Let me indicate at the outset the road I propose to travel. It has four parts. Focusing on the interface between science and religion, I shall begin with my reading of the problem science has created for religion╤or, more strictly, for us in our spiritual lives. From there, I shall proceed to spell out the consequences this problem has occasioned. My last two sections will be brief. I shall suggest what would solve the problem that I point to, and end by asking if it is likely that the problem will be solved, or at least ameliorated.
I. THE PROBLEM
Something momentous has happened in the modern world, and the following sentence from The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 9, 1978) puts its finger on what it is: "If anything characterized modernity, it is a loss of faith in transcendence, in a reality that encompasses but surpasses our quotidian affairs." As this is the spiritual problem of our time, I want it to sink in, so let me recast it in two ways: in the form of an image and then by way of an anecdote.
First the image. Imagine yourself in a house in North India. You are standing before a picture window that commands a spectacular view of the Himalayan Range. What the modern age has done, in effect, is to lower the shade on that window to within two inches of its sill. Angled downwards, all our eyes can now see of the outdoors is the ground on which the house is planted. In our analogy, this ground represents the material world, and let us give credit where credit is richly due: science has shown that material world╤nature╤to be awesome beyond belief. Still, the ground under which our feet are planted is a far cry from Mt. Everest.
The anecdote, which makes the same point, comes from E.F. Schumacher. In his Guide for the Perplexed, he tells of sightseeing in Leningrad and being lost. As he was puzzling over his map, an Intourist guide approached him and pointed to where they were. "But these large churches around us," Schumacher protested. "They're not on the map." "We don't show churches on our maps," the guide responded. "But that's not so," Shumacher protested. "The church on that corner is on the map." "Oh, that," said the guide. "That used to be a church. Now it's a museum."
Precisely, Schumacher goes on to say. Most of the things that most of mankind has most believed in did not show on the map of reality his Oxford education gave him. Or if they did╤and it's here that his anecdote locks into his point precisely╤ they appeared as museum pieces: things that people believed in during the childhood of the human race, but which we now know don't exist.
I am addressing the spiritual problem of the modern West, the loss of transcendence, and having tried to concretize the problem by way of an image and an anecdote, I proceed now to an issue it poses. There are now, in the contemporary West, two opposing views as to who we, as human beings, are. On the one hand there is the view preached in our churches and synagogues according to which we are the less who have derived from the More; we are creatures created by God, who exceeds us incomparably by every standard of worth we possess. Concomitantly, our schools teach that we are the more who have derived from the less: we are organisms that have evolved out of inert matter through the play of a mechanistic principle (natural selection) on chance mutations╤from slime we have ascended to intelligence. There is no way to reconcile these opposing etiologies, yet every denizen of the modern West schizophrenically believes parts of both of them. Even those who think they have entirely outgrown theology continue to bathe in its afterglow. They too profess to believe in the sanctity of the individual and his inalienable rights, concepts which the evolutionary account cannot support. The eclipse of transcendence has placed the evolutionary account alongside our fading theological account and has confused us as to who we are. It has produced an identity crisis.
I think you see what I am doing. The central point is that science, in the process of showering us with material benefits, has all but erased transcendence from our reality map. Having tried to bring that erasure home by way of an image and an anecdote, and having called attention to the identity crisis it has occasioned, I proceed now to why transcendence has been removed from our maps. What is there about science that makes it, in very principle, opposed to transcendence? I propose to address that question by way of an argument which, for the sake of clarity, I shall propositionalize in five points.
1. Science is our sacral mode of knowing. As court of ultimate appeal for what's true, it occupies today, quite isomorphically, the place Revelation enjoyed in the Middle Ages. An intellectual historian has pointed out that already a hundred years ago Westerners had come to believe more in the periodic table of chemical elements than they believed in the Bible.
2. The crux of science is the controlled experiment. I am speaking, of course, of modern science. Generic science (which is as old as art and religion) relies on reasoning from careful observations, but what distinguishes modern science is its introduction of the controlled experiment and its reliance on it as decisive. This explains, of course, our confidence in science (point 1. above), for it is through the controlled experiment that science achieves proof╤the ability to winnow hypotheses and retire faulty ones.
