The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when science discovered a system of cause and effect operating in the universe, the atheistic philosophers of the time enthusiastically welcomed it, for it provided a scientific alternative to God. The scientists, however, did not for their part interpret this law of nature in that way. For instance, to Newton, that was simply the way that God worked. He believed that it was through cause and effect that God made manifest His will throughout the universe. But those who were building up their philosophy in the light of scientific discoveries found in it a ‘proof’ for atheism and based upon it a whole system of thought.

On the law of causation, Sir James Jeans has this to say in his book The Mysterious Universe:

Confronted with a natural world, the first question that comes to mind is as to who is its Maker and who is the Sustainer of the Grand Machine. In ancient times man held that there were many invisible beings who were the lords of this Universe. And that a number of mini-gods were running the machine, under one great God. Still, many hold such beliefs. But in the academic (scientific) world this concept has generally been abandoned. The modernists of today subscribe to atheism rather than polytheism. They think that the universe is not an act of an intelligent being but is rather the result of chance occurrence. This principle of causation was found to dominate the whole of animate nature. (p. 13)

The concept which came to be known as “the mechanical interpretation of the universe” was thus developed. It came to be ‘established’ that all events occurred without any external intervention. The entire process was material. Thus, the whole universe was seen as being tied to the chain of cause and effect.

According to an article published in 1874 and recorded in Chambers Encyclopaedia, Vol. II, p. 691, philosophers of physics, chemists and biologists were convinced that a particular cause invariably showed the same result. If this concept was successful in one instance, they felt assured that they would always succeed in producing the same result. In the physical sciences, therefore, no discrepancies were to be found in the law of causation. It was only in metaphysics that the system of cause and effect did not work.

But this happy state of affairs was short-lived; with the beginning of the twentieth century, many facts came to light in the world of science, which were not consistent with the mechanical interpretation. For instance, numerous experiments which were carried out to determine the cause of radioactivity (a spontaneous disintegration of certain unstable types of atomic nuclei—as happens with radium) met with no success. Even today, we do not know what causes the breaking away of a particular electron in a piece of radium from its atomic system. The same mystery surrounds the magnet’s power to attract iron. Many theories have been put forward to explain this phenomenon. Sir James Jeans having attempted to analyse this fact, concludes that we do not know why a magnet attracts iron. “Perhaps it has been ordered to do so by its Creator.”

This resistance to analysis is not confined just to radium and the magnet. In-depth studies have shown that in the past, the supposed causes of events were actually superficial aspects of fundamental events. In actual fact, we do not know why any event takes place, we do not even know why we sleep at night.

After prolonged deliberations, it has been established in the world of science that the law of causation is not the absolute reality it was understood to be in the 19th century. (Over the last fifty years a number of authoritative books have been published which support this theory). The traveller in science has returned to his point of departure: the system of this world is not functioning because of the chance existence of the law of cause and effect, but because there is a conscious mind operating it at will. The reasoning of science has come full circle, leaving the field to religion to offer an account of reality.

Let us examine the theory that twenty billion years ago, the universe with all its suns, stars and planets as we know them did not exist, and that space was scattered over with matter, not in solid form, but in the form of basic particles—electrons and protons. At that time matter was static and in perfect equilibrium. From the mathematical viewpoint, this balance was such that any disturbance whatsoever, no matter how slight, was bound to affect it in its entirety and was also bound to go on increasing. If we concede the initial disturbance, we can fall in with the mathematicians’ view that all other subsequent events are explainable by mathematics. The theorists liken the disturbance in the ‘cloud’ of matter to the churning up of a tub of water by a human hand. But, in the peace and quiet of the universe, who or what brought about this disturbance? Despite the fact that nothing whatever is known about this, the assumption has gained ground that such an event did take place, that the disturbance went on and on increasing, that, as a result, matter began to collect at isolated points and that it is these collections of matter which are now known severally as stars, planets and meteors.

This is one explanation of the universe given by science. But what a poor, flimsy explanation it is! Scientists themselves do not feel that it carries any great conviction. Though claiming to have discovered the first cause of the universe, to which it gives the name of chance, it cannot say who or what caused the first motion in the universe. And that is its greatest weakness. The question is, when there was supposed to be only static matter in the universe, and presumably nothing else existed, how did this strange kind of chance come into existence, which set the whole universe in motion? When the causes of this event were neither within nor without the imagined matter, how did this event come to occur? This is a very strange and contradictory contention, for it postulates one event leading on to another, and so on, ad infinitum, but it makes no mention of the primary cause which is supposed to have set off the whole chain reaction. It begins, ostensibly, with an event, which has no cause. On this baseless supposition stands the whole edifice of the chance origin of the universe.

