It would... be subtly misleading to say, 'The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it... There is no question here of the old Model's being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p.221
This may be true in some sense - science doesn't provide as clear-cut answers to our problems as we would like. However, it surely cannot be completely true that the change from one worldview to another depends only on the fact that our minds are simply changing and that we need another model different from the one we had. Surely we must be getting closer to the truth, even though we may still be very far away from that final Model or theory of everything. Or are we not?
19/10/2007
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