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1-Page Summary of The Grand Design

Overview

For thousands of years, people have attributed physical occurrences to the whims of gods. But in reality, there are physical laws that govern how things work. Humans can understand these laws through scientific methods.

In the past, people believed that the world was created by various gods. Today, we know a lot more about how things work. We have an excellent understanding of how the universe came to be and how it works today. In between those two periods, there were many discoveries made in scientific fields such as astronomy or physics.

The following points will help you understand how we know what we know. They will also hint at what is left to discover.

In this passage, you’ll learn that there is no such thing as free will and why we are lucky to be here.

Big Idea #1: Explaining our world has been a long process. It started with myths and legends, then moved to science.

Humans are curious creatures. We’ve been asking big questions for a long time, such as “Why are we here?” and “Are we alone in the universe?”

While these questions are thousands of years old, the way we answer them has been updated. Back in ancient times, we used gods to explain natural phenomena. We had sun gods and rain gods; even earthquake and volcano gods.

When people are desperate for good weather, they will do whatever it takes to please the gods. When droughts occur or natural disasters happen, people believe that it’s their fault and that they haven’t done enough to please the gods.

The ancient Greek philosophers were devoted to exploring the universe and thinking about life’s big questions. They began to find ways of understanding the world without divine intervention. For example, someone like Archimedes conducted experiments and carefully observed results in order to come up with revolutionary principles that explained how small forces can be used to lift heavy objects.

This idea of the scientific method was developed by ancient Greeks and refined in early modern times. The system is a strict framework for formulating an hypothesis and conducting experiments, measuring results, and making observations to test whether or not the hypothesis is true.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scholars like Galileo, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes and Isaac Newton were proponents of the scientific method. Using this system, they formulated laws that allowed us to understand how planets move.

Eventually, science would be used to explain how the physical world works. The scientific method led us to determinism, which is the belief that everything in nature can be scientifically explained.

Big Idea #2: Scientists have debated for a long time whether humans are free to make their own decisions or if they are subject to scientific determinism.

You might be thinking, “Wait a minute. If decisions can be explained scientifically, doesn’t that mean they’re not really free?”

The idea of free will is a controversial topic. Some people believe in it, while others think that all our decisions are determined by the laws of nature and previous events. There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not we have control over our own lives.

In defense of free will, we have the philosopher René Descartes who believed that human beings do not simply follow laws of nature like robots. He saw a clear distinction between the human body and the human soul.

He saw the soul as a person’s source of free will. He also believed that it was located in the pineal gland, which is in the center of the brain.

Descartes makes a compelling argument, but it also raises many questions.