Suppose we accept that the universe came into existence in a purely fortuitous way. Were events then bound to take the exact course that they did? Was no other course open to them? Is it not conceivable that the stars could have collided with one another and been destroyed in the process? Was the original motion of necessity an evolutionary process, rather than just a simple movement? And was it essential that with this astonishing continuity the present universe should have been brought into existence? What was the logic, after all, which made the stars, after they were formed, move through the vastness of space with such perfect precision and regularity? And what was the logic, which brought about the formation of the solar system in a far corner of the universe? What was the logic, which was responsible for those extraordinary changes in our earth, which enabled life to begin and then survive? And it should be borne in mind that these transformations that occurred on earth have not been found replicated in any other place in the vast, countless worlds in the universe. Then what was that unique logic which caused life to grow from lifeless matter? Is there, in fact, any reasonable explanation of how life came into existence on earth and how, extraordinarily, the tendency developed to evolve continuously?

Then again, what was the logic, which created all those astounding things in this speck of the universe, which were necessary to life and civilization? And what is the logic, which maintains the continuum of these conditions? Is just the coming about of one chance event sufficient reason for all these events to go on flawlessly, unceasingly, for millions and millions of years, without the slightest aberration? Are there any real grounds for accepting that an allegedly chance or accidental event can spontaneously develop the attribute of continuous evolution?

In spite of these suppositions resting on such shaky premises, they have been almost universally accepted as an ‘answer’ to the question of the origin of the universe. This is a question whose answer leads to another, more important question: “Who makes this great machine move with such perfect regularity?” The creator—chance—cannot be held to be the Lord of the Universe. Such an explanation would, by its very nature, require two ‘gods’. The first movement might conceivably be attributed to chance, but not so the subsequent continuous motion. We should have to find another ‘god’ to fit that explanation.

The establishment of the principle of causation appeared to offer a solution. A cause was found invariably to produce the same effect. What happened at any instant did not depend on the volitions of extraneous beings but followed inevitably by inexorable laws from the state of things, at the preceding event. And this state of things had in turn been inevitably determined by an earlier state, and so on indefinitely, so that the whole course of events had been unalterably determined by the state in which the world found itself at the first instant of its history; once this had been fixed, nature could move only along one road to a predestined end. In brief, the act of creation had created not only the universe but its whole future history. Thus, the law of causation took charge of all such events as had previously been assigned to the actions of supernatural beings.

The final establishment of this law as the primary guiding principle in nature was the triumph of the seventeenth century. Out of this resulted a movement to interpret the whole material universe as a machine, a movement which steadily gained force until its culmination in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was then that Helm Holtz declared that ‘the final aim of all natural science is to resolve itself into mechanics,’ and Lord Kelvin confessed that he could understand nothing of which he could not make a mechanical model. It was the age of the engineer-scientist, whose primary ambition was to make mechanical models of the whole of nature.

Although scientists had not yet succeeded in explaining all of the manifestations of this universe according to this principle, this want of success failed to shake the belief that the universe must in the last resort admit of a purely mechanical interpretation. It was felt that only greater efforts were needed, and the whole of inanimate nature would at last stand revealed as a perfectly acting machine.

All this had an obvious bearing on the interpretation of human life. Each extension of the law of causation, and each success of the mechanical interpretation of nature, made the belief in free-will more difficult. For if all nature obeyed the law of causation, why should life be exempt? Out of such considerations arose the mechanistic philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Science appeared to favour a mechanistic view which saw the whole material world as a vast machine. Then came the discovery that living cells were formed of precisely the same chemical atoms as non-living matter, and so were presumably governed by the same natural laws. This led to the question of why the particular atoms of which our bodies and brains were formed should be exempt from the laws of causation. It began to be fiercely maintained, that life itself must, in the last resort, prove to be purely mechanical in its nature. The mind of a Newton, a Bach or a Michelangelo, it was said, differed only in complexity from a printing press; their whole function was to respond exactly to the stimuli they received from without.

But science today does not adhere to this rigid and unbalanced principle of causation. The theory of relativity calls the principle of causation an illusion. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was first revealed to science that many of the phenomena of the universe, radiation and gravitation in particular, defied all attempts at a purely mechanical explanation. While philosophers were still debating whether a machine could be constructed to reproduce the thoughts of Newton, the emotions of Bach or the inspiration of Michelangelo, the average man of science was rapidly becoming convinced that no machine could be constructed to reproduce the light of a candle or the fall of an apple. The old science had confidently proclaimed that nature could follow only one road, the road which was mapped out from the beginning of time to its end by the continuous chain of cause and effect.

But finally, science had to admit that the past of the universe could no longer be so adamantly claimed as the cause of the future. In the light of modern knowledge, a great majority of scientists are in agreement that the river of knowledge is leading them to a non-mechanical reality.

Regarding the origin of the universe and its movement, both the theories which have been advanced in the course of scientific progress still fail to carry conviction. Modern research does not strengthen their basis, but rather undermines them. Thus, science itself is contradicting its own theories. Man has now returned to the point of departure, which he had at first abandoned in order to launch himself into deep, uncharted waters.