The vital necessity of recovering scientific faith
So said Michael Polanyi, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester in an article entitled, "Scientific Conventions and the Free Society," linked to by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The article is based on a previous work of 1949. Polanyi writes,Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue. To show the falsity of this pretension, it should suffice to recall that originality is the mainspring of scientific discovery. Originality in science is the gift of a lonely belief in a line of experiments or of speculations, which at the time no one else had considered to be profitable. Good scientists spend all their time betting their lives, bit by bit, on one personal belief after another. The moment discovery is claimed, the lonely belief, now made public and the evidence produced in its favor, evokes a response among scientists which is another belief, a public belief, that can range over all grades of acceptance or rejection. ... Let me show how this works or has worked in some instances. Take the reception accorded to two papers published by two authoritative scientists in Britain at about the same time, not quite two years ago. One of these was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in June, 1947, by Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished Fellow of the Society. It described some simple experiments which proved in the author’s opinion that a hydrogen atom impinging on a metal wire could transmit to it energies ranging up to one hundred electronvolts. Such an observation, if correct, would be of immense importance. It would be far more revolutionary, for example, than the discovery of atomic fission by Otto Hahn in 1939. Yet when this paper came out and I asked various physicists’ opinion about it, they only shrugged their shoulders. They could not explain the results stated; yet not one believed in it, nor thought it even worth while to repeat the experiment. They just ignored it. Since Lord Rayleigh has subsequently died, the matter seems to have been already forgotten.
Polanyi recounts the history of science's treatment of hypnosis, beginning with the thorough discrediting in the late 18th century of "Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a Viennese medical practitioner, whose hypnotic cures had spread his fame all over Europe" (and whose name is the source of "mesmerized"). Hypnosis, says Polanyi, had been practiced for centuries throughout the world but had been dismissed as part of the realm of superstition that science sought to overwhel, Other scientists investigating the phenomenon were scornfully dismissed for 100 years by their peers, including a professor of medicine at the University of London who was so professionaly persecuted that he resigned his position.
The hatred against the discoverers of a phenomenon which threatened to undo the cherished beliefs of science was as bitter and inexorable as that of the religious persecutors two centuries before. It was, in fact, of the same character.
The Marxists are quite near the truth in saying that in demanding freedom we merely seek to establish our own orthodoxy. The only valid objection to this is that our fundamental beliefs are not just one orthodoxy; they are true beliefs which we are prepared to uphold. This true vision also happens to open greater scope for freedom than other, false visions; that is so, but in any case, our commitments to what we believe to be true comes first.
Islamists are much more ferociously anti-science than even the most rabid creationists in America. Science in the Western tradition claims to investigate, discover and know the "really real." Over the last century-plus, science has displaced religion as the arbiter of the ultimate, according to Carl Sagan (in Broca's Brain). Sagan told the story of Napoleon’s complaint to the Marquis de Laplace about Laplace’s work, Mecanique celeste. "Napoleon complained to Laplace that he had found no mention of God in the text. Laplace’s response has been recorded: 'Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.'" The idea that God could be hypothetical is a product of modernity, says Sagan. People who ask him whether he believes in God, he says, are really asking for reassurance that their belief system “is consistent with modern scientific knowledge.”
And so, following Polanyi's line, we have a culture that is scientistic as well as scientific. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of of the West, it is considered self-validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are testable using the scientific method:
(1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth;
(2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as reality really is.
Early modernity’s mechanistic view of creation was originally proposed as a way to preserve God’s agency. This view was soon supplanted by the view that knowledge about the world beyond the self was limited to what could be known through sense-perception of material things. The materialism of the modern world view is its central feature. Thus, “the modern world view simply has no natural place for God in it,” as philospher of science Langdon Gilkey put it.
