QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

space. In the new way of thinking, this antique mechanistic way of thinking has also been
integrated with the Pythagorean tradition. Modern science is built on the Platonic belief of a
rational system which can be revealed by intelligence. Development of the new way of thinking
left however very little room for Plato’s mystical metaphysics. Even though a mathematical law
may perhaps be timeless, its usefulness is not taken as addressing deeper meaning, no more than
as nature’s mechanical tendency to produce regular forms. In physics, the mechanisticdeterministic
way of thinking and world-view ruled from Newton’s death until the end of the
1800s. 252
3.1. Fundamental ontological and epistemological presuppositions
The frequent comparison of the material world to an ingeniously contrived clockwork
mechanism which was embraced by several thinkers in natural philosophy in the 1600s 253 made
it easy for a layman to understand the basic principles of the mechanical material world. For
several centuries, the common conception of reality was strictly deterministic. The attempt was
made to reduce all the intricate phenomena of nature to a few basic phenomena which could be
carefully measured, analysed and predicted. Even though the universe was constantly in motion,
it was believed that no qualitative development or change took place in its material basis. Atoms,
the fundamental components of matter, were always considered to exist at some point in space
and the causes of every event were to be found in some previous event. Explaining a particular
phenomenon meant the precise identification of an effective cause. In the last resort, it was
believed that all the phenomena observed in nature could be reduced to the motion of atomic
particles which moved from place to place in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion.
Essential concepts in the scientific thinking of the modern age were the terms mechanism,
determinism and atomism, which were seamlessly combined in classical physics and which
define the material foundation for the widely adopted world-view. The precise content and
significance of these concepts will be examined more closely in this chapter. It is important to
examine the terms as precisely as possible to understand the change that took place both in
scientific development and in the ideal of mechanical explanation at the beginning of the modern
era, as well as to understand the subsequent changes that took place in the by then familiar
252
March 1957, 30-32. Tarnas 1998, 292-3.
253
Dijksterhuis 1986, 442, 495. In particular, the comparision to the large and extremely-complicated clock in
Strasbourg Cathedral recurs frequently.
95