How To Be An Agnostic
formed the world as we experience it. But his atomic theory
was also limited as an explanation: at the atomic level it can
account for the material world around us, but it cannot account
for itself, because that, in turn, would require an explanation
involving particles smaller than atoms to account for atoms.
This search for ever smaller, more elusive forces and particles is
one that quantum theory is still caught up in to this day. The
problem is that particle physics – ancient or modern – begs the
question of what accounts for its fundamentals.
A different persistent problem was anticipated by Parmenides.
What survives of his work includes two explanations of the
world, called the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming – titles
that on the face of it chime remarkably with the thought of
Kant. The Way of Seeming includes his astronomical achieve-
ments and simultaneously throws them into question: how do
we know, he implies, that the way we divide the world up, as
any reductionist science must do, actually refl ects the world
as it is? Are the divisions purely arbitrary or would a true map
of reality show similar divisions? Put in the modern idiom, is
the universe truly mathematical or is mathematics just very
successful at describing certain aspects of it? In other words,
Parmenides understood that science needs theories in order to
interpret observations, but whether these theories correspond
with reality is not something that science can itself answer.
Another speculation with a contemporary ring can be heard
in the thoughts of Empedocles. He felt that the integrating
and disintegrating cycles of the elements implied the need for
a moral interpretation alongside the physical. After all, is it
not as if the universe is moving from harmony to discord, and
then back again, and perhaps according to some fundamental
forces – he called them Strife and Friendship – he asked?
A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time it grew to be one alone
out of many, at another again it grew apart to be many out
of one. Double is the birth of mortal things and double
their failing; for one is brought to birth and destroyed by