Modern science has had a much more difficult time being accepted in Muslim lands than elsewhere in the world. In an article, “The Religion of Modern Science: Roots of modern God-free thinking,” published in the western-based Islamic Journal, Muslim author Harun Yahya wrote of Western scientific absolutists who... regard modern science as absolute and true religion, and want to impose this view to all humankind. . . . However, the question is not that whether Islam is in line with science or not, but whether science is in line with Islam. What needs to be approved is science, not Islam.
There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention between Islamists and the West is not really between Islam and Christianity but between Islam and Western scientific-materialism.
Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, Western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. The pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that Islamists correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.
In their view, certain social structures (such as the status and role of women) are absolutely essential, required by Allah's command as revealed in the Quran. Without those structures, a society is wholly corrupted. We see them as hopeless religious fanatics; they see us as godless and degenerate.
The tension between Islam's historic traditions and modern pressures of scientific modernity is found throughout the Muslim world. Many Arab intellectuals know that their countries have fallen behind most of the rest of the world. They want to gain the benefits of technological society, but without the cultural baggage that comes with it. They want to modernize their societies but not Westernize them. Their vision of modernization is mostly technological, such as communications, medical science, education, transportation, and consumer goods. They want our DVD players but not our DVDs. Even al Qaeda will accept the trappings of tecnology, they just reject the foundation.
The war between Islamists and the West is fundametally an inter-religious war. It does not spring from grievances that can be resolved to mutual satisfaction of all concerned. It is a dynamic struggle between two irreconcilable world views and understandings of reality.Polanyi concludes,
Dare I say that what we must recover is not merely "belief," but faith itself.We are entering in this century into a period requiring great readjustments. One of these is to learn once more to hold beliefs. Our own beliefs. The task is formidable, for we have been taught for centuries to hold as a belief only the residue which no doubt can conceivably assail. There is no such residue left today, and that is why the ability to believe with open eyes Must once more be systematically re-acquired.
Crossposted at DonaldSensing.com
Ooooooooh boy. Here comes the thunder. I concede its an interesting point, but science is indeed unique in its testability and self-consistancy. The speed of light isnt found to be different under Marxist Communists and Capitalist science regimes.
If anything this is an examination of the practice of science, dont by fallable human beings, which is of course influenced by politics and philosophy. As an example: a new generation military airframe is surely influenced by politics in all sorts of ways- none of them affecting the laws of aerodynamics.
"The speed of light isnt found to be different under Marxist Communists and Capitalist science regimes."
That may be true. However, replace "found" with "held to be" and you have a whole different story.
Measurements doesn't always mean established fact.
Polanyi's description of science as a belief is correct, though that belief extends to empirical knowledge in general, including even logic and mathematics.
Describing it as a religion is more problematic, but there have been times when sciences have survived purely by faith. Darwinism subsisted solely on the the faith of its adherents for a long period of time after the geology it was based on (which posited a primordial, quiescent earth that was trillions of years old) was thoroughly refuted. It took quite some time for Darwinism to reconcile itself with current scientific knowledge.
The point I want to make, though, is that science does not reign supreme in the West. It simply operates without restriction. This has gvien very good results, but also a false sense of authority. Western science has justly earned great respect, but that does not mean that it can count on any such respect.
It's inaccurate to say that "we" believe in science, and that this is what distinguishes us from the anti-rational Islamist. Our popular culture, which is based on personal freedom and gratification, hardly worships science. It simply regards it as unthreatening. It likes the technology that science produces, but it has no use whatsover for the intellectual discipline of science. It doesn't like rules or authority of any kind. It's sensual and emotional, not intellectual; Dionysian, not Apollonian. And it doesn't like to work too hard when it thinks about anything.
On the one hand, popular culture rejects religious suspicions about science. On the other, it rejects the Luddism and primitivism of the far-left Green. For its own part, though, popular culture listens only to the science (good or bad) that tells it what it wants to hear. When it bothers to listen at all.
We should not put too much faith in the scientific faith of our culture. It has little faith in anything, not even itself. It cares no more for the life of the mind than it does for the life of the soul. It could reject science and remain much the same. Just as the Islamist covets technology without wanting to pay for it, there are those in the West who covet the ideological fervor of the Islamist, and would like to try it on without paying for it.
