In short, human beings don't actually know the cosmos as it is in itself: it is, as d'Espagnat has called it, a "veiled reality"

TO BE NOTED: From the Guardian:

"Beyond science

The Templeton Prize has gone to a physicist who believes science, though it predicts the world successfully, cannot reveal its ultimate reality

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• • Mark Vernon
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009 12.20 GMT
  • Article history

It is astonishing that almost a century since the emergence of quantum physics, no-one – scientist or philosopher – really knows what it means. Classical physics had been descriptive. It presumed that it was saying something about the world as it really is. Quantum physics is predictive. Although its predictive accuracy is unsurpassed by any other science, and its technological spin-offs now shape our every waking moment, strictly speaking, it has given up working out how things are in themselves. It sticks solely to what might happen when we make observations.

Bernard d'Espagnat, who has won the Templeton Prize for his contributions at the interface of science and religion, recognises the force of this shift. Moreover, he's prepared to risk speculating about it, which places him in "a small coterie of courageous thinkers" as Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, put it.

He believes that quantum physics confirms something that many philosophers have suspected for centuries. In short, human beings don't actually know the cosmos as it is in itself: it is, as d'Espagnat has called it, a "veiled reality". Rather, we only know the world as it comes to us. He has said that observing the world is rather like looking at a rainbow: it looks real, though we know the way it appears to us depends entirely on our location and perceptions.

Immanuel Kant, the great Enlightenment philosopher, formulated a similar suggestion. He argued that we can only get to grips with the world of phenomena, and that the world of noumena – things as they are in themselves – remain permanently beyond our reach. Where d'Espagnat differs from Kant is that he doesn't doubt that the world beyond us really exists. Rather, it's "just" a mystery to us. Hence he can be called a "transcendental realist", rather than Kant, who is known as a "transcendental idealist". So, d'Espagnat's is not a "brain in a vat" scenario. When d'Espagnat kicks a stone, and feels the pain, he concludes that something real is resisting the forward motion of his boot. There is a ground of things but it lies beyond our concepts. Quantum physics reminds us of this, and perhaps provides us with a sidelong glimpse of it.

Most scientists don't accept this interpretation of quantum physics. To give up on studying the world as it is in itself feels like giving up on too much. What kind of status could physics and the other sciences then claim to have? And most scientists probably wouldn't go along with d'Espagnat in his next move either. For to him, transcendental realism suggests a new kind of proof for the existence of God.

After all, if science is dealing with something real, though permanently beyond it, then this suggests that a more fundamental reality exists as a kind of ground of being for everything as we perceive it too. Moreover, that ground exists outside of space and time – which actually is not so startling a comment: the laws of nature presumably exist outside of space and time too, since they themselves determine the nature of space and time. In fact, you could say that the laws of nature are supernatural – perhaps should say they are supernatural – only that word has been ruined by its secondary associations with spooks and spirits.

Reality as it exists beyond science and our perceptions can, d'Espagnat has volunteered, be called "Being" or "the One", after the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. It is this proposition that appears to come pretty close to a philosopher's idea of God.

And transcendental realism raises another possibility, namely that other kinds of human activity might afford us glimpses of things as they are in themselves too. Music would be an obvious candidate. The idea is that music can provide us with real, if indirect, knowledge of things in themselves. We might borrow from another philosopher to enlarge on this, Arthur Schopenhauer. He thought that music was the language of the reality that exists behind appearances, which explains its extraordinary power over us, as when people say that music speaks directly to their heart or soul. It should be noted that Schopenhauer called his version of that reality 'the Will', not God, and it was far from a benevolent entity. However, the general point is that music can speak to us of this reality too.

There is a difference between the nature of "music's knowledge", as it were, and the knowledge provided by science. Music incorporates within its communication a sense of the mystery of ultimate reality. Science, though, seeks to dispel mysteries when it offers explanations and it stops at the point where its sphere of competence stops – in the case of quantum physics, that being with making predictions about observations. To put it another way, if music can actually carry us into the mystery of existence, science can only show us where the mystery of existence begins.

If d'Espagnat's view of quantum physics is right, then what he contributes is a way of reconciling the reality of mystery with the explanations of science. This is what he talked about in his speech accepting the Templeton prize: the 'conflict between science and religion therefore vanishes,' he said.

It won't, of course, any more than the question of how to understand quantum physics is settled. But d'Espagnat's ideas may give us something "real" to talk about."