Thomas Aquinas, publishing around 1250 A.D., wrote that the task of the scholar was
to manifest the truth that faith professes and reason investigates, setting forth demonstrative and probable arguments, so that the truth may be confirmed.
Aquinas is offering several foundational principles: reason investigates, reason formulates demonstrative arguments, reason formulates arguments from probability, and reason finally confirms truth. Although these principles are necessary for modern science, they are not sufficient. A few more principles are needed.
From Mumbai (Bombay), India, Dinesh D’Souza writes that, as part of the foundation for modern observational sciences, we also need
the presumption, quite impossible to prove, that the universe is rational. Scientists today take for granted the idea that the universe operates according to laws, and that these laws are comprehensible to the human mind.
These same axiomatic notions are phrased differently by various scientists, but remain effectively the same. Thus James Trefil writes
that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time.
Steven Weinberg, who earned the Nobel Prize in physics, writes “that there is order in the universe,” because “we have found that the laws, the physical principles, that describe what we learn become simpler and simpler,” and “the rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal.” Weinberg is saying that the further we proceed with rational investigation of reality, the more we uncover a logical structure in the physical universe:
There is a simplicity, a beauty, that we are finding in the rules that govern matter that mirrors something that is built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.
The patterns which reason discovers in physics and chemistry are mathematical. Mathematics, as an extension of logic, is at the core of our notion of science. As D’Souza writes:
The laws that govern the universe seem to be written in the language of mathematics.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman noted that “why nature is mathematical is a mystery,” and “the fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.” The universe could have been different: it could be irrational and illogical - it could have been so structured that algebra would be of no use whatsoever in any physical or practical endeavor.
The belief “in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos,” as D’Souza phrases it, and the “belief that rationality of the universe is mirrored in the rationality of our human minds,” are so inculcated into the modern natural science that any hypothesis that calls these principles even partially into question - as we find in some speculations about quantum physics - is regarded as a shocking yet fascinating idea. Those tentative statements about quantum physics cast into high relief the how central the notion of a rational universe is in observational science.
Francis Bacon, author of a translation and commentary on the Psalms, is often cited as the formulator of method for the natural sciences. Inasmuch as empiricism ultimately includes some reference to probability, Bacon echoes the formulation by Aquinas about “demonstrative and probable arguments.” In any case, it is worth realizing that the notion of a rationally structured universe is central, not only to the scientific work of Bacon, but also to each of the following:
Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Herschel, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Steno, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Lemaitre, and Mendel.
The list could be much longer, and by reference include anyone who properly bears the label “scientist.” As Einstein formulated it: “God does not play dice with the universe.”