A review of popular conspiratorial notions will quickly demonstrate the very weak hold that rationalism holds in popular "thinking".
We see them as hopeless religious fanatics; they see us as godless and degenerate.
And we're both right.
science is a religion
well, no. not unless you totally stretch the meaning of the words "science", "religion" and "faith" beyond recognition.
simple example: One question which has gripped religionists for millenia is how to get into heaven. Faith? works? what happens to those who are never exposed to the Word of the true religion?
a scientist's answer to those questions -- who cares?
now, there's lots of interesting questions you can ask about people who are focused on getting into heaven. but debating the nature of heaven is, honestly, a lot like debating the best Quidditch teams of all time.
Scientism is a religion. It's a faith-based position on the nature of transcendental reality. Like atheism, the faith-based position is that there isn't any.
Science is a method that helps us crawl incrementally towards better and better approximations of certain kinds of truth. This method applied to hypotheses that make predictions potentially falsifiable through objective experiment, which plenty of genuine truths do not.
I wrote an essay on this: Why do we believe in electrons and not in fairies?.
Polanyi's says that science is like other beliefs, not different than them, but that's not the point he makes; rather, his examples tend to show that scientists are like other people not different from them. Maybe they're different in degree, but they're not different in kind, regarding their resistance to new ideas that challenge old established ones. Scientists don't always adhere to the creed, and the creed calls for application of the scientific method and true reporting of the methods, procedure and results, whether the outcome of the experiment tends to prove the hypothesis, disprove it, or neither prove nor disprove it. In making his point about scientists, Polyani implicitly affirms his faith in the scientific method, which we might say is a first principle of a faith which is derived from the God-given gift of reason.
The failing of those who believe in scientism is that they cannot perceive the intersection of faith and science, and the belief that all truth is provided by science and only science is a product of this rather large blind spot. The third possible outcome of an experiment, that of neither proving nor disproving the hypothesis, may indeed by one to be considered not only in a particular experiment, but also in regard to science as a discipline.
Despite Polyani's complaints of scientists' lapses into the undiscpline of the layman, I would venture that the proportion of actual scientists who are believers in scientism is small. The scientist's recognition of "science" as a discipline by which knowledge is gained may help in understanding that faith is something to be distinguished from "knowledge, with faith being a belief or disbelief in that which cannot be tested, or at least has not been proven or disproven to any meaningful degree, by the scientific method.
So please let us not confuse science with scientism. The practioners of scientism are the post modern equivalents of sun worshipers who (among other things) urge us to throw the virgin of Economic and Technical Progress into the volcano of Kyoto-inspired regulation in order to stop the dragon of CO2 emissions from eating the sun and causing a tropicapocalypse.
Does it make to demonstrate that science is ALSO a religion by listing numerous examples of "scientific" theories which have been dismissed by other scientists or later been proven false?
I mean... even if such are an indictment of science in general - and because of bad science, we can freely conflate science with Marxism, Nazi phrenology, or hoki hypnosis - doesn't this argument imply that religion, too, is about believing in unprovable, erroneous nonsense?
I just don't follow the logic at all. It's an odd position for the religious to take. Kind of like sawing off the limb on which you are sitting.
Did I missunderstand?
Joe,
I have to admit, I wasn't really sure what you were saying, let alone Polanyi, until I read thru comments. All became mostly clear!
You gotta really feel a sense of accomplishment that, in posts like this, you have a really smart group of readers.
Unlike some other subects which attract Lazarus and his followers of KOS!
To a serious scientist, the touching faith of scientism, that science can answer all questions, sounds extremely naive. It's often said that every answer just raises more questions. Following that path in various directions, we get to solid mathematical and scientific results that only deepen our sense of awe and mystery about the nature of reality and our ability to comprehend it. A small sample:
Goedel's Theorem: There are truths that are not provable, starting from any finite base of axioms and axiom schemas. This remains true no matter how powerful a logic you choose to use. (Though there are logics so simple that all the truths expressible in them are also provable. Also, if you start with an inconsistent set of axioms, then everything, true or false, is provable. Neither of these helps.)
