Excerpt of The Wonder of the World
Every thousand years or so, there comes a thinker whose life
is as striking as his or her intellectual output is stunning. Viewed from this
perspective, it is remarkable indeed that within a period of 300+ years, the
world was to witness the convergent odysseys of four titans of thought who set
the agenda for the study of reality at every level. This is the period I like
to call the Golden Age of human thought. Between them, Avicenna of Persia (980-1037),
Moses Maimonides of Egypt (1135-1204), Thomas Aquinas of Italy (c.1225-1274)
and Madhvacharya of India (c.1238-1317) created a magnificent monument of thought
that underpins the very possibility of the scientific enterprise. It was the
mother of all Theories of Everything, one that was validated both by its inherent
logic and the success of modern science.
The point of departure for these thinkers, let’s call
them the Four, was simply that things exist. From this bare fact their minds
soared to the greatest insight possible to the human mind – the realization
that things exist only because there exists One who cannot not-exist, who exists
without beginning or end or any conceivable limitation. The very essence of
this Being is to BE – there is no question of was or will be for It always
IS. Thus we speak of “It” as “He who IS”, the “I
AM.” Each one of the Four considered this “equation of God”
to be THE fundamental truth:
Avicenna: In God alone, essence, what he
is, and existence, that he is, coincide. God’s essence is to exist.
“The essence of the Necessary Existent [God] can be no other than existence.”
Maimonides: “His existence is identical with his essence
and his true reality, and his essence is his existence.”
Aquinas: “There is a being, God, whose essence is His
very act of existing.”
Madhvacharya (Commentary on verse 17 of the Isavaya Upanishad
Basya): “’SO AHAM ASMI.’ This is the great ineffable name
of God, ‘I am that I AM’ ‘That Supreme Being (asau) which
indwells in Asu is the I AM.’”
Interestingly enough, this striking idea of God as the Self-Existent
is to be found in the Hebrews and the teachings of Zoroaster. “Then Moses
said to God, .. ‘But if they ask me what his name is, what am I to tell
them?’ And God said to Moses, ‘I Am who I Am. … This is my
name for all time; by this name I shall be invoked for all generations to come.’”
(Exodus 3:13-15). “Thus spake Zarathustra – ‘Tell them, O
Pure Ahuramazda, the name which is the greatest, best, fairest and which is
the most efficacious for prayer. Thus answered Ahuramazda .. ‘Ahmi yad
Ahmi Mazdo: I am that I AM” (Avesta, xvii, 4-6). (159)
The great discovery of divine self-existence, the “God
equation” of Essence=Existence that has inspired hundreds of writings,
is foundational for the Matrix. From it flows a dynamic vision of reality rooted
in a living, ever-active and infinitely creative source and conserver of everything
that was, is and will be. By working out all the implications of this “equation”,
the Four arrived at all their other findings: the world is real and rational,
the human person can think and know, every phenomenon has an explanation given
that infinite Intelligence is the ground of all things.
Why is the Matrix important for science? Well, for modern science
to work, for the very possibility of a scientific method that bears fruit in
theory and experiment, we must make certain basic assumptions about the nature
of the world. For instance, we can’t “do” science in the sense
of seeking out underlying causes and laws if we didn’t believe that the
world operates with causes and laws. Nor could we pursue our inquiries if we
didn’t think our minds are capable of making deductions and reaching valid
conclusions.
But why should we believe any of these assumptions to be true?
And how did we come up with them in the first place? Did scientists discover
them like they discovered Pluto or invent them like they invented jet engines?
The fact of the matter is that science and the scientific method didn’t
drop out of nowhere. There’s a framework of thought behind science that
goes beyond the methods of science. It’s a set of pre-scientific and pre-philosophical
insights accepted by the first scientists.
We call them “meta-scientific” and by that we mean
a principle or reality that is fundamental to science but cannot be tested with
the methods of science. The domain of the meta-scientific includes
- things that have no physical characteristics (e.g., consciousness, abstract
thought),
- claims that can be proved or disproved by reasoning but not by experiment
(e.g., are our minds capable of knowing?) and
- questions about the nature of existence (e.g., what does it mean for
something to “be”).
A classic meta-scientific issue is the belief that the universe
exists. This can only be assumed by science and not proven because every physical
experiment will necessarily assume the world exists. A proof for the reality
of the world (as laid out by Madhvacharya, for instance) is necessarily meta-scientific.
The Matrix does two things. It:
- affirms the meta-scientific principles that were later adopted by science
and then
- builds a case for accepting the truth of these principles.
To put it another way, it supplies science with its foundations
and provides the ground on which these foundations can be laid. Most scientists
are too busy (as they should be) building on the foundations to worry about
the foundations themselves. But if we assume (as science does and must) that
there’s rationality in the world embodied in the laws of nature, then
we should know if and why this assumption is true and what it implies. It’s
here that the Matrix takes us beyond the assumption itself to the ultimate reality
on which it is founded.
The importance of the Matrix becomes apparent when we consider
the idea of scientific laws. The notion of fundamental laws of nature is now
a commonplace in science. But where did the idea of such “laws”
come from? Not from atheists or materialists. Intellectually it originated in
the idea of a divine Mind who instituted immutable laws of nature (as even critics
of the concept of laws of nature admit). Paradoxically, the scientist who today
reflects on these laws talks of the Mind of God. So here are the two sequences:
historically, the idea of God led to the idea of fundamental laws; currently,
the idea of fundamental laws leads to the idea of God.
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