Chapter One

Who's Right About Reality: Traditionalists, Modernists, or the Postmoderns?

Wherever people live, whenever they live, they find themselves faced with three inescapable problems: how to win food and shelter from their natural environment (the problem nature poses), how to get along with one another (the social problem), and how to relate themselves to the total scheme of things (the religious problem). If this third issue seems less important than the other two, we should remind ourselves that religious artifacts are the oldest that archeologists have discovered.

The three problems are obvious, but they become interesting when we align them with the three major periods in human history: the traditional period (which extended from human beginnings up to the rise of modern science), the modern period (which took over from there and continued through the first half of the twentieth century), and postmodernism (which Nietzsche anticipated, but which waited for the second half of the twentieth century to take hold).

Each of these periods poured more of its energies into, and did better by, one of life's inescapable problems than did the other two. Specifically, modernity gave us our view of nature -- it continues to be refined, but because modernity laid the foundations for the scientific understanding of it, it deserves credit for the discovery.

Postmodernism is tackling social injustices more resolutely than people previously did. This leaves worldviews -- metaphysics as distinct from cosmology, which restricts itself to the empirical universe -- for our ancestors, whose accomplishments on that front have not beenimproved upon.

The just-entered distinction between cosmology and metaphysics is important for this book, so I shall expand it slightly. Cosmology is the study of 'the physical universe -- or the world of nature as science conceives of it -- and is the domain of science. Metaphysics, on the other hand, deals with all there is. (The terms worldview and Big Picture are used interchangeably with metaphysics in this book.) In the worldview that holds that nature is all there is, metaphysics coincides with cosmology. That metaphysics is named naturalism.

Such is the historical framework in which this book is set, and the object of this chapter is to spell out that framework. Because I want to proceed topically -- from nature, through society, to the Big Picture, tying each topic to the period that did best by it -- this introduction shuffles the historical sequence of the periods. I take up modernity first, then postmodernity, leaving the traditional period for last.

Modernity's Cosmological Achievement

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe stumbled on a new way of knowing that we refer to as the scientific method. It centers in the controlled experiment and has given us modern science. Generic science (which consists of careful attention to nature and its regularities) is as old as the hills -- at least as old as art and religion. What the controlled experiment adds to generic science is proof True hypotheses can be separated from false ones, and brick by brick an edifice has been erected from those proven truths. We commonly call that edifice the scientific worldview, but scientific cosmology is more precise because of the ambiguity of the word world. The scientific edifice is a worldview only for those who assume that science can in principle take in all that exists.

The scientific cosmology is so much a part of the air we breathe that it is hardly necessary to describe it, but I will give it a paragraph to provide a reference point for what we are talking about. Some fifteen billion years ago an incredibly compact pellet of matter exploded to launch its components on a voyage that still continues. Differentiation set in as hydrogen proliferated into the periodic table. Atoms gathered into gaseous clouds. Stars condensed from whirling filaments of flame, and planets spun off from those to become molten drops that pulsated and grew rock-encrusted. Narrowing our gaze to the planet that was to become our home, we watch it grow, ocean-filmed and swathed in atmosphere. Some three and a half billion years ago shallow waters began to ferment with life, which could maintain its inner milieu through homeostasis and could reproduce itself Life spread from oceans across continents, and intelligence appeared. Several million years ago our ancestors arrived. It is difficult to say exactly when, for every few years paleontologists announce discoveries that "Set the human race back another million years or so," as press reports like to break the news.

Taught from primary schools onward, this story is so familiar that further details would only clutter things.

Tradition's Cosmological Shortcomings

That this scientific cosmology retires traditional ones with their six days of creation and the like goes without saying. )Who can possibly question that when the scientific cosmology has landed people on the moon? Our ancestors were impressive astronomers, and we can honor them unreservedly for how much they learned about nature with only their unaided senses to work with. And there is another point. There is a naturalism in Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and tribal outlooks that in its own way rivals science's calculative cosmology, but that is the naturalism of the artist, the poet, and the nature lover-of Li Po, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, not that of Galileo and Bacon. For present purposes, aesthetics is irrelevant. Modern cosmology derives from laboratory experiments, not landscape paintings.

Postmoderism's Cosmological Shortcomings

With traditional cosmology out of the running, the question turns to postmodernism. Because science is cumulative, it follows UN a matter of course that the cosmology we have in the twenty-first century is an improvement over what we had in the middle of the twentieth, which on my timeline is when modernity phased into postmodernity. But the refinements that postmodern scientists have achieved have not affected life to anything like the degree that postmodern social thrusts have, so the social Oscar is the one postmodernists are most entitled to.