What is the Nature of Ultimate Knowledge?
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Knowledge, Philosophy, Science, Truth, Religion

Ultimate Knowledge

Let’s finally pose the question: What could be the use or causal role of ultimate knowledge of the nature of reality? In attempting to extend our empirical knowledge that far, we run up against two problems.

First, the model of reality couldn’t proceed by analyzing the subject matter into parts, ignoring the foreign systems that are of lesser interest. Rain can be mentally divided from snow or from wind, but everything we perceive would be infused with whatever is most real. Alternatively, all would be part of the whole, and it makes no sense to speak of isolating the whole from something else. There would be nothing apart from the universe.

Thus, if empirical knowledge consists of a reductive model that divides and conquers, as it were, there can be no empirical knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter and energy or of the universe as a whole.

Second, we’d need direct or indirect (technological) access to these final objects of inquiry. The more tenuous our physical grasp of something, the more speculative or otherwise dubious our understanding of what we’re talking about.

For these familiar reasons, ultimate knowledge has typically been couched in mythological and religious language. Just as the unvisited parts of the world were represented on old maps by such vague warnings as “Here be dragons,” we posited gods or spirits to answer our ultimate questions about how the universe came to be or why we’re here.

Scientific cosmologists use exotic mathematical reasoning and powerful technologies to probe the universe at high energy levels that resemble the universe’s earliest conditions, close to the Big Bang. Again, we can ask about the purpose of that cosmology. After all, a physical theory of everything would compete with a religious myth that likewise packages human knowledge and experience.

How would we show that the naturalistic answer to life, the universe, and everything is superior, say, to a monotheistic one? The latter would be incoherent and archaic, of course, but so would be the former, as I show elsewhere.

Again, empirical, naturalistic, or scientific reasoning consists in analyzing and dividing the territory, but that can’t be done when confronting the ultimate subject matter. Indeed, “ultimate subject matter” is oxymoronic. Whatever the universe as a whole or the ultimate consistent of matter is, that X can’t be more matter in so far as matter is understood as stuff that can be further divided. The whole of the universe can be divided into its many parts, but that whole wouldn’t itself be a part of a greater whole. Likewise, the rock-bottom level of matter couldn’t be scientifically explained by positing yet further conditions, elements, or forces, since there would be no such resources.

The physicist’s theory of everything might tidy up and tie together all our other scientific theories, but the monotheistic myth would prevail in the normative domain, unifying not so much our beliefs but our desires and interests, by providing an ultimate answer that guides our choice of how we should live.

We’d say that God created the universe and expects us to be good. That myth might be illogical and childish, but the cynicism required to condescend to religious people isn’t conducive to a well-functioning society. You’d have to keep that secular enlightenment to a minimum or risk mass depression and anxiety.

Thus, religions have their causal roles too. This isn’t to suggest the myths are empirically true or factual. But neither are scientific models factual in the naïve sense that they agree with or somehow picture or correspond with what they’re about. At this point of the argument, we’ve arrived at a pragmatic account of empirical truth, according to which empirical knowledge is a way of working with mental or linguistic intermediaries to manage our environment.

As to a more precise account of that management, I’ve referred to the evolutionary function, to empowerment, and to certain ethical implications. But perhaps the key factor is the one that distinguishes ultimate rational knowledge from religious myth. The former would have universal technological potency, meaning that scientific knowledge of ultimate reality, of the universe as a whole or of the essential nature of matter would enable us to edit, destroy, or recreate natural reality, at least in principle. By contrast, myths and religious creeds and institutions are useful in stabilizing society, in managing us rather than the world at large.

The picture begins to come together: the act of acquiring empirical knowledge is the original sin, as it were, of alienating ourselves from the world by pretending the world can be divided into isolated pieces which we can study and simplify. We use those models to generate technological applications that modify natural processes. A model of how rain works gives us the power, in theory, to change how the planet rains. A model of what the universe really (fundamentally or ultimately) is would amount to the potential to do to the universe what we’re presently doing to the wilderness on Earth, to humanize or to artificialize all of nature.

If so-called pure science is the sin that results in alienation, applied science is the cure we think can redeem us. Religions tend to be anthropocentric and therefore infantilizing rather than alienating, and they organize society in some uplifting way rather than attempting to test or to apply intuitive personifications as though they were objective or rigorous.