cause as in classical physics. We refrain from so doing only because we would then have to know the microscopic state of the entire world … and that is certainly impossible” (Heisenberg 1959, 69). In order to explain why a radium atom emits an alpha particle at this particular moment, we would have to recognize the state of the entire world, which is impossible for human intelligence. However, an infinite intelligence with comprehensive insight would still be able to maintain a deterministic worldview. Where is the difference to Laplace?
Human intelligence is driven by needs – the need for a reality that is predictable and controllable is certainly one of the most powerful of all, because we could not survive in a world of chaos where all predictability and controllability has vanished. The idea of a fundamentally orderly world is therefore as old as mankind’s oldest myths and as young as the triumph of modern science. In my perspective this explains why science, in its most powerful impulse, that is in its search for objective truth, has until now applied this endeavor only to external things but not to itself. The moment it would take this step as well, it is logically forced to radically rethink its position. It then realizes that chance does not have to be discovered by quantum physics and be praised as the most momentous insight of the twentieth century, as Anton Zeilinger claims. Rather, the existence of chance has always been nothing less than a logical precondition for science to make sense for science can only be true if its basic assumptions are wrong. The denial of chance or the claim that infinite intelligence would eliminate chance is one of these false assumptions.
For what reason did man seek laws, those, for instance, that trigger a cluster of lawful processes that safely ignite a rocket and then steer it to Mars, or the processes that cause a bomb to explode, or even simply set a car in motion as soon as the accelerator is pressed? In all these and countless other cases, it is his aim to set in motion a strictly and usually perfectly predictable sequence of events by means of a decision that for its part may be strictly unpredictable.Knowledge of the deterministic sequence only makes sense to us if we can set it in motion at any time and in any place, i.e., in a strictly indeterministic manner. When I myself or any one of trillions of people press the accelerator, or when a politician activates the red button that sets a ballistic missile in motion, this triggering action eludes all calculation – the event is outside the laws of nature. There exists no natural law relationship between the triggering action (pressing the red button or the gas pedal) and the subsequent lawful sequence of events. One is determined; the other is not. It is, therefore, not a matter of distinguishing between “hard” and (more or less) “soft” determinism. The logic of science allows us only one choice: to place chance as a second ontological dimension of reality, on an equal footing with natural laws. The latter only make sense and have a purpose for humans if the assumption of a completely determined world proves to be fundamentally wrong.
However, in the world around us, we cannot recognize chance in the same way as laws. For how can we prove it – i.e. the absence of any relationship between things? There always remains the possibility described by Heisenberg that the state of the entire world could well explain why an alpha particle is emitted from a radium atom at this very moment. This possibility science can neither prove nor disprove. We can recognize the existence of chance in a provable way only in our own dealings with things. I mentioned activating a red button that sets a rocket in motion, or pressing a gas pedal that lets a vehicle going. Of course, every person who performs such an act is influenced by certain motives or habits. However, these motives cancel each other out in view of the fact that the events in question may at any time and in any place be set arbitrarily in motion. Even though for each acting person, such triggering of determined sequences never presents itself to him as random, his thinking and willing can take on an infinite number of forms and contents. If we generalize the actions of all individuals, there is no lawful relationship between the two. At this point – that is with our intervention in reality – chance becomes the best-proven fact of all.
If it is true that we explore deterministic processes with the purpose of being able to execute them in an indeterminate manner at any time and in any place *1*, then the question inevitably arises as to why even the greatest scientists have suppressed or rejected this insight, even though it strictly follows from the logic of science that is from its sense an purpose for human beings? I explain this with two very different reasons, one very effective indeed but nevertheless superficial, and a second that goes deeper. On the surface, there has always been a strong tendency among experts, especially when their knowledge requires years of study, as is the case in physics in general and quantum physics in particular, to ignore objections that come from outside their field of expertise and are moreover accessible to any intelligent layperson. Experts tend to claim a monopoly on all statements concerning their field of knowledge, even if the logical basis of such statements – unlike specific findings about definite phenomena of nature – is equally accessible to all people, since it underlies thinking itself. But a more profound reason undoubtedly lies in the fact, already mentioned, that human intelligence is always controlled by feelings and needs. Science wants to further and further extend the net of human domination over nature and even man. But in accepting chance as a second dimension of reality alongside natural laws, it is forced to admit from the outset that this domination will always remain limited and ultimately precarious. Even if ist endeavors provide us with more and more devices to change parts of reality in a strictly predictable manner, we will never be able to apply this calculation to reality as a whole. We will never know what the totality of such selective changes will make reality look like tomorrow, let alone in a hundred years.
