What motivated me, I think, to purchase this slim, but very complex book by David Bohm was my profound dissatisfaction with works such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics - popularizations of quantum theory that swerved into poetry or metaphysics or quasi-religious musings.

Someone – I don’t remember who or the conversation’s context – recommended Bohm’s Wholeness and the implicate order. I took a bus downtown to Borders bookstore; remarkably, there was a copy in the science section.

Bohm writes (pages 4-5 of the Routledge 1994 paperback edition):

The Newtonian form of insight worked very well for several centuries but ultimately (like the ancient Greek insights that came before) it led to unclear results when extended into new domains.

In these new domains, new forms of insight were developed (the theory of relativity and the quantum theory). These gave a radically different picture of the world from that of Newton (though the latter was, of course, found to be still valid in a limited domain). If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to reality ‘as it is’, then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth.

Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains and unclear when extended beyond these domains. This means, however, that we do not equate theories with hypotheses.

As the Greek root of the word indicates, a hypothesis is a supposition, that is, an idea that is ‘put under’ our reasoning, as a provisional base, which is to be tested experimentally for its truth or falsity. As is now well known, however, there can be no conclusive experimental proof of the truth or falsity of a general hypothesis which aims to cover the whole of reality. Rather, one finds (e.g., as in the case of the Ptolemaic epicycles or of the failure of Newtonian concepts just before the advent of relativity and quantum theory) that older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains. Careful attention to how this happens is then generally the main clue toward new theories that constitute further new forms of insight.

So, instead of supposing that older theories are falsified at a certain point in time, we merely say that man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear.

[...]

What I find particularly lovely about this passage is how Bohm elegantly dispenses with the notion of final, authoritative truth, of our understanding of the world ‘as it is’. Our natural way of thinking (or at least, one of our natural ways of thinking) relentlessly wages war against uncertainty, against the idea of provisional truth. Surely the chief comfort of nearly all forms of religous expression is the proclamation that the rituals and body of arcane knowledge believers share are an expression of a deep and eternal characteristic of the divine and, therefore, reality itself.

Perhaps the primary battle of the 21st centiry will not be, as so many now believe, between the ‘liberal’ traditions of the West and an intolerant Islamic fundamentalism but, more generally, between flexibility, fluid motion and carefully constructed fortresses of belief.

Bohm’s Implicate and Explicate Order is described in Wikipedia.