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| Paul Davies |
Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in
cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization.
In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the
following:
The fact
that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the
Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a
distinct teleological flavor.
And in his most
famous book, The
Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History
of Time, Davies wrote the following words:
The success of the scientific method at unlocking the
secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific
miracle of all: science works.
What Davies poses
here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and
anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the
following words:
