classical worldview

The term “classical worldview” is broadly used to describe the scientific description of the world that began with Greek philosophers and reached its zenith in the 19th century. It was conceived 2,500 years ago as a rational replacement of myths about gods who controlled the world by imposing their whims through acts of nature they caused. As Morris Kline put it:

“The Greek intellectuals adopted a totally new attitude toward nature. This attitude was rational, critical, and secular. Mythology was discarded as was the belief that the gods manipulate man and the physical world according to their whims. The intellectuals eventually arrived at the doctrine that nature is orderly and functions invariably according to a grand design. All phenomena apparent to the senses, from the motion of the planets to the stirrings of the leaves on a tree, can be fitted into a precise, coherent, intelligible pattern. In short, nature is rationally designed and that design, though unaffected by human actions, can be apprehended by man’s mind.“ Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 10

For almost two thousand years, western conceptions of the universe revolved around the Aristotelian notion that Earth was stationary and at the center of the universe, and that the surrounding heavens were perfection. This is of course only a subset of Aristotelian philosophy, but it suffices for current purposes. These conceptions were to be shattered by Copernicus' insight that the earth moves and orbits the sun— a claim verified through Galileo’s observations of planetary motion and the mathematics of elliptical orbits developed by Johannes Kepler. The heliocentric system ripped Earth (and therefore humankind) The term “mankind” was more or less exclusively used through the 20th century, but is appropriately abandoned now. from the center of the universe Richard Tarnas asserts that the effects of this disruption continue to this day (see Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche for a detailed defense, and XXX in this project for a cursory description. , but retained the conception of the world as a knowable place that at least in principle can be fully described by the laws of physics. The laws of physics as described by Aristotle were modified or replaced by Newton, et.al. In this view, now referred to as “classical physics”— and apparently believed by most contemporary scientists and philosophers— the universe is a vast system of objects, fields and forces that affect them, all interacting predictably by a set of laws that can be completely described through mathematics. This view was born by Francis Bacon, Galileo and Descartes in the 17th century. It coalesced around the the physical laws first described by Isaac Newton in the late 18th century (amended by James Maxwell in the 19th century and Albert Einstein in the early 20th), and became dogma in the 20th century with the Modern Synthesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the genetic observations of Mendel. Classical physics holds that the condition or configuration of any object in the universe is fully determined by its preceding conditions. Everything— galaxy formation, what we perceive as conscious thoughts, and everything in between— is, at least in principle, fully predictable with sufficient knowledge of preceding conditions. We are simply observers of a reality that we cannot affect.

Henry Stapp summarized the view:

“The ideas of Galileo Galilei, Rene’ Descartes, and Isaac Newton created a magnificent edifice known as classical physical theory, which was completed by the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. The central idea is that the physical universe is composed of"material” parts that are localizable in tiny regions, and that all motion of matter is completely determined by matter alone, via local universal laws. This local character of the laws is crucial. It means that each tiny localized part responds only to the states of its immediate neighbors: each local part “feels” or “knows about” nothing outside its immediate microscopic neighborhood. Thus the evolution of the physical universe, and of every system within the physical universe, is governed by a vast collection of local processes, each of which is ‘myopic’ in the sense that it ‘sees’ only its immediate neighbors. Henry Stapp: “Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics” "

This set of ideas is the foundation of the scientific worldview that through the end of the 19th century was almost universally accepted as being true, or, as academic philosophers sometimes say, as having ontological primacy. “Ontological primacy” is used here in the general sense of a fundamental truth about the nature of the world, a conclusion that physics was widely thought to be solely responsible for (and for some contemporary scientists and philosophers, still is). Newton connected us to the cosmos by showing that the same principles or laws applied to both planets and everyday objects. Maxwell unified magnetism, electricity, and light in a set of common field equations. Darwin’s theory of evolution extended the conception of a lawful universe into the domain of biology. But none of those expansions changed the underlying presumption of an objectively real, purely physical, external world with definite properties that are independent of any observer. Hillary Putnam sums it up this way:

“…the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ’the way the world is’. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.“ Hillary Putnam, from Reason, Truth, and History p. 49, about the “externalist” perspective— quoted in The Mind Matters, p. 14. The nature of claims about “truth” are discussed briefly below and in XXX

As Jerry Coyne says in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality:

“Physics is causally closed and causally complete. The only causes in the universe are physical, and everything in the universe that has a cause has a physical cause. In fact, we can go further and confidently assert that the physical facts fix all the facts. Atheist’s Guide to Reality, p, 25-26 ”

In this view, there is no room for free will or any non-physical force or influence. The emergence of life is a random and, most likely, an extremely rare occurrence— and when life does emerge it evolves in a completely blind manner. Concepts such as mind and consciousness are human constructs and purely derivative from physical conditions, different in degree and outcome but not in type from any other physical interactions. Everything that we know about the world, anything that we can possibly know, will necessarily come through science.

It is a fundamental dogma of modern science that nothing exists that cannot be measured, at least in principle. That includes consciousness and all the subjective phenomena that derive from it. Spirit, meaning, and other qualitative notions, they’re all just electrochemical reactions in our brain. Reality is purely physical, full stop. Feelings of connection to something greater than ourselves such as sense of awe or spirit are merely pre-scientific superstitions, emotional detritus from times before we understood how the world really works.

Such is the presumption of the modern scientific program— and the idea of reality that Wolfgang Pauli believed needed to be replaced. This, of course, is my opinion, although it appears to be consistent with the basic theme of a psychophysical model such as outlined through Pauli’s collaboration with Jung.

But some of us who are very much engaged with science— with its consistency of evidence, its predictability and precise descriptions— do not accept the dogma that reality is exclusively physical (in the sense that all things that are real can be measured). Even if we cannot articulate or conceive of what it might be, we believe there is something else, a fundamental, qualitative and very real aspect of the world that we have yet to more than glimpses. We believe that we are part of something far greater than ourselves This assumes a reasonably well-educated reader and a conventional western worldview (either secular or thoughtful theism). , something that cannot be explained through scientific methods. This would be something like the “tertium quid” that Thomas Nigel refers to in his critique of reductive materialism (and theism) in Mind and Cosmos.

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