There are times of transformation and change in the course of human history, when new discoveries force human beings into reassessment of their model of the world, into changing their views often in a drastic and painful manner. Eventually, what seemed to be unbelievable and shocking at first, years later becomes part of commonly accepted knowledge, and a new model gradually takes hold, promising to solve all the riddles of our existence. That process took place more than once, and at the times when people have to adjust to changes in their worldview it becomes clear how much tension and difficulty is involved in adapting to new information. Sometimes human mind finds it easier simply to deny the existence of facts that do not fit into the established picture, sometimes it chooses to discard “old” knowledge altogether: it is more convenient to divide our views of the world into true and false, outdated and modern, than to attempt a more complex synthesis. The Baroque period is often seen now as the time of switching from the obsolete medieval outlook to the more “correct” secular vision of modernity. However, the Baroque thinkers themselves would, probably, disagree with this interpretation, and it can be argued that, even from the modern viewpoint, division between religious and secular, spiritual and material, intuitive and rational is not as clear-cut as it is often presented.
Discoveries of Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton and others are seen nowadays as revolutionary developments that shattered the old medieval worldview based on Ptolemy’s astronomy, - and, in some ways, they did. New causal relationships, now understood as natural laws, were discovered. One could no longer think of Earth being in the center of the whole creation, or of motionless, unchanging, static universe, where everyone’s place was fixed in a strict hierarchical order. To those whose religious beliefs were founded on these assumptions, new knowledge must have been profoundly disturbing. For the great minds of the time, whose work brought about these changes, trying to establish new connections between human and divine was a major part of their quest for knowledge. Some looked within themselves, turning for guidance to the realm of emotional and intuitive; some attempted to use the new tool of rational discourse.
Pascal in the beginning of hisThoughtsrecognizes the existence of two types of perception: intuitive and mathematical. Mathematicians, he argues, “do not see what is before them… accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement” . On the other hand, “those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight, and are not used to seek for principles” . As a mathematician, Pascal was obviously accustomed to think in terms of logical reasoning, but he was also painfully aware of the limitations of human mind, its usual tendency to build protective walls around itself, which inevitably crumble: “We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach themselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays with us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses” . Pascal speaks of a human being lost and confused: “Man does not know in what rank to place himself. He has plainly gone astray, and fallen from his true place without being able to find it again. He seeks it anxiously and unsuccessfully everywhere in impenetrable darkness” . Perhaps, more poignantly than any other contemporary thinker, Pascal expressed the feeling of loneliness overcoming a human being at the realization of the infinite nature of the universe: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” ,
The question “why” often appears on the pages of theThoughts, and Pascal concludes that reason cannot provide us with all the answers: “The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this” . However, he by no means rejects the role of reason altogether: he criticizes the Koran for placing too much stress on seeing the signs of God in the natural world and too little on mental reflection. Christianity, in his opinion, offers potential for exercising both one’s faith and reason: a synthesis which he regards as crucial for our understanding of the world: “We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason. There are some who offered against these three rules, either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is; or by doubting everything, from want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want of knowing where they must judge” . When one learns to acknowledge at times the limits of one’s intellect and submit to the power of revelation, “the infinite immensity of spaces” inspires not just fear but the sense of wonder, described by Pascal in one of the most poetic passages of theThoughts: “Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought” .
Unlike Pascal, Descartes trusted the capacities of human intellect and attempted to arrive at the truth by means of logical reasoning alone. He describes in theDiscourse on Methodthe rules by which his thought will proceed: “…to direct my thoughts in an orderly way; beginning with the simplest objects, those most apt to be known, and ascending little by little, in steps as it were, to the knowledge of the most complex… Those long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had let me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order for deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or too well hidden to be discovered” . The most important things that Descartes “discovered” in this way were the existence of self, expressed in the famous maxim “I think, therefore, I am” and the existence of God. The method by which he arrived at these statements is now known as “Cartesian doubt”: one has to set all previously held opinions aside and start from anew, subjecting every opinion and every belief to doubt, until one comes to the point where truth becomes so “clear” and “distinct” that skepticism is no longer possible. To support the notion that such truths exist and can be known,
Descartes turns to proving the existence of God - a perfect Being who places in us the capacity to perceive these truths. “…I reflected on the fact that I was doubting, and that consequently my being was not wholly perfect… I decided to enquire whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and I recognized it as evident that this idea must come from some nature that was really more perfect” . This nature is recognized by Descartes as God.
Bertrand Russell pointed out that “the constructive part of Descartes’ theory of knowledge is much less interesting than the earlier destructive part” . In Russell’s opinion, affirmations that Descartes brings forward on the grounds of his method, are flawed: “When he goes on to say “I am a thing which thinks”, he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense” . Russell shows that Descartes’ argument for the existence of God “uses all sorts of scholastic maxims, such as that an effect can never have more perfection than its cause, which have somehow escaped the initial critical scrutiny” . Descartes’ method itself proved to be more influential in Western thought than did conclusions made on its basis: rational thinking based on mental calculations began to dominate over intuition, and human intellect began to be perceived as an independent observer, somehow detached from sense-perception and emotions. Fritjof Capra in his bookThe Tao of Physicsmakes the following observation: “The “Cartesian” division allowed scientists to treat matter as dead and completely separate from themselves, and to see the material world as a multitude of different objects assembled into a huge machine. Such a mechanistic view was held by Isaac Newton who constructed his mechanics on its basis and made it the foundation of classical physics. From the second half of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, the mechanistic Newtonian model of the universe dominated all scientific thought. It was paralleled by the image of a monarchical God who ruled the world from above by imposing his divine law on it. The fundamental laws of nature searched for by the scientists were thus seen as the laws of God, invariable and eternal, to which the world was subjected”.
