Q: In Paul Davies's Eerie Silence, there's a section titled 'Is Science Inevitable?' In
the paragraph beginning 'Suppose an asteroid had hit Paris ... It goes on to
say: In medieval China, no clear distinction was drawn between moral laws and
laws of nature. Do you think that is still the case? After 65 years of
communist rule?
A: There are really two questions here.
First, whether the rise of science is inevitable given the rise of a toolmaking
intelligent species, and second whether Chinese society today reflects the same
sort of philosophical attitude towards epistemology as it did in the Middle
Ages. (To paraphrase). Never one to shy away from discussing things I only
slightly understand, I will attempt some comments.
If I took his point, what Davies was saying
is that science; or, more specifically, the scientific method, arose because of
a contingent series of historical accidents, beginning with ancient Greek
logic, followed by late Medieval philosophical developments which themselves
were dependent on certain intellectual currents in the Islamic world, followed
by a new age of exploration and technological development in the Renaissance.
Take away any of these elements— q.e.d., no science, and presumably much slower
or non-existent progress towards systematic procedures for uncovering the
actual nature of physical reality, slower technological growth, etc.
Counter-example being China, which in 1000 AD was far ahead of the West in
every way, including technology and what you might call practical engineering
and descriptive science, but which had not developed a procedural system or methodology
for investigating scientific truth. And as a result, in a few short centuries
it fell hopelessly behind the west in science and technology.
Davies apparently infers (from what, I’m
not entirely sure) that the Medieval Chinese drew “no clear distinction…
between moral laws and laws of nature.”
To the extent that statement is true, though, I’m not sure that the
development or failure to develop scientific methodology is explained by it, or
that either is necessarily dependent on the other. (Although it would seem
likely that the state of philosophical development could significantly affect
the timing of scientific advances). There are those (such as Thomas Nagel) who
even today reject the modern secular notion that values are purely relative, so the idea that a civilization could
not have a systematic set of cultural norms that espoused “moral laws” as
objectively true, and at the same time develop a truly scientific methodology,
does not seem obvious or even plausible to me.
For example, the Ming Emperors Hong Xi (r. 1424-1425)
and his son Xuan De stopped the voyages of exploration of the great admiral Zheng
De, who had explored the Indian ocean and rounded the tip of Africa in huge
trading fleets during the late 14th and early 15th centuries, well before
Columbus. And, interestingly, their reasons for doing so were apparently moral, i.e., that it was unfit to
require crippling tribute from foreigners. (Anti-Imperialism in 15th century
Chinese political philosophy!). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_he).
But I have to say, can there be any real doubt that had history not caught up
with China, i.e., had the Europeans not beat them to the punch, they would
have, in time, resumed these voyages of exploration? And the Chinese may have
had more intellectual baggage surrounding the nature of truth, and so on, but
Buddhist philosophy contains the principle of determination of truth through direct
investigation, which could quite easily have led in time to something hardly
distinguishable from the scientific method. I actually think the parallels
between more or less isolated Chinese civilization and the civilization of the
West (including Islam) up to around this time more plausibly leads to the
inference that something like science, and certainly engineering and
technological development, were very much inevitable developments.
Looking at it from the broader context (the assessment of
the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence, if you posit its existence,
would necessarily develop advanced science and technology), what Davies is saying seems to me to be a
variation on his Anti-Copernican theme. Namely, that maybe we here on Earth,
both in terms of the serendipity of the origin of life, the suitability over
deep time of our home planet for life to thrive and for complex, and ultimately
intelligent, life to arise, maybe actually ARE kind of special, after all. That
this series of events is not only contingent but maybe rather spectacularly unlikely,
in the greater universe. Add some apparently rather unlikely contingencies for
the development of advanced science and technology, even given a toolmaking
intelligent species, and you get an argument for extreme rarity of
technological civilizations, which is pretty much exactly where Davies seems to
be going with this.
To my mind, there’s a
lot of sort of anti-teleology going on here. Or what you might think of as negative special pleading. Sure, there
are a lot of things that have to have gone right to get us to the point, say
10,000 years ago, where civilization was about to arise on Earth. There are all
kinds of arguments for why that is terribly unlikely to happen elsewhere in the
universe, to which those who advocate that extraterrestrial intelligence likely
is out there counter, yes, but there are so many, many stars and worlds, surely
some of them must have had their own favorable contingencies (and not
necessarily the same ones), etc. etc.
But looking only at the question of whether science was purely
dependent on the specific contingencies of European civilization ca. 1500, I
have to say I don’t buy it.
As for the second question here, which is whether there is
some kind of continuity with the what I’m referring to the epistemological
cultural attitudes of Chinese civilization vis-à-vis the West, and whether it
continues today in Modern China, well. That’s inscrutable. No, seriously, I
think of the Chinese as being pre-disposed to longer term thinking than
Westerners, by and large (a stereotype, of course, but like many stereotypes,
with a grain of truth). And the same goes for their history. As a nation on the
edge of the World’s great continent, subject to repeated barbarian invasion,
occupation, and eventual assimilation of the barbarians to the (to them)
obviously superior Chinese civilization, Chinese history almost looks like a
series of pendulum swings between stable empire (Heaven’s favor) and the chaos
of various interregnums, (Heaven’s disfavor), when thugs and brigands rule and
Confucian morality is trampled upon. Not hard to see the period from 1930 to
the present (and beyond?) as such a “warring states” period. I don’t doubt that
many in China, even though it’s not yet safe to say it, would argue that Deng
Xiao Ping was a restoration emperor, who brought back a civil order, but I
suspect others would say that the deeply corrupt and nepotistic Communist Party,
the unrest of the people, and the environmental instability and unsustainable
growth of the modern Chinese society all are indicators that the period of
Chaos isn’t over yet. (It is pretty clear that specifically Maoist/Communist rule came to an end sometime before 1990, but the regime didn't change. An entire historical treatise on how Marxism, and even Leninism, were subverted to become mere ideological pretexts for totalitarian regimes, but I've already ventured far enough afield. It is notable, though, that the Chinese regime has pretty undeniably retreated somewhat from the kind of totalitarianism that held sway under the worst days of Mao).
All of which is to say that moral truth may not be a major
issue for Chinese leaders today. They have embraced Western technology, and its
science, and perhaps even more significantly the currently fashionable Western moral relativism. China has produced, for example, some fine physicists and other
scientific leaders, and their society has seemingly embraced amoral market capitalism even more enthusiastically than is the case in the countries of the birth of that concept. But whether, in the long run, a purely Chinese traditional philosophical
system will re-emerge and modify their attitude towards science, it’s hard to
say. I like to think that what will emerge, perhaps during this century, is a
synthesis of western and traditional eastern attitudes towards what truth is,
and how it is arrived at, which may allow for a syncretistic and secularized
acceptance of certain key moral values as objectively necessary and true.
Perhaps then, the favor of Heaven may come to bless our
whole world, and the people and the rulers will live in harmony; the Confucian
ideal. (Don’t hold your breath, but we have to have something to work towards).
This has been a rambling and verbose answer to these
questions, but there you have it.
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