The Pythagorean Argument of the Intelligent Design of the Universe and Its Critique. Part IV: Metaphysics of Pioneers of Physics

In this, the penultimate article of our Pythagorean cycle, we turn to the metaphysical or natural-philosophical heritage of those great men who are referred to as founders or pioneers of physics. The choice of specific figures in this kind of research is surely arguable to some extent. Our choice is limited by the length of the paper, the availability of relevant texts, and yes, a certain subjectivity of our evaluations. After a brief Introduction, we give an overview of the tension between the paradigm of physical reductionism and the intuition of free will. We show how the author of the first universal physical theory, Isaac Newton, resolved this contradiction, and how he held the belief in the authenticity of free will while sacrificing not only mechanistic reductionism but also belief in the omniscience of God. These philosophical problems are then discussed in the light of the modifications to physical conceptions of the universe that twentieth-century physics has made. Turning to James Clerk Maxwell, the author of the equations of electrodynamics, we note his philosophical primacy in pointing out the important feature of physical laws that ensures their discoverability: the correlation of their mathematical complexity with the difficulty of observing the corresponding layer of reality. Speaking of Albert Einstein’s philosophical views, we note in them a combination of a deep understanding of the mystical basis of physics with the naivety of moral philosophy. Like Einstein, Max Planck was a deistic idealist who did not believe in a “personal God,” but, aware of the enormous moral significance of Christianity, only shortly before his death he publicly declared this unbelief as a long-held conviction. Reflections on Niels Bohr lead us to conclude that he was an apophatic mystic, combining the complementary qualities of a passionate desire for theoretical clarity and an anticipation of its impossibility. Erwin Schrödinger, to whose views we next draw attention, expressed them in terms of Vedanta idealism. It seems to us that the same views can be expressed within a European context, albeit unorthodox. Turning to Werner Heisenberg, who in his youth read Plato in the original, we show not only his Platonism, but also his understanding that the connection with God is the moral foundation, the loss of which is ruinous. The drama of being, according to the author of the uncertainty relation, has to do with the fact that the divine will is essentially embodied through human freedom, through the indeterminacy of conscious choice. In the section on Wolfgang Pauli, we note his amazement at the profound harmony of the mental and the material spheres, which reveals itself with particular power in the mathematical discoverability of the material world. Hence began his search for a possible reason for this agreement, the search accompanied by many years of conversations with Carl Gustav Jung. The concluding section of the article is devoted to Paul Dirac, who, unique among the great physicists, went from Marxist atheism to preaching about Godmathematics, and then to regular prayers in church.