"Why does the universe go to all this bother of existing?"

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

       -- Richard Wilbur, Epistemology

It's apparently well-accepted what the base assumptions of science are.  I found several sites outlining anywhere from two to six basic assumptions, yet, curiously, no source.  Or maybe not so curious.   Basic assumptions are, after all, supposed to be self-evident, so perhaps they require no source?  Anyway, they were all more or less similar.

The most inclusive example I could find were those of Kitty Ferguson's in her excellent essay Fire the Equations: Science Religion and the Search for God, which I've just read and realized that she basically beat me to what I was going to say here, and says it more beautifully than I could have said it, thereby completely wasting the last two decades of my life.  Thanks Kitty.

Kitty's assumptions are that the universe is:    

• rational
• accessible 
• contingent 
• objective 
• unified

It's interesting, as Ferguson points out, that these basic tenets, developed in the 17^th century and still accepted today, were written by scientists who were devoutly religious (at least would be by modern standards).  So their assumptions were not in conflict with their religious beliefs. On the contrary, many of the assumptions of science were also assumptions of Christianity.

Assumption:  The universe is...	Science	(Christian) Faith
Rational	The universe follows laws.	God is rational and we can see his symmetry and plan in the universe around us.
Accessible	The reality of the universe can be explored empirically (though the senses).	The way to God can be found in his creation.
Contingent	There is cause and effect.	All around is an effect; God is the cause.
Objective	The universe exists outside of the self.  The existence is shared by rational observers.	God exists outside of the self.
Unified	There is an underlying set of laws that describes the universe.	There is one God that describes the universe.

Trouble with this "science" business started brewing a little before the time of Galileo. Contrary to popular opinion, the Church did not have a huge issue with the earth orbiting the sun at the time (see Wade Rowland's excellent treatise on the subject, Galileo's Mistake).  Copernicus had already floated the idea almost a century beforehand and the guys working in Rome were no dummies. They had already practically resigned themselves to a heliocentric model, and were busy developing weasel clauses to maintain ecclesiastical consistency.

The real issue was Galileo's implication the universe could be completely known through science. Where, in such an equation, was there room for God?  This clockwork universe, in the words of Pope Urban VIII "imposed necessity on the Lord Almighty."

It turns out Galileo was wrong--at least by what we think we know today.  Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and Chaos Theory demonstrate that neither empirical (inductive reasoning) nor logic (deductive reasoning) is capable of describing the universe completely.  Score one for the Pope.  At least until Darwin came along and pretty much nuked creationism.

In theory, there is still no conflict between religion and science.  Again, using the Christian religion as an example, it is possible that a supernatural omnipotent being created the Earth a few thousand years ago and then, being omnipotent, set the whole ruse up with the fossils and the carbon dating. 

There's no conflict with science.  Because God is (presumably) beyond empirical understanding ("supernatural") then the question of his existence lies outside the realm of science.  The proposition "Well an omnipotent God created everything and just made it look like we evolved from monkeys," is non-falsifiable, therefore non-scientific.  There is no conceivable evidence  anyone could present that would refute the hypothesis.

However, if God, or the Godhead, or a Supreme Being is empirically real--if he can seen or heard or otherwise sensed in a non-metaphorical sense--then his existence does become a question for science.  A most interesting proposition.

Of course there are other forms of spirituality besides the monotheistic personal god, such as, for example Buddha and Zen enlightenment.  Parallels have been drawn between, for example, Zen and some recent findings in quantum physics.  Many former dualities have disappeared at the quantum or relativistic levels (form/emptiness, time/space, energy/mass, cause/effect) and shown that reductionism, at a subatomic level, breaks down.  An event becomes a part of its context. It cannot be teased be out as an independent observable phenomenon, but can only be understood in an interdependent way with what is happening around it.

"Ultimate reality," in science, doesn't look anything like the grand clockwork universe of Newtons's day.  That apocryphal apple that dropped on Newton's head we believe today was made of protein and sugar polymers, and those polymers were made of atoms of carbon, and oxygen and hydrogen.  And those hydrogen atoms were comprised of a nucleus, comprising about one billionth of the volume of the atom, orbited by a distant, tiny electron smeared over some multi-dimensional probability cloud, all afloat in a frothing sea of virtual particles which tend to exist more than actually exist.  The apple didn’t bonk Newton on the head so much as a swarm of electromagnetic impulses on the surface of the apple interacted with Newton's head, itself a swarm of electromagnetic activity.  Today's model is more akin to a pile of leaves whipped into dance by a fickle gust of wind than Galileo's intricate clock.

I'm not sure our "modern" view is as comforting.  According to what we know, the universe cannot be known.   We can't answer Stephen Hawking's question, "Why does the universe go to al this bother of existing?"  


In the meantime, here we are--apparently--these brief, howling back eddies in the tide of entropy, clinging to the surface of an infinitesimal speck somewhere in the middle of the granddaddy of all explosions and going, "WTF, man?  W-T-F?"

Oops--went a little off the rails there. Next up--inductive and deductive reasoning.  Let's blow the doors off those puppies!