And if science, which has swept the world with the success of its technology, cannot offer a world-view that provides a certainty that is emotionally satisfying, then no other philosophy has any hope of doing so either. So we are left with the religions, and the marriage of minds, which the German General Staff considered essential for the effective conduct of war. When a troop commander orders his gun position officer to carry out certain orders, the gun position officer does not try to interpret the electrical impulses that have travelled along the telephone wire; he understands the orders, and obeys them. Similarly in a Court of Law, there is a great deal of telepathy involved both in the examination and cross-examination of witnesses and in arguing before either a judge or a jury. In practice this is taken for granted; and in this subject science, so far, has nothing to say. Indeed telepathy is regarded as a rather spooky subject; whereas we all practice it every day of the week, in all our dealings with other people, as a matter of course. Our judgement may not be very good; but we all try as best we can. It is one of the glories of Creation that out of a seemingly mechanical Universe, human character and Man’s freewill are born, and blossom and flower. Similarly, out of a world in which all knowledge appears to be uncertain, occasionally you find that two human minds can understand each other with complete certainty.
So it is that we are able to see that mathematical physicists and evolutionary biologists who discover that their respective subjects appear to obey causal laws, and do not need the intervention of freewill to explain their results, are not entitled to conclude that we are all automata, and have no freewill. To reach this conclusion, they have extrapolated wildly from the results of their experiments, and by induction inferred that the same mechanism applied to men and women. They have counted the first 10 of the Welsh village, and found they are all called “Williams”, and concluded that the remaining 50 are all called “Williams” too. They have failed to understand the most elementary part of the scientific method, which is that few scientific propositions involve deduction only, because deduction can never result in any scientific “Law”. Only induction can lead from experimental results to a generalized proposition, which is what we call a “Law”. And in practice some inductions are legitimate, and some are not. We all know that David Hume proved conclusively that induction was logically indefensible; so that although the whole of science depends on it, the only excuse for it is that it often produces acceptable conclusions, and the construction of the whole of scientific theory would be impossible without it. For scientists to ignore the very basis of science, I would have thought, could be called ignorance.
It is tempting to think that we have already reached the limits in science of what the mind can understand.