It seems that the new outlook, which emerged as a result of scientific discoveries in the early modern period in some respects resembled the earlier Ptolemaic vision. The laws of nature replaced the divine laws, which governed the world in the Middle Ages. The universe was again, though in the new sense, seen as a well-ordered, predictable machine where every event had its direct cause, even though, in search for causes, one would turn to material rather than spiritual explanations.
Newtonian model included several important concepts on which the mechanistic view of the universe was largely based, such as absolute, immovable space, absolute and linear time, existence of indestructible material particles of which all objects were made and the force of gravity, which acted upon them. In the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of relativity theory and quantum theory, these views had to be significantly altered. F. Capra summarizes the essence of newly discovered facts as follows: “According to relativity theory, space is not three-dimensional and time is not a separate entity. Both are intimately connected and form a four-dimensional continuum, “space-time”. In relativity theory, therefore, we can never talk about space without talking about time and vice versa. Furthermore, there is no universal flow of time as in the Newtonian model… All measurements involving space and time thus lose their absolute significance. In relativity theory, the Newtonian concept of an absolute space as the stage of physical phenomena is abandoned and so is the concept of an absolute time. Both space and time become merely elements of the language a particular observer uses for describing the observed phenomena” . Einstein proved that space, time and material objects do not exist independently of one another: presence of large bodies can affect the flow of time and the curvature of space. Quantum theory revealed new information concerning the structure of the atom and the behavior of matter on the subatomic levels. Discovery of the fact that subatomic units can exist both as particles and waves led to an important development in the quantum theory: the idea that units of matter could exist as probabilities rather than actual happenings. This meant that the universe was not static and predictable but was constantly in motion and change, all its elements deeply interconnected: “Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated “basic building blocks”, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole” . Another shattered myth was that of an independent observer. As Capra explains, “The crucial feature of atomic physics is that the human observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an object, but is necessary even to define these properties. In atomic physics, we cannot talk about the properties of an object as such. They are only meaningful in the context of the object’s interaction with the observer… The observer decides how he is going to set up the measurement and this arrangement will determine, to some extent, the properties of an observed object” . Capra quotes the words of a physicist John Wheeler: “…the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word “observer” and put in its place the new word “participator” .
As the quantum theory developed, understanding of causal relationships had to be broadened more than once. Einstein, who deeply believed in the inherent harmony of the universe, wrote in hisIdeas and Opinionsthat “the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past” . Further studies (particularly, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment with two spinning particles moving in the opposite directions) demonstrated that causation was not limited to local variables but, indeed, could be called universal. John Horgan summarized the basics of the EPR experiment in his bookEnd of Science: “According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position – even if it is on the other side of the galaxy”. Einstein himself doubted the possibility of non-local causation suggested by this experiment, but further research, supported by Bell’s theorem, indicated that it is, after all, a valid conclusion.
The major implication of these discoveries is, in Capra’s words, that “the universe is fundamentally interconnected, interdependent and inseparable”; that it is constantly alive and changing: in a sense, it is being created over and over again with our active participation. This realization brings forth a new sense of wonder that, Einstein felt, is comparable to religious feeling: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity” . In a passage fromIdeas and OpinionsentitledThe Religious Spirit of ScienceEinstein described a religious feeling as experienced by a scientist: “His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection” . Einstein repeatedly talks of “intelligence”, “cosmic religious feeling” , “the Reason that manifests itself in nature” , and it is clear that to him, spirituality and rational knowledge were closely tied together.
In the bookThe Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra argues that modern science, specifically quantum physics, presents a worldview that is in many respects similar to such traditions of Eastern religious thought as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism. He explains: “The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view – one could almost say the essence of it – is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality” . Capra draws detailed parallels between the facts of modern science and revelations of the Eastern mystics. To dismiss his conception as an argument built by analogy and, therefore, invalid, means to deny any value to that kind of intuitive knowledge of which Pascal spoke in the beginning of hisThoughts, and to limit ourselves to rationalized, linear form of reasoning proclaimed by Descartes. Science itself proved the world to be infinitely richer and more complex than the schemes human beings create for themselves, however sophisticated these schemes seem to be at the moment. Perhaps, rather than continue to split and compartmentalize our ways of understanding, it is time to search for the common ground between different perspectives: religious or secular, logical or intuitive.



Bibliography

1). Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Shambhala Publications: Boulder, 1983.

2). Descartes, Rene. Philosophical Writings. Bobbs-Merrill Company: New York, 1971.

3). Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishers: New York, 1954.

4). Horgan, John. The End of Science. Broadway Books: New York, 1997.

5). Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts. Collier and Son: New York, copyright 1910.

6). Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1972.