The Big Bang: There is general scientific agreement that the Universe began 10-20 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Physicists have made amazing progress at theorizing what must have happened within the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and how the Universe evolved to this day. However, the Big Bang itself is a singularity, which means that we have no way at all to tell how it was caused, whether it was caused, or even whether the question makes sense, since time, space, and our physical laws came into being through that process.
Quantum reality: Niels Bohr once said something like, "If you have studied quantum mechanics, and you are not deeply, fundamentally disturbed by it, then you haven't understood it." Serious consideration of results as simple as the two-slit experiment lead to questioning the nature of causality, time, and the universe. It could very well be that the Universe we know is just one path in a rapidly-branching Multiverse that explores all possible futures.
Religious faith can help one deal with mysteries like these, but it doesn't make them go away. If God exists, the world is the Word of God, at least as much as the Bible is. Science (not scientism) is one way that we can try to read His words in the world.
I'm not sure these are correct:
Noting that other existing methods lack science's reliability is not the same as saying that only science reveals the real or can discover truth.
Having said that, there's an awful lot to be said for insisting on testable hypotheses and the habit of truth through experiment when you're trying to make anything work.
I'm trying to think of any scientist who believes this. Does Polyani actually claim this?
I'm new at this and probably goofed somehow: can't seem to get trackback working. I wrote a little about this post here.
Wastelandlive - I don't think Polyani means that science is a religion becuase scientists have been proven wrong, but because the capacity of science to know and explain everything about the universe has to be taken on faith.
Timothy
Donald:
Thankyou. I greatly appreciate this post, and it goes to the heart of what troubles me. I intend to post on this topic in the not-too-distance, but until then let me just say that there is some considerable common ground here between the "conservative" positions of people like Leon Kass and Fred Ikle and the positions of people like Polanyi and contemporaries in the left-leaning tradition of Steve Fuller and the STS crowd. That alone is noteworthy.
It has been suggested to me that these two positions are fundamentally distinct, since one argues against reductionism and the other for dualism. But, to to be honest I don't see the practical difference. Pushed to the limit the reductionist will argue that the ultimate reduction may not be possible for limitted human intelligence (although it "exists"), while the dualist argues that it's not possible to achieve because of the spiritual nature of reality, inherently beyond monism. But in practical terms they both appeal to higher intelligence at the extreme, and they both conclude a practical indeterminacy beyond the capacity of man: an ultimate mystery. How are they really distinct, other than that one might prefer one story over another?
BTW, regarding Leon Kass, I saw him this week at Princeton. There's a transcript of a very similar lecture he gave in 2005 at the US Holocaust Museum here, in case anyone's interested The bottom line is that science may well be leading us into dilemmas it's incapable of solving. And it also may be leading us into territory where a minor wrong step could be cataclysmic.
I also don't want to give the impression that I agree with Kass. I think his cautionary tale about science and technology is important, but ultimately the sovereignty granted man demands that we have to make a choice... and unless we can choose to strike out on the path toward life extension, for instance, it makes no sense to say that we have sovereignty when the path is denied us by some external authority. To constrain choice in this way is to define mankind as less than human.
Oh, and the other thing I wanted to say is that absent the realization that science is a faith it's impossible to conceive how science could be adequately defended from some of its faith-based competitors. This is clear from Plato's argument in Phaedra that the existence of a method and theoretical distinctions doesn't explain how that topic could hold ones interest. Something else besides the categories must be implied, or else the categories are more than they seem. (Forgive the paraphrase.)
I love this topic. It's always fun to tell atheists that they are polytheists or animists, and that their religion follows the same patterns as any other polytheistic religion.
