Science, Logos, and Order

The Order of the Whole

The English word “science” comes from the Latin term for knowledge, scientia.[1] I have learned from a long career studying the quantum science of atoms, molecules, and light to appreciate the deep order of our universe that we have come to know through human science. This order is vast, with a profound unity to it all, spanning the entirety of the cosmos from the scale of clusters of galaxies to the mysteries of the atom and everything in between. 

Human beings have a remarkable capacity to articulate the scientific order of the cosmos, often requiring mathematical language for its precise formulation. The sheer fact that human beings do science is all too often taken for granted. Should not this fact provoke us to ask why there are beings like us who can do science in the first place? The knowability of the world through science surely filled Albert Einstein with wonder. He marveled: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”[2] Einstein looked at the cosmos and found mathematical order. He knew the god of the philosophers,[3] reflected in the profound rational order in all things that ancient philosophers from Heraclitus and Parmenides onward have called logos.[4]

The basic notion of order has to do with organization and arrangement. The human mind has both a need and a capacity to abstract things from the whole to consider them under a specific aspect, that is, according to a particular order of things. We thus speak of the political order, the social order, or, among others, the economic, philosophical, religious, or scientific, orders. None of these “orders” are strictly isolated from the others and all are implicated in a larger order of the whole. 

Physics deals with reality according to the quantitatively measurable properties of physical things and their inherent relations. Quantity is certainly not the only thing that is significant about things, but it is also not insignificant. The biblical Book of Wisdom tells us that the Wisdom though which all things were made “orders all things well” and has “arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wis 8:1 and 11:20). Consequently, there is an appropriateness to considering reality under its quantitative aspect as physics does, for this opens up to us special ways to see the remarkable order that is everywhere present in the cosmos. 

The Scientific Order of the Cosmos

A scientific theory gives us a way of seeing things under the aspects of that particular theory. “Theory” comes from Greek theoria, which in turn is derived from the verb “to see.” A modern scientific theorist is one who sees according to the framework of a scientific theory, which orders or organizes reality such that we can see things by it. Scientific theories are derived from and tested against observation and measurement and thereby come to be seen as reliable guides—although incomplete and subject to modification—for understanding the material order of the cosmos. 

The ancients encountered the world through their sense experience, seeing, hearing, touching, and so on. The range of our senses has now been extended by a wide variety of scientific instrumentation. Microscopes open up the microworld to our examination, such that we can use an atomic gas microscope to image a single atom or even up to thousands of individual atoms. Telescopes, either ground-based or on orbiting satellites, now scan the full range of “light” with observatories for gamma ray, x-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microwave, or radio wave detection to enhance observations by ordinary visible light. With such scientific instrumentation, scientists now find far more order than the ancient philosophers could dream of in their imaginations. Who is not in awe of the incredibly beautiful pictures of the cosmos we get from the Hubble or Webb space telescopes? Science has given us not only the instrumental means but also the conceptual frameworks to penetrate far more into the nature of things than had been possible for the ancients. 

The fact that we can do science confronts us with the mystery of the comprehensibility of being. We are the kind of beings who have both the capacity and deep desire to make sense of things. 

The basic framework for understanding the physical order of the cosmos today are Einstein’s “special” and “general” relativity theories and the quantum theory of matter and light. Relativity is concerned with space and time, matter and energy, and is particularly important for the large-scale structure of the universe. It shows that the space-time fabric of the universe is warped by the presence of mass, giving rise to gravity as a geometric property of curved space-time. Quantum theory concerns atoms, molecules, and the even smaller “particles” out of which they are made. It accounts for the ordinary properties of matter. Both relativity and quantum theory are highly successful across a vast range of phenomena. Yet both theories are profoundly counterintuitive and show that extraordinary and paradoxical ideas are needed to account for observations. 

Let me focus on the order present in even the smallest of things. Quantum theory shows how atoms must have discrete states of precise energy organized according to definite “quantum numbers.” This quantum definiteness accounts for the emission of light by an atom according to a very precise set of discrete oscillation frequencies. Each atomic or molecular species in the universe has a unique “quantum fingerprint” in the frequencies of light that it absorbs or emits. Given the knowledge of such “fingerprints” from laboratory measurements, scientists can read the detailed messages encoded in the light detected by the various kinds of observatories mentioned above and learn much about distant stars or planets, such as their chemical composition, their temperature, or velocity with respect to the earth. Consequently, what we now about stars and galaxies is tightly tied to what we know about atoms and light. Quantum theory lets us “see” what light is and what light from distant galaxies is telling us.

Quantum theory is also intimately involved in understanding the biochemical processes that are essential to life as we know it. It is precisely the paradoxical, counterintuitive features of the quantum theory that are needed to understand the nature of chemical bonding and chemical reactions. The theory gives us a detailed account of the molecules of life and their dynamic transformations that underly the activities of the cells in our body, for example, proteins, carbohydrates, enzymes, or genomic molecules like RNA or DNA.

There are roughly ten thousand times more atoms in a typical human body than there are stars in the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe. While we may seem insignificantly small in relation to the largest things in the cosmos, we are vastly larger than the smallest things. To some, these staggering facts seem to say that a human being is insignificant in relation to the whole cosmos and, furthermore, some think that we are but some accidental configuration of atoms. To my mind, this is a highly implausible thought. It is the human being who knows the cosmos and its order. The physical structures of both our bodies and the cosmos at large are ordered to our knowing. Given the remarkable coherence and unity of science, it seems far more plausible that there is a “for the sake of” aspect to both the cosmological and atomic vastness of the universe.

