2 - The context and consequences of the argument

Summary

The argument and recent physics and cosmology

The historical context of the argument helps clarify its intentions. Consider four such contexts: the physics and cosmology of the last few decades, the physics of the first half of the twentieth century, the rise of the life sciences and their relation to physics, and the study of human history and society. To place the argument in these multiple contexts is to understand how much is at stake in these disputes. It is also to undermine the fake authority that clings to widespread ideas about the plurality of worlds, the restricted reality of time, and the power of mathematics to serve as a privileged window on reality.

In its relentless quest for a definitive unification – a view that would bring gravity under the same theories that account for the electromagnetic, the strong, and the weak forces – much of contemporary physics and cosmology has despaired of explanations that meet the traditional and exacting standards of either deterministic or probabilistic causality. It has settled for explanations that admit a vast array of states of affairs, of which the observed states of affairs represent no more than particular variations. Rather than acknowledging such underdetermination as a limit or a failure of insight, it has tried to turn a detriment into a benefit by describing the former as the latter.