Thus, from scienceís earliest moments in the cradle of humanity it has served the twin masters of commerce and superstition, although the citizens of Babylon probably didnít think of it this way. The first person to think specifically about the processes and applications of science was a Greek living 300 years later. His name was Aristotle, and the discipline he created we now call the philosophy of science.

According to Aristotle, every particular thing in our world is a union of matter and form. He proposed the theory of induction as an explanation of how generalizations about forms are drawn from sensory experience, and then used to categorize things. This next step, he said, was deduction, by which the generalizations were used as premises to deduce statements about the initial observations. In this way, one can create arguments elucidating how the world works based on compilations of data and observations. It was also Aristotle who propounded that the validity of these arguments must be determined solely by the relationship between the premises and the conclusions reached, so that a conclusion can be true only if its premises are as well.[5] This is still the way we work today.

In the medieval period the great Roger Bacon reaffirmed Aristotleís philosophy and added to it. He insisted that all genuine scientific explanations must state causal relationships, and also that a third level of science, the ìtestingî level, must be accounted for as well. In this stage the conclusions reached by the inductive-deductive method are then put to the test of experience. Bacon called this testing procedure the ìfirst prerogativeî of experimental science,[6] and claimed that by steadily working up a pyramid of thus-tested propositions man could discover at the apex the most general principles of the world and in this way recover the dominion over Nature which he lost in the Fall.[7] When Pope Clement IV heard about Baconís proposed unification of the sciences in the services of theology, he asked for a copy of the work. Bacon sent him a copy of The Opus Majus (1268), but the Pope died before seeing it.[8] Three hundred years later, Copernicus published his groundbreaking theory on the motion of planetary bodies, which placed the Sun at the centre of the Universe and was based on revolutionarily simple schemes of mathematical harmony.[9] Again, a Pope Clement (number VII this time) approved the work and asked to see a copyówhich he finally received 13 years later on his deathbed.[10]

Inspired by the Copernican upheaval in scientific thought, Galileo proclaimed that all science was written ìin the language of mathematicsî and attempted to reduce the laws of physics to ìprimary qualitiesî (such as shape, size, position and speed) and reject those ìsecondary qualitiesî (like colour, odour, taste and sound) that he believed existed only in the mind of the person perceiving them.[11] This distinction between a common-sense world and that of abstract symbols led Herbert Dingle to write, in 1949, that ìthe undying glory of Galileoís contribution to thought is that, though only half-consciously, he discarded the everyday common-sense world as a philosophical necessity.[12] This was an important shift because it helped Galileo divorce science from teleology, thus giving up the questions of ìwhy?î that had consumed his predecessors to instead focus on those of ìhow?î[13] Instead of waiting for the inevitable call from Rome, Galileo went there himself, ready to convert the papal court to his new ideas. The Papacy, however, had since reversed its views, upset that the Churchís authority was being undermined by the new science. It silenced Galileo, placed him under house arrest and pronounced that the Copernican theory was ìfalse and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture.î[14]

Descartes, in 1646, thought about Galileoís ìqualitiesî as he watched a candle melt and decided that though the secondary qualities of the wax had changed, the ìreal natureî of it hadnít, and thus that this ìreal natureî must be an intuition of the mind.[15] A strict adherent to action-reaction principles, he believed that God was the ìprime moverî or ìultimate causeî of all changes in the world and thus had granted humans with the intuition to understand the world through science. Newton, working in England at around the same time, was quick to point out that no person can ever truly know the laws of nature (and thus the mind of God). According to him, a scientist (or ìnatural philosopherî) could explain that phenomena are related in a certain way, but could never establish that the relation could not be otherwise.[16]

David Hume picked up this philosophical thread and followed it to the conclusion that all knowledge comes to us from our senses and is thus, in a sense, impossible. Albert Einstein once summarized Humeís position thusly: ìas far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.î[17] One problem with this strict sense-based theory is that if only things which we can see, touch, smell, hear or taste are real, then all our ideas and feelings do not exist because they cannot be sensed, including ideas a bout a sense-based theory. Kant saved Reason from this self-destruction by attacking Humeís ìextreme empiricism.î In his famous Critique of Pure Reason Kant affirmed the place of teleological explanations in science as a regulatory principle by which Reason organizes empirical laws and thus affects causality.[18] This brought him back to an almost Platonic and Cartesian concept of ìideals,î a philosophical precipice from which he cautiously backed away. Nevertheless, the great philosopher and mathematician Henri Poincaré jumped right into the realm of Ideals because for him, there was no question of immutable Ideals that gave scientific laws validity and purpose. He gave as an example the universally-accepted law of inertia, which he maintained could only truly be tested by holding everything in the universe still for a moment, recording all positions and then resuming the same positions and velocities again. Obviously we cannot do this, but equally obvious is the fact that this does not discount the principle of inertia. For Poincaré, it was therefore clear that scientists were making ìleaps of faithî when they applied isolated test results to a whole universe.[19]

