The Naturalist’s Great Magic Wand

“What has got me so hot under the collar this time is a passage I just ran across in the revised version of Stephen Hawking’s  A Brief History of Time , called, amusingly enough,  A Briefer History of Time ,” writes Father Edward Oakes in today’s “On the Square” article, The Explanatory Sprawl of Natural Selection .

The authors are trying to justify their initial assumption that “we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see,” and thus “might progress ever closer toward the laws that govern our universe.” But then a doubt seizes them:

Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions—as the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusion from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all?

Oakes does not think much of “the great magic wand” by which they try to answer their own questions.