Scientific Perspectives

Here I seek to be un-mistakenly clear about the nature of that prevailing scientific worldview that I claim is the major philosophical—might I say, metaphysical—challenge confronting modernity. That claim is that ontological reduction is the prevailing interpretation of the world apparently revealed by contemporary science. This means that the laws and principles of each level of theoretical interpretation can be folded into those at a still more fundamental level. Ultimately, this view holds that nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced. Thus, the belief in human freedom can only be the expression of inadequate ideas that the further development of science will dispel. It was this mathematical structure of the natural world to which Einstein was alluding when he said that he “believed in the god of Spinoza.” And it is to counter the various and widely held updated versions of that position that my argument is directed.