By the end of the Second World War the scientific community had garnered worldwide honour and prestige. The victorious nations credited atomic science and scientists for ending a bleak period of superstition and ideologies and ushering them into a new era of rational, technology-driven prosperity that was based on pure facts and objective science. For some scientists, like the American Ernest Nagel, it was time for science to expand its reach in and of the world. He proposed, much like Galileo five hundred years before, that all science and scientific laws be ìreducedî to simpler, more all-encompassing laws.[20] The scientific community and the world agreed, and much time was spent trying to reduce theorems and laws to more general forms.

However, not everybody has been happy with the trend to reduce, reduce, reduce. Paul Feyerabend, in particular, led an attack with his 1975 treatise Against Method, in which he exploded against what he saw as the ìchauvinismî of modern science:

Wendell Berry has spent much of his life on a farm in rural Kentucky. He is a farmer, novelist, essayist and poet, and has received for his work, among other honours, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and the T. S. Eliot Award. In his 2000 essay-cum-book Life is a Miracle (written as a retort to Consilience), Berry argues against Wilsonís radical reductionism and all-encompassing assumptions. In the face of a world Berry sees being rapidly reduced, mechanized and industrialized, Life is a Miracle is his call for a rejection of the so-called ìscientificî approach towards creation. Instead, he urges scientists to form ìlasting, local and sustainableî relationships with their natural environment.[26] Berry spends a long time trying to dismantle Wilsonís case, which seems an easy enough task, but he is often sidetracked and wanders off into discussions of current literature and freedoms in academia. In the end the work feels unfinished, as though a rough draft in dire need of editing. Moreover, some critics claim that Berry misses the point, and that his real enemy is apathy and ìthose who think that giving [away] a few dollars is enough to assuage all fears about the worth of life and the way we are treating our planet.î[27]

Robert M. Pirsig has had a restless life. He started studying chemistry and philosophy at the University of Minnesota at age 14, with the intention of becoming a molecular biologist, but he found that from his hypotheses he would only get hypotheses. His search for an underlying universal principle then led him to Benares Hindu University, where he studied Eastern thought. Upon his return he taught English composition and rhetoric at the State University of Montana, and was employed as a writer of technical manuals. After suffering a mental breakdown, he wrote his 1974 masterpiece Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceóa loose autobiography, travelogue and set of lay sermons about his life experiences and search for meaning.[28] His goal was to do nothing less than to ìrevamp the whole scientific method that operated from the premise that the observer and what was being observed must be separate realities.î[29] Our thus-bifurcated world, says Pirsig, constantly generates ìantagonistic relationships between mind and matter, feeling and reason, art and science, life and technology.î[30] He attempts to transform this subject/object dualism into a trinity by the addition of ìvalue judgements associated with the words ëexcellenceí, ëworthí and ëgoodnessí that he, together, calls ëQuality.íî[31] Altogether, both scientific and literary critics praised it as ìabsorbing, witty and haunting,î[32] ìoriginal and imaginativeî[33] and ìable to evoke a landscape or intimate a deep sense of uneasiness without being overwritten.î[34]

Wilson, Berry and Pirsig have wildly different philosophies of science and its relation to the humanities, religion and ethics. Yet they all passionately believe in their ideas and defend them to the hilt. The study of how their ideas differ, the underlying assumptions on which they are built and their overall conclusions is a fascinating one.

Wendell Berry begs to differ. He rightly points out that Wilsonís ìcollaborationî between disciplines is really a subjugation of the arts by science (shades of Feyerabend), since Wilsonís ìhypothesis of the biological origin of the artsî is strictly a scientific one, and ìproposes only scientific tasks.î He also takes great umbrage at Wilsonís assertions that the arts are merely an ìÊsthetic and emotional response,î pointing out that they also include knowledge and can serve to instruct. He also maintains that the arts, unlike the sciences, cannot be reduced: ìThe essential truth of a work of art cannot be extracted, just as beauty cannot be interpreted. To believe that the arts can be interpreted so as to make them consilient with biology or physics is about equivalent to the belief that literary classics can survive as comic books or movies.î[37] Moreover, Berry doesnít see how art as determined by an ìinborn human natureî could explain bad or ìunnaturalî art. If Êsthetics are biologically determined, and all humans want to produce the ìbestî art, then ìhow does the issue of quality arise in the first place?î[38]