And we are even forced to make further concessions. No, not to the fantasies of myth or esotericism, both of which falsely assume that they possess positive knowledge, which in reality they do not. Rather, it is science itself that, despite its immense success, must recognize its limitations. For it can never offer us more than the discovery of isolated lawful connections. It is those isolated strands of lawfulness that science determines within the total field of phenomena surrounding us – a field about which it can never say, on the basis of empirical observation, where laws end and chance begins. No scientist has ever been able to see the total field of phenomena, let alone make any judgement about it. Since empirically we can neither prove nor disprove the point, it is quite possible that most coexisting or successive events are as unconnected to each other as my thoughts and those of my neighbor are in the human realm.
This proves the first basic assumption of modern science to be wrong. The basic assumption of an infinite intelligence, for which chance would not exist, must be false, if science is to have any sense and purpose for humans. Classical physics had simply denied chance, and so did Albert Einstein. Heisenberg relativizes it with the argument that we could very well recognize a continuous lawfulness even in quantum events provided our intelligence were capable of grasping the state of the world as a whole. The statements by Laplace and Heisenberg with regard to infinite intelligence remain purely speculative; in other words, they confidently disregard everything that can be empirically proven.
Alternatively, we can also say that science only makes sense if freedom exists as a second ontological dimension alongside necessity.
We must reject a second basic assumption too. Although our potential knowledge of the world is infinite in scope, it is wrong to assume that this knowledge can eliminate our fundamental ignorance. Chance, that is fundamental ignorance, is just as boundless – and this ignorance, like chance itself, cannot be eliminated. In contrast to all knowledge, which always has positive content, chance (which we refer to as freedom in humans) has no content whatsoever; it is pure negation or the absence of all knowledge. In this case the error of science lies in the assumption that all human ignorance can and will fundamentally be replaced by knowledge.
This opens up a transformed worldview that is, of course, by no means anti-scientific, for there is hardly a better proven fact than that every further discovery of natural laws demonstrably expands our empirical knowledge and our partial dominion over nature. But we must now accept that the desires and will of living beings are also among the driving forces that have shaped future since the beginning of history and will continue to do so in unpredictable ways. This exposes a third basic assumption of modern science as false. The course of the world (evolution) cannot be explained exclusively by the action of impersonal forces (laws of nature), but is also based on purely subjective factors – namely the will and desires of living beings, which may or may not trigger predictable sequences of events. The third fundamental error of science is therefore the assumption that we can explain reality solely with the help of objective, impersonal laws.
In other words, following the logic of science and its claim to truth, we must commit ourselves to a supra-scientific worldview that includes chance and freedom, will and desire as dimensions of empirical knowledge. The worldview of science is only correct if we declare the three basic assumptions just mentioned to be wrong.
Finally, it should be noted that a supra-scientific worldview opens up perspectives that have been frowned upon by serious scientists for three centuries. As is well known, the Enlightenment thinkers mocked miracles that, according to religious belief, may at any time interrupt the course of normal events if God thus decrees. Obviously, no one has ever been able to prove that a natural process such as the evaporation of water at 100 degrees Celsius suddenly ceases to apply because a human being, a spirit, or a divine being decides so. The mockery of such claims by the natural sciences seems as justified today as it was three centuries ago. But if we define miracles in a way that is consistent with the logic of science, namely as the possibility of phenomena that are due to chance, which we cannot foresee, let alone calculate in advance, then the world has always been full of miracles and will remain so. And we must also admit – along with William James, the great scientist and philosopher who discussed this topic in his seminal work about The Varieties of Religious Experience – that prayers, like all desires and volitions that determine human actions, can definitely be forces that influence and change reality. This is an empirical fact that exists quite independently of any belief in supernatural powers.
*1* The laws that the Babylonians observed in the movements of the planets are only an apparent exception. According to the beliefs of the time, these movements determined people’s actions and character. It was therefore necessary to know them in order to plan one’s own actions correctly.