ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a fable. (I claim no great originality for it, since there is a long tradition going back to Plato, which explains the idea of a source of goodness by using the symbol of the sun.) Suppose there is a planet – let us call it Oceana – which is surrounded by an impenetrable luminous watery mist. The inhabitants believe, arguably with good reason (since there is no evidence of anything other), that they inhabit a ‘closed’ cosmos: that their world, and its surrounding atmosphere, is the universe, comprising everything that exists. Their world is a watery world – they live, reproduce and move around in a marine-style environment. In addition to the faint luminosity which enables them to find their way around, their world contains fires – strange burning islands of what we would call wood, which float around on the ocean, giving out light and heat. The expert scientists of Oceana have mapped out with great mathematical precision and accuracy the laws which govern all the watery phenomena of their ocean and their atmosphere. But the workings of the ‘fires’ do not seem to be derivable from, or explicable in terms of, any of the natural watery phenomena that their science has so successfully investigated.
