The Hubris of Proposing a Theory of Everything
And how the talk of “gods” and “objects” humanizes the vast, alien wilderness
We can explain how relatively mundane things work in the world, like tools, rocks, the seasons, or even molecules, life, and the stars. But does that mean we should expect much from our explanations of the whole universe?
Isn’t it even a category mistake to speak of a theory of everything, a final, absolutely comprehensive explanation of fundamental reality, of what everything ultimately is? Could the universe or what Martin Heidegger called “Being” itself even be considered an individual thing to be explained like one of the many particular beings?
If we think of explanation pragmatically as a strategy we employ to dominate the nonhuman environment, the notion of a theory of everything becomes laughably vain or even Luciferian, sinister, and deranged. What kind of evil or insanity would it take for the angel Satan to revolt against God, as the myth would have it, when Satan knows he can’t win, when God’s supremacy must be obvious to him?
When we presumed the universe was no bigger than our solar system, the talk of ultimate answers to the question of why there’s something rather than nothing might have seemed comparable to the mundane reasons for why the seasons change or why your stomach hurts when you’re hungry. You just posit a cause to account for the apparent effect.
But after scientists discovered that the universe is virtually infinite, in that the cosmos vastly transcends human intuition and experience, with trillions of stars and extraterrestrial worlds out there, the comparison between what we might call sublime and profane questions is weakened to the point of being impudent.
We explain things in our daily experience as we use them to our advantage, and we stretch our minds to reckon with faraway places and events. Science pushes the sphere of human knowledge furthest with experiments and mathematical models.
And there’s no harm in doing so — unless that mental stretching becomes hubristic and we lose our existential perspective.
Again, think of an explanation as a mental tool, a way of grasping something by understanding or making sense of it. We entangle our mind with something we perceive, casting our neural net over it, familiarizing ourselves with the environment with intuitions, analogies, logic, and trial-and-error. In processing what’s in front of us, we humanize it to some extent, so we always encounter, in part, a reflection of ourselves.
For instance, we attempt to bridge the gulf between our local circumstances and the unimaginable ferocity of the Big Bang. But the bridge is rickety, requiring an existential leap of faith or impudence if we’re presuming that we’ve reached the other side.
To be sure, science comes closer to confronting reality than does religion, insofar as scientists specialize in dehumanizing things and subduing our penchant for projecting our biases onto the vastness of what could only be a bizarre, alien, impersonal wilderness. By contrast, theistic religions run with our most foundational, naïve cognitive tools, construing the objective bedrock as a friendly, upstanding fellow with whom we can socialize.
But even scientists indulge in prejudices with their objectifications. Implicitly, we think of “objects” in nature as slaves, as raw materials that we duly domesticate in the act of understanding them, which is a precondition of adding them to the galaxy of artifacts in our civilization. We neutralize the wilderness by analyzing, quantifying, mapping, and modelling it. But that’s far from a neutral representation of nature. Indeed, as Immanuel Kant said, the very notion of such a representation may be oxymoronic.
But the further out we push our cognitive humanizations — our analogies with terrestrial experience, and our trust in logical inferences and the testing of hypotheses — the humbler we should be about the results.
Coming to grips with the vastness of the universe may have killed not only the archaic gods of naïve theists, but also the prospect of an adequate answer to our deepest questions.