Joe:
I think scientism would be more fairly defined as the belief that scientific knowledge is the only meaningful knowledge that exists - however flawed or incomplete science may be. But few historical champions of scientism are that modest, probably because few of them have been scientists.
The extinct philosophy of logical positivism attempted an exact definition of scientific truth, but that straitjacket was too tight to allow science to function. Science does not progress in a neat empirical fashion.
Modern science is no friend of Absolute Philosophical Truth. It is more an annihilator of certainties than a creator of them. Even the logical positivists did not claim that scientific statements were "truth"; they claimed that they were the only meaningful statements possible. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Science certainly knows nothing about any ultimate reality (actuality, Being, God, whatever) that underlies the phenomenon of perception. Its job is to describe that phenomenon, not penetrate it.
While I am not on board with the idea of science as religion (or as a "myth-making culture") I would observe that the people who react most violently to the idea of science as a religion tend to be the same ones who act as if science were a religion - and often a very narrow-minded and bigoted sort of religion, too.
I think it's a mistake to concieve of science as a religion (especially for those that treat it that way). There are many scientists who are religious, and pure science rarely makes statements about the validity of religion. Occassionally, there are statements that prove the world is older than 10,000 years old, and that the world might have started at the big bang... but who is to say that contradicts with 'let their be light'.
I know many people, mostly physicists, who beleive that a single equation (albeit very, very long) will be able to explain the whole universe. I highly doubt it, but theoretically whose to say that this equation excludes a God or heavenly being? The works of Sagan are explicit with the idea that the writings of religion and science may be descriptions of the same events.
When people speak of science as a religion, they are usually referring to atheism, although atheism and science are not intrinsically connected. In fact, my view is that science can only argue an agnostic viewpoint. Science can prove that the literal bible is inaccurate, but it cannot prove or disprove the existence of god.
I tend to think of science as a tool. It's earliest existence was for the generation of metal alloys, and then expanded into medicine, astronomy and into the mathematics of the human world. Most of these events were not to prove or disprove God, but to understand how the physical world works. Most true scientists have the same goal: Why does this work? How can we modify this reaction to suit our own purposes? What can this tell us about the world around us?
Thinking of science as a tool, it makes sense that it cannot give us a moral guideline of what is right and what is wrong. All of these debates about human cloning, identity and the curing of human disease can gain solutions from science, but the value of these solutions will have to come from our own moral compass.
Now there are those who use science as weapon to secure their viewpoint. I don't see that as a religion thing, but as a human thing. We all invest time and effort into things we care about. When change comes, many of us are resistant to that change, thinking that this may render our achievements useless. So it comes without surprise that when serious challenge comes to a bed scientific theory, there are serious challenges to new ideas.
Like religion, science is slow to accept new viewpoints. Unlike religion, science does not prosecute new viewpoints (though atheists sometimes do) but tries to evaluate new theories (though sometimes not willingly). It may be a difficult task to bring new theories to bear, but if your can gather enough evidence to support your theory, eventually science will change to accept it. Again, it's not easy, but in my lifetime I have yet to see a scientist chained to a tower for debating 'the greenhouse effect', or physicists holding signs saying "God hates strings".
Science, by it's nature is not hoping to convert people into Scientism (just to find new answers, and then new questions), and I think that makes the world of difference.
A thoughtful and interesting post.
Science in the Western tradition claims to investigate, discover and know the "really real."
It may be informative to mention that there is a spectrum of philosophies within scientific practitioners that are compatible with the scientific method: Realism (where there's a capital-T Truth out there that science is mapping out), Empiricism (where assaying the predictive accuracy, consilience and falsifiability of various models increases our knowledge regarding those models, but no claim to a fixed, ultimately understandable "really real" reality is being implied, and for this group the author's claim doesn't hold) &tc. I also think that the author's observation that scientists, being people, can be deluded and politicized under various conditions (Marxism, Nazism, etc.), doesn't really say much about Science. As with any method, there are good and lousy practitioners.
