Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

the complementarity of science and religion 147

tarity” to resolve the paradox. The classical theory of particles collapsed. They
can only with reservations be called “substantives.” Bohm wrote the following
to elucidate the Copenhagen position:^16

the properties of matter are incompletely defined and opposing po-

tentialities that can be fully realized only in interactions with other

systems....Thus, at the quantum level of accuracy, an object does

not have any “intrinsic” properties (for instance, wave or particle)

belonging to itself alone; instead it shares its properties mutually

and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts.

He had already written:^17

The existence of reciprocal relationships of things implies that each

“thing” existing in nature makes some contribution to what the uni-

verse as a whole is, a contribution that cannot be reduced com-

pletely, perfectly and unconditionally, to the effects of any specific set

or sets of other things with which it is in reciprocal interconnection.

And, vice versa, this also means evidently that no given thing can

have a complete autonomy in its mode of being, since its basic char-

acteristics must depend on its relationship with other things. The

notion of a thing is thus seen to be an abstraction, in which it is

conceptually separated from its infinite background and substruc-

ture.

In this same spirit, the physicist Richard Schlegel argued that^18

Physics is the most abstract of the physical sciences, since it does

not take any particular set of entities as its subject matter....Physi-

cists attempt to describe and explain the properties of space, time,

matter and energy everywhere in the universe. Their science is ex-

pected to be valid for discussion of all material things: of stars, of

man-made machines, or of living cells, without, however, taking as

its domain the particular properties of any of those entities.

Modern physicists are still working within this paradigm of “relationality,”
according to which the physical realities are not things with their properties,
but the properties themselves. In a recentNew York Timesreview by Michael
Riordan of a new book by Lee Smolin, entitledThree Roads to Quantum Gravity,
the reviewer notes the following viewpoint of Smolin:^19

This is a deeply philosophical work that makes us rethink the episte-

mological roots of the mental pictures we make about nature. Smo-

lin maintains that we must adopt a “relational” viewpoint in which

space and time are nothing but networks of relationships.