On the Trail of the Grail

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.