The difference between Realism and Empiricism is perhaps comparable to Gnostics and Agnostics, and in the broadest sense, both religion and science involve basic foundational assumptions (axioms) that are taken on faith (scientists value observation, progress and the scientific method by definition, for example). The difference between religion and science enters stark relief over the issues of testability/falsifiability v. faith. It's extremely difficult to improve on revelatory epiphanies (and religious institutions and moral philosophies advance on a scale of generations, often centuries, perhaps reflecting this difficulty) , while scientific observations are modified constantly as the data improves.
"Scientists try to discover what is really real"
Well, maybe. A rather different approach is to say that they deal with logically consistent sentences which are demonstrably connected to our experience. For example, Newton's theory of gravity is demonstrably connected to everyday experience. It is extremely useful and precise. However, we know it to be false in the logical sense, because it misses things which general relativity describes better, and also misses things which quantum mechanics describes better. And we know GR to 'wrong' and QM to be 'wrong' as well, in the same rigorously logical sense. But they are still extremely accurate approximations to almost (but not quite) everything we can see or do.
To recapitulate Marvin Minsky's famous example, I don't know whether Intelligent Design is 'really true' or 'really false'. I do know that all the modern versions of evolution are 'wrong' in the same sense as is Newtonian physics.
HOWEVER, I also know that evolution is a useful guide to fighting diseases (bacteria evolve defense to medicines), breeding better crops and animals, and so on. Thus, evolution is usefully connected to experiences - while ID is not. The only thing ID does is tell a story; it does not tell me how to prevent the rise of drug resistant TB.
That's one of the key differences between religion and real science (i.e. not the naive dogmatism Benjamin Kuipers criticizes above)
PS: We should be honored to have someone of Dr. Kuipers' caliber here. I've admired his work for many years (almost three decades? Sheesh!).
Great discussion. I'm fully on board with alchemist in #18.
I'll add a thanks to Benjamin Kuipers for his quick roundup that explains in very concrete terms where science diverges from scientism.
"Unlike religion, science does not prosecute new viewpoints..."
Well, this is the theory. In practice, persecution of challenges to the orthodoxy is part of human nature. Science can't eliminate this entirely without replacing all scientists by robots, but it does do a very good job of keeping it at a low level - a possible loss of funding here, a position allegedly lost there, a nobel prize denied because someone on the prize committee hates the idea; but it's the exception rather than the rule. Occasional disenfranchisement rather than real persecution.
(Most of the stories I've heard about this were regarding ID or global warming, where science collides with narrative beliefs about God as Creator or Man as Destroyer; turf battles between Faith, Reason and Rich Man's Guilt, I suppose. I've also heard rumours of such things in my own field - quantum chemistry - but never looked into them; I should have, I think.)
"They want our DVD players but not our DVDs."
Good quote.
"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with." - Max Planck, "Where Is Science Going?" (1932)
1 Thessalonians 5:21: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."
It's a valuable topic - thanks, Donald.
There's a dimension to these issues that we will increasingly have to take into account, namely the recent advances in cognitive science that are beginning to model how concepts are formed, persist and (sometimes) shift during the interaction between individuals and their social, physical and technological environment.
It would take a lot more than a comment here to outline, but a few sketches might suggest the relevance to Donald's topic.
It seems likely to me that these and other insights from recent cognitive science will lead to discussions which place the characteristic stances of various scientists and various religious believers on a spectrum rather than as polar opposites. And that seems right to me: I know Jesuits whose austere rationality eclipses the spittle-flecked anti-religion fervor of some self-described 'rationalists', although there are certainly disciplined and responsible scientists and intellectually muddled believers to be found all around us.
From CS Lewis:
bq I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If... I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real becuase it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.
From The Weight of Glory, "Is Theology Poetry?" (1944)
I hope no one is bothered by Lewis's Christianity in this context. He wrote about the same problem elsewhere too, especially in his book Miracles.
