Thoughts on "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll.

 "The Big Picture" was written in 2016 by Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech. As book cover suggests, Carroll is after big prey in this book: Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself. A blurb on the inside cover endorses the book this way:

With profound intelligence and lucid, unpretentious language, Sean Carroll beautifully articulates the worldview suggested by contemporary naturalists. Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight.

I do appreciate the straightforward manner in which Carroll writes, his willingness to take on big game, and his refusal to pull punches when he gets to the big questions. Even if I don't agree with much of Carroll's worldview, he has interesting and novel takes on many questions and some fascinating explications of scientific points.

I read the book not long after it was published and picked it up recently, noticing all the highlighting and notes I made throughout it. In this post I'd like to explore some of the notes I made in the text.

Chapter 15 is entitled "Accepting Uncertainty" and is specifically directed against religious dogmas. Carroll quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church several times, one of these being "Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie." Carroll's response to this is:

It is this kind of stance - that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we should submit - that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its prepositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better.

I'm not sure where his quote from the Catechism came from. I couldn't find it by searching on the Catechism, and the link he provides in the references no longer works, which is not surprising given it is nine years old.

In any case, the point of the Catechism is not to propose a successful strategy for understanding the world. It is to explicate for Catholics, who have already embraced the faith through whatever strategy they had for understanding the world, what it means to be and live life as a Catholic. It is more a map than a strategy. It is no criticism of a map to point out that the map dogmatically states where certain things are and the way to get from one place to another, when a better strategy to understand the world would be to express uncertainty where anything is and be constantly testing the map. The map user isn't interested in testing the map and making it better, he wants to get from here to there. Maps are for people who have made certain decisions and conclusions about where they want to go, an indication of how to get there. The Catechism is a map for those seeking salvation who have accepted the guidance of the Church on how to obtain eternal salvation. 

But I am more interested in the logic of Carroll's response, which is self-refuting in a way typical of naturalists. Carroll wants us to accept that there is no such thing as certain knowledge - "There are no such kinds of knowledge." That statement is, however, itself a knowledge claim and so subject to Carroll's insistence that no knowledge can be certain. We can't be certain, therefore, that there is no such thing as certain knowledge, which means there actually might be certain knowledge.

The best we can do is assert that we are currently unaware of knowledge that is certain and remain open to the possibility that it might be available. And, in fact, we do have certain knowledge in the form of various metaphysical first principles that are undeniable. For instance  the principle that "nothing can be and not be at the same time and in the same way." Science itself depends on these metaphysical foundations, which if not certain make science not just uncertain but impossible. Something can't be both hot and cold at the same time in the same way. If I measure the temperature as 60 degrees, it means that it is 60 degrees but also that it is not 30 degrees or any other temperature. If this weren't true science couldn't even get started.

This may sound like a trivial point, but that is only because fundamental metaphysical principles are so obviously true and certain that it can seem unnecessary to point them out. And it normally is unnecessary, until the time arrives when it is claimed they are uncertain or they are even denied. Naturalists often make this sort of claim indirectly with statements like "there is no such thing as certain knowledge." They are likely thinking in terms of empirical knowledge of the scientific type, in which case the assertion may be accurate. But they haven't considered the metaphysical background that makes science possible in the first place.