Issues of quality are of supreme importance to Robert Pirsig. Inspired by the Ideals advocated by PoincarÈ (as well as the philosophy of ìintuitionî put forth by Karl Popper[39]), he suggests that it is the interaction between the subjective self and the objective world that gives us a feeling of quality. He gives it a capital Q and refuses to define it, saying that any attempt to would have to invoke Quality itself. He goes on to explain his belief that this Quality, the ìleading edge of the train of knowledge,î[40] can serve as a new form or paradigm to understanding our world, linking the tragically-divorced realms of art and technology, and on a greater scale, feeling and reason. For him, both scientists and artists need to tap into that recognition of the ìhere and nowî, to fully realize their relationship between themselves and the world around them at every moment and thus to seek oneness with the deep currents of Quality that undergird our existence. For scientists, this might mean a greater realization of the subjective components of the scientific process, while for artists it might be a call to explore and understand the technology around them. Additionally, to Wilson Pirsig would say ìthe arts are irreducible,î but to Berry he would warn that ìbeauty can be interpretedî. To him, we are interpreting it individually and constantly, in the same way that we are always interpreting our surroundings. This act of sensing and interpreting is Quality at work, and it is what makes up reality as we know it.

Wilson does seem to have a problem with religion. Having grown up in a fundamental Christian household, he still feels ìbound to respect its ancient traditions,î but he sets up an elaborate mock debate between an Empiricist and a Transcendentalist where it is clear whom he believes to be the fool. Wilson simply does not need religion anymore, he states, favouring instead a purely material origin of ethics. He says that individuals by and large are predisposed biologically to make certain choices that lead them to a belief in God, and he also proposes that religions be treated as organisms, with their growth plotted over time. In this way he proposes to turn his reductivist lens on religion and ethics, to find the ìepigenetic rules of moral reasoningî which, he concedes, will ìprobably turn out to be an ensemble of many algorithms.î[45] Humanity will have to make a choice, he says, between a moral reasoning ìcentred in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shifted towards a science-based material analysis.î[46] There does not seem to be a possibility of coexistence, for Wilson, who boasts that ìScience has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted.î Instead, he sees the two as perpetual competitors and foresees the result of their match as ìthe secularization of the human epic, and of religion itself.î[47]

As for Pirsig, he has identified a big, unifying, underlying, all-creating and all-encompassing force that resists definition, is timeless and gives our lives meaning. He calls it Quality, but it would be a simple hop, skip and a jump to calling it ìGod.î He himself later recognizes its same description and qualities in the works of Lao-Tzu, where it is called Tao,[48] and even recognizes it as the Dharma of the Hindus.[49] Thus Pirsigís work, while perhaps not offering many religious answers, is wide open to religious interpretation, and might be able to offer the right religious questions. Near the end of the book Pirsig also touches on the question of ethics. He traces the current reason/feeling dichotomy back to the ancient Greeks, who engaged in the same battle. Aristotle, Plato and the dialecticians were defending Reason, and the absoluteness of Truth, while a group of philosophers called Sophists were teaching that all principles are relative, and that ìman is the measure of all things.î The Truth won, Good lost, and according to Pirsig we have lived lives of Reason ever since. But Pirsig likes the theory that ìman is the measure of all things,î because for him it places man neither as source nor as passive observer of things, but rather envisions that relationship between man and experience that he sees as the embodiment of Quality. The Sophists, he discovers, had a name for this which can be interpreted as ìvirtue,î or ìexcellenceî and they believed that it had been around before substance, before form and before mind and matter.[50] Thus to be ethical, Pirsig reasons, one must simply follow this virtue. Whether one calls it Tao, Dharma or Quality, it is all the same fundamental Goodness from which all reality as we know it flows. Pirsig leaves it up to the reader to decide what to call it, ultimately, but to me it seems very close to that Christian idea of ìGod."

Wilson represents the empiricist arm of Empiricism. He rejects religion inasmuch as he cannot quantify it and echoes the cry from Galileo and Nagel to ìreduce by all means.î Yet he considers himself an ethical man, but born out of a materialist and science-driven personal morality, which he seesóalong with the eventual domination of all other fields by Scienceóas the future of the human race.

Berry, on the other hand, takes a page from Feyerabend and attacks the idea that anybody will ever be able to know everything. Life is a mystery, he maintains, that is God-given and cannot be reduced, just as a great poem cannot be translated. He wants science to move slowly and cautiously, with great reverence for the Earth. He also challenges scientists to discard the influence of corporations on their work, and to truly respect care for the communities in which they live. This he sees as the only future for science.

Pirsig is a stranger to the conversation. He follows the Ideals of Plato, Poincaré and Popper to their limit and then takes them one step further. He views the world as made up of interactions of people and their environment, relationships which he calls Quality. It is this Quality that will heal the rifts between science and the humanities, he says, a rift which he considers unnatural. His philosophy is almost religious in and of itself, as he proposes a force which is all-powerful, timeless and when followed, leads one to the ethical life. The future of science, and of all humanity, lies in the recognition of and striving for this Quality.