100 years that changed science [OPINION]

“Modern” science has forever changed the condition and destiny of human beings, offering us the benefits of electricity, rapid transport, medicines that have almost tripled the life expectancy of human beings. But at the fundamental level, it is based on determinist, mechanistic and reductionist conceptions which have generated what philosophers like Max Weber or Marcel Gauchet have been able to call the " disenchantment with the world ". It is these conceptions which, a century earlier, may have caused the Marquis Simon de Laplace to say " Sire, I didn't need this assumption » when Napoleon asked him where God was in his work « The system of the world », or to the neurologist Jean-Pierre Changeux that « man has nothing to do with the mind, he just has to be a neural man ».

Science, reason and rationality seemed to make religions obsolete and all conceptions based on the existence of non-material entities located or acting from another level of reality, giving a vision of the world closed on itself, where no other intervention coming from another level of reality was seriously possible.

But a real revolution has been going on for more than a century, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, passing through the sciences of life and consciousness, and even through fields as abstruse as mathematical logic. If the scientific method and the way of doing science have not changed, its fundamental concepts have been profoundly upset.

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has just been attributed to an experience demonstrating that our world cannot be limited to what is included in time, space, energy and matter (cf. LSDJ 1710), thus blowing up in a completely scientific and rational way the " fenced of the material world that classical science wanted to impose. Quantum physics has destroyed the main concepts of this classical science that we have just mentioned since it gives us an indeterminist, non-reductionist and non-mechanistic vision of the world.

In the infinitely large too, revolutions have followed one another, first showing that time and space were relative and not absolute, which implied that they could have started one day, as the Big Bang theory will later show. The Universe in which we live has therefore not always existed, which raises the question of its origin.

Worse still (for materialists), the discovery of an extremely precise adjustmentof the characteristics of the Universe openly poses the question of the existence of a Creator at the very heart of contemporary science and has been able to push great scientists to debate a question which seemed to be forever rejected outside the realm of science. science.

Many other revolutions should be mentioned here, for example Gödel's Theorem which demonstrated that any coherent human logical system (which is the least of things for a logical system) was radically incomplete.

In short, it is a much more humble science, a science aware of its limits and open to other levels of reality that is on the horizon. A science very different from the triumphant scientism which thought it could explain everything.

This evolution has been very well described under the term "Great Turnaround". (see illustration above) by the best-seller by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies: “ God, Science, Evidence » which was released on October 13, 2021, a year ago to the day, and has just reached a circulation of over 200 copies.

Current events mean that even today, a version " Collector » comes out in bookstores. It is a version that includes a very important addition: the support of about fifteen personalities coming from the scientific, philosophical and religious worlds. This demonstrates that this work, which, of course, cannot achieve unanimity in a civilization still globally dominated by materialist or separationist currents of thought (according to the latter, science and religion are completely separate domains, and a discourse scientist cannot therefore evoke the question of God) is a credible work which has many supports.

Testimonials from great scientists like John Lennox (mathematician), Denis Alexander (biologist) or Andrew Briggs (physicist), show that this theme, often little known in France, is more than " respectable » in the major Anglo-Saxon universities where science centers et Religions (and not Sciences of Religions) do exist in Oxford as in Cambridge.

This book is, in short, the symbol of a new era where reason and transcendence can now walk side by side, and enrich each other instead of opposing each other.

John Staune

source: TEDX Talks Conference

This article is published from Selection of the day.