Reformation, which reduced much of Europe to chaos and anarchy in the Thirty Years War; and by the prosecution of Galileo before the Inquisition. It was foolish of the Church to imagine that it could reduce the meek gospel of Christ to formulae, and equally foolish to be intransigent when those formulae were more and more openly challenged. Dean Inge in his Outspoken Essays says in terms that had Jesus Christ appeared at that time, he would have been burned. Those who were running the religion, which was in his name, would have found the presence of the Founder quite intolerable. What could mankind do, but destroy a power so misused? Is it not the fate of everyone to be destroyed, who allows himself to get locked into an attitude of mind, from which he will not, or cannot retreat, as in Ibsen’s Master Builder, whether in public or private life? We may hanker after certainty; but it is unwise to be too sure you have found it. Those who confidently condemn everyone different from themselves, tolerable whilst impotent, are utterly unfit to exercise power; and if they seek to obtain power, has Society any option but to prevent them, by any means that are expedient? If Jesus died to free man’s spirit, He did not die so that mankind’s spirit could once again be imprisoned in a single attitude of mind, from which those in authority were unwilling or unable to release it.
The merit of classical physics was that its propositions were tentative hypotheses, which were always liable to be overturned by the embarrassing experimental fact that did not fit current theory. Yet ironically today, natural science seems to be providing a strait-jacket similar to the one which religion used to provide, with its overtones of determinism and predestination. Mathematical physicists imagine that they are on the verge of discovering a theory of all things; and I think the public by and large expect them to succeed. I very much doubt if they will. Even if they succeed so far as inorganic matter is concerned, it will be unintelligible to everyone except a mathematician, and impossible even for them to correlate it with experience in the everyday world. And it seems to me that this is the problem. Although in theory an embarrassing experimental fact, which did not fit, would upset the theory of all things; in practice how would anyone know, if the whole thing is virtually unintelligible to the non-specialist? In the late Victorian era, when classical physicists literally thought they had little more to discover, the effect of their overweening confidence was devastatingly destructive of ordinary people’s confidence in the things of the Spirit. And one of the few bonuses of War is that it reminds us all that morale or spirit is supreme. Now that most people cannot remember the Second World War, is not the same process under way again? This time with the tantalizing lure of a theory of all things somewhere near the rainbow’s end? And its effect on the public’s confidence in the things of the spirit will, I suppose, again be devastating. Indeed the process may have begun, in as much as the corrosive enervation of determinism is seeping into all our minds. We all look for someone to blame in misfortune, we all think the World owes us a living, we all look for hand-outs from an anthropomorphic Providence. And it stems from the fantasy that the World is governed in its minute detail by the Laws of Science, from the galaxies in the heavens to the centre of the atom. The contrary idea that over the vast bulk of the Universe the movement of particles is utterly chaotic, and it is only when large numbers of particles are involved that they become ordered, seems to pass unnoticed.
I think at heart the battle for the soul of science centres round the question whether the so-called “Laws of Nature” are relationships between concepts in the minds of scientists as Whitehead and Dampier Whetham thought, or between the realities of Nature herself? I firmly believe it is the former; which means that the realities of Nature herself remain complete mysteries. Indeed Newton himself considered force at a distance absurd. Despite his theory of gravitation seeming to suggest that all bodies attracted each other, in proportion to their masses, and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them; he still thought that force at a distance was absurd. His view was that God compelled the heavenly bodies to obey the Laws which He had prescribed for them. Newton was too great a thinker