On a humbler level, to Dr. Kupier's point, one of the most religious experiences I have had (and I'm a regular churchgoer) was in calculus lecture as an undergraduate, when we learned that the dreivatives of arcsin, arccos, etc, have no trigonometric functions at all. Astounding.
26) Sigh
It's not surprising that CS Lewis would completely disavow science because it doesn't 'seem' right, but at the same time if you look at brain chemistry, you can see physical trauma (by blows, surgery or tumors) of the brain resulting in massive personality shifts. It's a scary thought to think that your entire being is encased in three pounds of fleshy gelatin.
Or is it? Does a soul exist? Science has tried to answer this question and ultimately failed to find any answer. I have heard Mary Roach (Author of Spook: Science tackles the afterlife, which I have not read) discuss how science has tried to deal with this problem. This evidence does not allow a stable conclusion, and hence the debate continues. Probably will continue forever.
And BTW: science does fit into the waking world. The more time you spend with atoms, chemistry, biology, the more you realize it has shaped the world around you. Much of art and beauty follows simple mathematical formulas which we view without acknowledgement. The science of sleep itself, has found to be directly linked to brain chemistry. Do we understand the imagery of dreams? No, but they are individual experiences that will probably not give an essential answer to our being. Whether we were built by God or built by nature, the human body is a massive cellular machine, and these nightly 'screen savers' appear to have dramatic importance in our processing of daily life.
I could go on, what we see, what we touch is all linked to chemistry, and hence physics. Still, who made the rules; is it God or nature?
"It's not surprising that CS Lewis would completely disavow science because it doesn't 'seem' right."
I'm with you on being wary of judging science according to what "seems" or "feels" right; but Lewis comes nowhere close to completely disavowing science in that quote, or any other I've seen.
Regarding the laws of physics and chemistry, yes, they rule the brain as well as everything else. I can't speak for everyone who believes in a soul, but I never expected there to be an arbitrary discontinuity at the centre of our brains where the laws of science just kinda faded away into some numinous event horizon. (Though that would be kinda cool, especially if it zapped any scientists trying to dissect it.) Which means we have to face the interesting and disturbing issues you talk of, about physical trauma and brain chemistry affecting our apparent personality and free will.
"Still, who made the rules; is it God or nature?"
Nature doesn't make rules, it follows them, but yes, that is the important question. I'd phrase it as "did someone make the rules, or were they always there?" Or, put otherwise, "was the First Cause a sentient entity or a set of arbitrary mathematical relations?"
27) Hi Alchemist,
I don't think that Lewis disavows science at all, but he puts strict boundaries around what it can and cannot explain. I agree completely that at a pretty fundamental level thought and memory are biochemistry - you know that if you've ever met an Alzheimer's patient. But I think Lewis is right that biochemistry can't be about anything in the usual sense.
If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
When I say "I think Lewis is right" I'm making a claim about the correctness of Lewis's statement (provable or not) and a claim about my own mental processes. If there is nothing in my head beyond atoms, how can either claim be either true or "about" anything? Atoms are not about anything. If I only mistake biochemistry for thought, who is making the mistake?
I'm no philosopher and probably shouldn't ask questions I can't answer. But I'm with Lewis: a purely mechanical, "scientific" universe would be devoid of meaning and wouldn't fit our daily experiences.
There's a (somewhat) related book review in today's WSJ: Fear of Knowledge, by Paul Boghossian. ..."link":http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116363345749924408.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
#10 - "Religious faith can help one deal with mysteries like these, but it doesn't make them go away. If God exists, the world is the Word of God, at least as much as the Bible is. Science (not scientism) is one way that we can try to read His words in the world."
This is one of the basic reasons why the Vatican has been funding scientists and upholding science for centuries. God does not work solely through the Bible and I don't know of any christian who seriously would hold that he does as the Bible itself confirms this (Noah's covenant was marked by the rainbow, etc). At worst, christian hostility to science (as opposed to scientism) is only born of the belief that salvation is all and that the Bible provides a known, sure path while science's path to salvation is uncertain.