“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
–Albert Einstein in “Ideas and Opinions”, 1936
We crave understanding. We seek to escape pain, death, and uncertainty through knowledge. Humans invented spirits and mystical forces that controlled seasons, tides, drought, flood, fire, disease, and war. Supernatural narratives originated as bedtime stories, intended to protect children from danger and impart cultural norms. These otherworldly forces took on a life of their own. Humans started believing their daydreams were real and could be influenced through appeasement, sacrifice, or prayer, allowing some indirect control over natural events. Through luck, or the purposeful coupling of these fabricated forces to real-world patterns, these petitions to the gods occasionally seemed to work. If not, one could blame a lack of piety in the petitioner or the capriciousness of the gods themselves. The narrative force of divinity was compelling. Controlling access to these stories could be used to corral populations, en masse, and build complex socio-political structures. Religious myths gave humans enormous power over each other, but they did little to shield us from the slings and arrows of the external world. Our dreams lacked accountability.
As a result of this human desire to understand the world through stories, we eventually began to pursue proto-scientific thinking that prioritized accountability to facts over the stories themselves. Science represented a virtuous cycle of fantasizing about how the universe might work, testing these fantasies through measurements and experimentation, and then adjusting them accordingly. When an idea could no longer stand under the weight of evidence, it was rejected and a new one was put forth, inching us a bit closer to a truth that we would never fully reach. Periods of scientific flourishing sputtered on and off, yielding intermittent advances in medicine, navigation, agriculture, manufacturing, and construction, which were lost and rediscovered, again and again. It was not until the Enlightenment, and a scientific revolution in 17th-century Europe, that we saw a more durable sea change in our approach to knowledge: for the first time, all serious theories of how the world worked had to be falsifiable through empirical observation.
We live in a material world, and most modern scientists are philosophical materialists. We operate from the basic axiom that all observable phenomena have a physical basis. Philosophical idealists, on the other hand, posit that certain phenomena have no material explanation (an axiom that underlies most religious traditions). Descartes was a mind-body dualist, attempting to straddle both worlds; for him, bodily functions had material causes, but the human mind (the "ghost in the machine") was off-limits to materialist thinking. Idealism has its uses in the realm of imagination and human behavior, but it has served as an impediment to scientific inquiry throughout history: from Galileo being forced to recant heliocentrism by the Catholic Church in 1633 to a panel of vaccine experts being fired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by RFK Jr. and the Trump administration. When the answer to a question is ‘because god’ or ‘because I said so’, a materialist hypothesis is snuffed out. Bertrand Russel distilled his opinion on non-materialist viewpoints in the form of a teacup. To paraphrase, Russel argued that if someone were to propose, without any evidence, a teacup, much too small to be observed by any telescope, orbits a star in the Andromeda galaxy, it would be unreasonable to take them at their word or to waste time looking for it. Our capacity to construct imaginary teacups is a powerful cognitive tool for communication and creativity, no doubt contributing to our evolutionary success as a species, but pure fantasy, unchecked by empiricism, is not a reliable basis for objective understanding. Materialism and scientific thinking have gifted us with god-like powers over time, space, sickness, and death. We have a limited time on Earth…why waste it on epistemological dead ends?
Ironically, the fundamental axiom of materialism — that all phenomena have a physical basis — must be taken as an article of faith. Scientists have faith that all observable phenomena are explicable, while also knowing they will never have the time or energy required to build a complete model of the universe. Science cannot accept that certain physical phenomena, like consciousness or the origins of the universe, are off-limits to interrogation — this would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, hypotheses that relate to unobservable or non-physical forces cannot be falsified and are forever beyond the reach of science. Thus, we set aside what we cannot hope to understand to focus on what is within our power to investigate. How can materialists claim that idealism is less useful if both philosophies stand upon axioms of faith? The answer lies in the technologies that you use every day. Navigation? Special Relativity taught us that the flow of time varies with proximity to a massive object, like Earth — knowledge of this fact allows smartphones to more accurately estimate your position on a map. Pain-free surgery? Anesthesia drugs allow modern doctors to turn your pain or consciousness on and off at will, through improved knowledge of neurobiology and chemistry. Air travel? Aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics govern the physics of flight, which has brought the world closer together over the past century. Are any of these technologies derived from religion or political ideology? No. They are all, without exception, the products of science. Technologies, from the wheel to wheat, are not ideological. They are not subjective. They work for Christians and Buddhists, Democrats and Republicans, Materialists and Idealists. They worked yesterday, they work today, and they will work tomorrow. We can look forward to continual improvements in these technologies as we advance our materialist understanding of the world. These wonders of the modern age are made possible through an abiding faith in the physical nature of reality and the never-ending effort to hold our fantasies accountable to facts, slowly aligning our mental models with objective truth.
We are fortunate that the universe is understandable. Comprehensibility may even be a prerequisite to our existence, for how would intelligent life arise in the absence of coherent physical laws? Independent observers can come to the same conclusions in science. The same cannot be said for religion or politics. Fantasy that is beholden to fact is the engine of human progress. The military strategist Helmuth von Moltke once said that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy." Creative generation of ideas about how the world might work comes naturally to us — this is our evolutionary inheritance and our ever-renewable resource. Creative destruction of these ideas through the scientific method comes less naturally and has arisen as a foundational technology of modern civilization. There is no Prometheus waiting in the wings to hand us the answers. It is our responsibility to continually ask questions, holding them up against the harsh light of reality, pruning away those that ring false. In so doing, humanity takes the reins of its destiny; “…How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,…In apprehension, how like a god.”
Image Credit: Prometheus, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1637.