The title of this blog is Ontological Holism - Reclaiming Atheism, so I thought I'd write about why I've included the term ontological. I've seen the argument used that science is simply about facts and evidence and that is, quite simply, wrong. Science is about using facts and evidence to come to an understanding of the nature of things. Logic and reason are used to make sense of the evidence - or to put it another way, a narrative about what the evidence might tell us is formed and that, the narrative structure within which evidence is viewed, is ontology.
Ontology, then, is very important. A very good example of how important is Einstein's insight into the nature of space and time, as espoused in his theories of Special and General Relativity. He wasn't working with any different data or 'facts' than other scientists, he didn't discover some new evidence, he considered the implications of questioning the narrative framework (the ontology) within which that evidence was viewed. Sometimes these narratives are so ingrained within our culture that it takes some imagination to question them. Sometimes the over-arching cultural narrative is so ingrained that a language capable of discussing another perspective is diffcult to tie down.
Einstein, essentially, wondered if the a-priori assumption that time was constant was valid. From his musings he elucidated many startling insights into our physical world. That there is a 'speed limit' of c, the speed of light, that cannot be breached. That energy and mass are equivalent (E=mc2), that the passage of time is relative, that space-time is warped by mass (and energy), and that gravity is a result of that warping. These ideas are profound in their importance to our understanding of the physical universe we inhabit.
At the same time as Einstein was producing his ontological masterpieces new discoveries were being made at the sub-atomic level. Discoveries that had those making them scratching their heads as they seemed to make no sense. Tiny particles called electrons seemed to be jumping from one energy level to another - as if their energy were stored in fundamental 'bits' (or quanta, as they came to be called). Entities behaved as particles in some contexts and as waves in others - even when individual specimens were measured. As we've gone on we've discovered that particles can be 'entangled', that a measurement on one can 'instantaneously' affect the other and even that one can affect a measurement after it has been made.
What can we make of these findings? What do they mean for our understanding of the universe? Well, most of these aspects are, by and large, ignored within a framework of 'materialism', and any mention of the possible implications of these aspects of physical evidence are dismissed as 'woo'. In fact, what we have with 'materialism' (or hard-materialism) is an ontology that just, basically, ignores these aspects as irrelevant. This seems, to me, to be bad science. In fact the ontology that has gained a fervent grip upon science is totally at odds with the evidence. The nature of time is simply not addressed, nor are the implications of quantum mechanics (and even Einstein's therories of Relativity) upon the fundamental question of what matter and spatial dimension really are.
When I hear seemingly intelligent physicists extol the explanatory nature of our concept of entropy with regard to time I wonder how much thought they've put into what they've said, and how deeply they have thought on the matter. When they follow that up, or precede it, with something along the lines of 'we know that the universe is 13.7 billion years old' then I see the power of narrative upon our thinking.
