148 cosmos
Smolin’s bold stand on relationality is made throughout his book. The
essence of his claim appears early on:^20
The lesson that the world is at root a network of evolving relation-
ships tells us that this is true to a lesser or greater extent of all
things. There is no fixed, eternal frame to the universe to define
what may or may not exist. There is nothing beyond the world ex-
cept what we see, no background to it except its particular history.
Smolin, who teaches at Penn State and on occasion conducted his research
with Ted Jacobson at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara,
even identifies himself as one of the founders of “relational quantum theory.”^21
On the same page he asserts: “The universe of events is a relational universe.
That is, all its properties are described in terms of relationships between the
events.” His work on loop quantum gravity has led him to maintain, over
against string theory, that on the Planck scale the theory must be background
independent. This means that space to him is not continuous, but discrete;
this further reinforces the idea that fundamental entities are not located in
space; rather, space—and time—are aspects of relations. It follows, further,
that the fundamental entities, to use his term, are processes “by which infor-
mation is conveyed from one part of the world to another.”^22 Smolin then
surmises that finally, perhaps, “the history of the universe is nothing but the
flow of information.”^23 I have presented these ideas, not to suggest that his
theories are to be preferred to others, but that relational models are still being
championed on the frontiers of physics.
To return to our thesis of complementarity: for some it is sufficient for the
thesis of complementarity to promote a spirit of cooperation among scientists
and theologians, as desirable as that may be. For others, there must be some
basis for this thesis in the nature of the two disciplines. Since they are histor-
ically different modes, some other discipline must mediate between these two
modes. Traditionally, metaphysics has played this role, because it is the most
generalized form of thinking.
One of the lessons we learn from modern metaphysics is that, in contrast
to the East, Western thought has become substantialistic and egoistic. Beings
are considered substances and their relations are accidents, and reality belongs
to substances. This Western bias can be traced to the influence of Aristotle
who based his philosophy on the subject-object structure of the Greek lan-
guage. Aristotelian substantialism did much to shape science and religion in
the West. In the modern world Descartes institutionalized substantialism and
through his Methodic Doubt developed the notion of the Modern Subject,
ensuring the egoistic tendency of Western philosophy, theology, and physics.
We have seen how modern physics moved toward a relational paradigm;
now we must turn to the philosophical situation in the twentieth century, and
especially to the metaphysical thesis of universal internality, to determine the