Scientists point out how our universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to our being here as living beings.[5] All the forces and physical constants of nature are “just right” to enable life as we know it. If the universe started in an unimaginably dense and energy-rich singularity such as the “primeval atom” postulated by Big Bang cosmology,[6] the universe expanded too rapidly in its earliest stages to synthesize chemical elements other than the three lightest ones, hydrogen, helium, and a tiny amount of lithium. Life depends on having heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, and so forth. Synthesizing these elements requires that stars of the right mass be formed, pass through their stellar life cycle, at the end of which they collapse and generate the conditions whereby the elements can be synthesized by fine-tuned processes and expelled back into the cosmos through a supernova explosion. Consequently, scientific cosmology shows that our fine-tuned universe needs to be about as large and as old as we find it to be in order for living beings such as us to be here on a planet like earth to be able to discover these processes that underly the material order of the universe. 

A human being is an incredibly well-ordered being with a universe within comprised of a vast number of complex coordinated parts that all work together seamlessly in mostly invisible activity: cells, organs, hands, heart, circulatory and nervous systems, brain and so forth. Yet, the human person who knows the cosmos is more than just a heap of complexity. Genomic science shows that each of us is absolutely unique in the universe, with a unique genome. No individual is strictly determined by his genetic heritage, for the new science of epigenetics[7] shows that the expression of the genome depends on contextual factors, that is, the particular history in relation to the greater whole that an individual person encounters. Science thus shows us that each of us is unique and fittingly has an individual name, although we are all together members of the human species. In a real sense the entire cosmos is ordered to each one of us being here and we are ordered to knowing the scientific aspects of that order. Life is about far more than merely knowing the cosmos, however. Human persons have the capacity to know and love and worship, and human actions have human consequences. Do we comprehend the striking wonder of it all? To my mind, knowing science only deepens the wonder.

Metaphysical Order

The fact that we can do science confronts us with the mystery of the comprehensibility of being. We are the kind of beings who have both the capacity and deep desire to make sense of things. Aristotle said as much in the opening sentence to his Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.”[8] That single sentence already contains a world of metaphysics, tying together human beings, nature, desire, and knowledge. French physicist Roland Omnes asks: “How can science exist? Or: How is science possible?” He responds: “The answer is perhaps as obvious as the question: science is possible because there is order in Reality.”[9] Omnes adds that science itself cannot establish the source of that order, which he calls logos, but rather to do so requires “leaving science and entering metaphysics.” 

We must never lose sight of the fact of the scientist. Of all the animals on earth, only human beings have the complex speech and highly abstract reasoning needed to do physics and metaphysics. To do “metaphysics” inescapably means to go “beyond physics,” for metaphysics is concerned with the knowledge of being as such: what is, and why? No one can escape having at least a tacit metaphysics concerning what is real and what is not. The popular science writer and quantum gravity theorist Carlo Rovelli wrote an article, “Physics Needs Philosophy, Philosophy needs Physics,”[10] where he pointed out, among other things, that one is already doing philosophy if one wishes to deny the usefulness of philosophy, as some scientists do. Michael Hanby makes the case that even in the sciences, if one insists that science does not do metaphysics, one is thereby implicitly importing both a metaphysics and a tacit theology into science.[11] Therefore, it is imperative to seek to do good metaphysics, since all aspects of human life—the social, political, cultural, educational, scientific, economic and cultural orders, and so on—play out under a metaphysical sky that forms a vision of what most people consider to be real and significant. Such a sky sets the horizon for how one thinks and lives in one’s own era. The tacit metaphysical sky that influences so many today is an “immanent frame,” indifferent to any kind of transcendent order over or above the horizontal frame of this secular world.[12] But what if that vision of reality is too limited?

In the opening article of his treatise On Truth, Thomas Aquinas, quoting from Aristotle’s On the Soul, made what I consider one of the most remarkable statements in all of philosophy, saying that the soul “is somehow all things.”[13] Why can Thomas say this? In his metaphysics things have natures, and the human mind, which is a power of the “intellectual soul,” has a capacity, in spite of its finite limitations, to grasp at some level the nature of all things capable of manifesting themselves to it because every existent thing has a form that makes it what it is. The form of a thing is closely tied to what it is for (its end or telos). For something so simple as an atom, its telos is simply to be the atom that it is. This is not tautological. Each kind of atom is well-ordered for bonding with or relating to other atoms in specific ways and for being fruitful in building up a cosmos with galaxies, stars, planets, life, and people who comprehend the nature of atoms. We are intended, then, by our Creator to be embodied as we are and to live in a universe with the fine-tuned nature of the cosmos we have.

This essay began by recalling Einstein’s wonder at the scientific comprehensibility of the universe. Let us end with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s perspective: “The more we know of the universe the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment. … In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful Reason that holds the universe together.”[14] Ratzinger does not stop at wonder, for he knows that the Reason is the Logos of the Gospel of John, the Word Who is God and through Whom all things were made, the Word-made-flesh, Jesus Christ, Who manifests the face of God to us.[15] Ratzinger says: “for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God is the Lord of all things because he is their creator, and only therefore can we pray to him. For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather they are sustaining forces of reality.”[16] The cosmos is not only ordered to our knowing it and its Logos, but it is also ordered to our capacity to love God and love neighbor in the light and grace of the same Logos. In the end, it is a good cosmos that has been given to us, one where truth, goodness, beauty, and love are written into the fiber of its being. It is a universe where it is good to do good science.