Physics Is Psychologically Intolerable

Scientists Turn to Religion.

Is Physics Determined by Psychology? The question itself is offensive to serious physicists who believe they investigate nature, not acting up on their hopes, fears, proclivities and subconscious desires.

Pierre Laplace found God and prayer irrelevant:   “The present state of the universe is the effect of its past and the cause of its future.” Spinoza boldly asserted: "Contingency and surprise are illusions due to limited human knowledge." Hobbes, Kant and others pointed out that Newtonian mechanics spelled agony, despair, death. Newton claimed that anyone with detailed knowledge of the present will map out the future to full specificity, allowing no room for any deviation, not to speak of 'free will'. Once we become smart enough to grasp the present, we will be forever doomed to roll out a pre-spelled out future, and although such future may be 'comfortable' in any common sense, it will be devoid of surprises, clean of probabilities -- boring. So boring in fact that our psychology would collapse. Our death -- fully prespecified -- will come when scheduled, not a moment later, not a moment earlier. Newton determinism was a model that our surprise-hungry (and surprise-fearing) psychology could not tolerate.

It was therefore necessary for human psychology to steer physics away from Newton and find a way to describe nature with probabilities, with indeterminism. As well we did.

Alas, we could not toss out order in full and see nature as crazy randomness. We used our Newtonian order heritage and kept probabilities curbed. We said: Newton was wrong: what will happen is not predetermined. Instead, what will happen falls under a well-defined probability profile, which means that repeat observations will flash out that profile. It is more subtle, but we must as well realize that curbed probability is as devoid of free will as a Newtonian world. Probability-profile curbed events are surprise-empty, simply on a higher level.

If you were told that for the rest of your life you are destined to step one step to your right every minute, all the while staying comfortable -- it would be unbearable punishment, would it not? But if instead you are given a fair coin to be tossed every minute and you are told to move to the right if the coin shows head and move to the left if the coin shows tails, then your surprise-devoid misery will be just the same. Curbed probability does not help.

We face the same psychological horror with quantum mechanics as we face with Newtonian mechanics.

Do we have to adopt the view of nature as being an existence boiling in unblemished randomness, in which every perceived order is a product of the limitation of the observer?

Surprise-devoid life is no life. We started the journey of science with a view that nature is chaotic and run by whimsical Gods. Over time we discovered order, and more and more phenomena we can fit in a comprehensive organized chart. We even toy with the idea of a Theory of Everything. Realizing that a perfect order means death, we scramble to mix this growing order with sufficient equivocation. However, as argued here: curbed probabilities do not protect us from suffocating boredom, from surprise devoid life -- death.

While we seek ever more knowledge, we better stop at some point so that we don't rob the future form life giving surprises. Really? Should we stop our investigation of nature?

In the past when we faced such overbearing danger, we turned to religion. We can do it again. Religion21.net offers a way out. It is based on one grand admission. The admission of Unbound Ignorance. What we know not is beyond our imagination. Our imagination is bound by our Darwinian evolutionary history, it sees only so far. And as far as it sees, as discussed above, we are in limbo. The solution, salvation, is deep in the territory of our unbound, unimagined ignorance -- what our ancestors called God.