Introduction


For most Americans and many others the time comes, usually in high school, when they decide to accept something as true that they do not understand. Science, you might decide, is not for you. Although you decide that science is not for you, you retain the belief that science, what I call the Scientific World Picture, is at bottom what is real. The world is particles and fields too small or vaporous to see that obey laws. We are made of them. That we act, that we are, is an illusion. All is particles, fields, waves and the like moving according to pointless universal law.You might, although abandoning understanding, continue in scientific study. Memorization of what a teacher thinks important can often get you through. Indeed such a technique can take you far. Much of medical school operates on this principle.

In choosing to accept the word of an authority for the ultimate truth, a person decides that reality is beyond his understanding. Such acceptance is a fatal step, for it requires one to learn a mental technique that can quickly be applied elsewhere. Bureaucrats, who follow rules to absurdity, can do so because they have learned this technique. Once one has learned to accept what makes no sense, that is, what someone else tells you that makes no sense, you can also do what makes no sense. It was this technique that produced what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

Belief in the scientific world picture is nihilistic. It is a belief in a world made exclusively of particles moving according to rules that make them take definite trajectories without purpose. So the world as a whole is pointless. What I propose to do is to expose the foundations of this belief, and reveal them as a theology. But my effort will surely fail for anyone not ready to embrace the duty of thinking for herself.

Without appealing to anything but what is or can be right in front of us, I plan to examine these foundations. For any reader who is not ready to claim the right to think for himself and refrain from appealing to authority no matter how august, this journey will be fruitless. It would be better for you to stop right here.


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