Chapter 3 - And Can It Be Reversered

But if in this secular world there are no fixed spiritual landmarks or signposts, the good news is that the only world-view that carries conviction is one based on a relationship with the Almighty, the Creator; and if Christianity is much the best religion which the world has known, (which was professor Eucken’s view), that means that a Christian world-view is probably the best that you are going to get. But before evangelical Christians indulge in too much euphoria, it is prudent to remind ourselves for a moment why it is that scientific truth is necessarily unreliable. The late-Victorian physicists literally thought they had little more to discover; with Clerk Maxwell’s equations for the propagation of electro-magnetic waves the last big problem had been solved, and all that remained was a little tidying up. Then came modern physics! First Max Plank’s discovery that energy was not infinitely divisible, but consisted of packets or quanta; leading eventually to the wave mechanics and the quantum mechanics, and to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”, namely that you cannot know a particle’s position and momentum; the more accurately you know the one, the less accurately you know the other. Then Einstein’s discovery that the common-sense concepts of space and time were not good enough to describe the movement of the heavenly bodies; you needed to combine them into a four-dimensional concept of space-time. Gravity did not exist; Newton was right, force at a distance was absurd. Even the concept of “Force” was eliminated; from henceforth the heavenly bodies moved along paths of least energy. Of course it is sensible to continue to use the concepts of force and gravity in everyday affairs; but one must try to remember they are but concepts. Similarly it is sensible to continue to talk of space and time, provided one remembers they too are but concepts, and inadequate ones at that. And Bertrand Russell ends his “Human Knowledge, its Scope and its Limits” in which he considers chiefly scientific knowledge, by saying that all knowledge is uncertain, inexact and partial. And to this doctrine no limitations have been found! And in his lengthy analysis of the legitimacy of “Induction”, (and the whole of science depends on the legitimacy of induction), he concludes that induction is legitimate when common sense says it is legitimate, and illegitimate when common sense says it is illegitimate. To give a simple example; if someone, taking a census of a Welsh village in which 60 people lived, found that the first 50 were called “Williams”, it would not be legitimate induction for him to conclude that all 60 were called “Williams”, because one might be called “Evans”. Induction is only valid, when common sense tells you that the great probability is that it is valid. All attempts to prove induction valid in the end are falsified, because they all come down to numerical induction, as illustrated above.

Religion Rewritten, a religious view of nature and the universe.