3. We can control only what is inferior to us. I mean intentionally control, for the walls of a prison cell could control my movement without being my superior. And I am also speaking of control across special lines, for within the same species variables enter that can produce exceptions to the rule; the Nazis controlled the German Jews but were not superior to them. By superior and inferior, I mean by every criterion of worth we know, and perhaps some we do not know. Many things are greater than we are in size (the moon) and many are greater in brute power (earthquakes), but neither of the cited examples is superior to us in all respects. Neither, as far as we know, possesses intelligence, or freedom, or compassion. It seems apparent that human beings control the American buffalo more than vice versa╤it's that kind of correlation between power and orders of existence that this third point calls attention to.
With these three points lined up, you have probably already extrapolated this fourth: 4. Science can only reveal what is inferior to us. Ask yourself: have you ever in any science course or textbook encountered anything that exceeds us in every positive attribute we know? Carl Sagan's Cosmos provides us with a gauge here. Sagan defines the cosmos as everything that was or will be, but does anything superior to the human species ever show in Sagan's cosmos thus defined? The question is rhetorical; the answer is no. Those who resist that answer╤who bank on science to the point that they refuse to see that its power derives precisely from the limitations of its method╤will try to convert the "no" into "not yet," but the force of the preceding point, point three, is to show logically, which is to say forever, why the substitution won't work. Try to imagine for a moment what beings superior to ourselves might be. Disembodied souls? Angels? God? If such beings exist, science╤the science that can prove its propositions through controlled experiments╤will never bring them to view for the sufficient reason that if they exist, it is they who dance circles around us, not we them. They know more than we do, and will walk into our experiments if they choose to; otherwise not.
This point╤that science in the tight sense in which it can prove its claims can disclose only what is inferior to us╤is important, so to emphasize it, let me recast it in the form of an image. If we liken the scientific method to a flashlight, when we point it downward towards, say the path we are walking on, its beam is clear and bright. Suppose, though, we hear footsteps; someone is approaching us, and wanting to know who it is, we raise the flashlight to horizontal level. This represents turning the scientific method on our fellow human beings. And what happens? A loose connection results. The light flickers, and we can't get a clear image. Psychology and the social sciences generally can tell us something about people: how they behave en masse and how they function physiologically. The complete person, though╤who she/he is as an individual, replete with idiosyncrasies, freedom, and commitment's, to say nothing of soul and spirit, if these exist╤science cannot reveal. To lock this in with our present point, which is again that science can disclose only what is inferior to us, it is axiomatic in the social sciences that in experiments where subjects have freedom, they must be kept in the dark about the experiments' design; they are made to occupy a tilt relation vis-a-vis the scientist who knows more about what is going on than they do. Finally, to complete our analogy, if we tilt our flashlight skyward╤towards the heavens╤its loose connection worsens. The batteries slide to the bottom of the casing and disconnect from the bulb entirely, producing a blackout. This, of course, does not prove that there are things in the heavens, but it does argue that if there are, science will never disclose them.
The final point in my argument follows almost routinely.
5. Because we look to science for our clues to what is inferior to us, hence: we are trying to live fulfilled (which in this context translates into
superior) lives in an inferior world. Or, if we prefer, complete lives in an incomplete world. With this second wording I smuggle in my suspicion that there are things╤beings╤in the world that exceed us, although herein I am not arguing for that suspicion.
II. CONSEQUENCES
This brings us to the second heading of my outline: the consequences that have followed from science's eclipse of transcendence. (I say science, but we know, of course, that science is not the agent here. It is our epoch's misreading of science that has caused the eclipse.) Social critics point repeatedly to a malaise the West has settled into: alienation, anomie, and nihilism have become recurring refrains as the Age of Reason has given way to the Age of Anxiety, and a wasteland threatens. I myself, though, feel unsure of my capacity to take the spiritual pulse of our times, so I shall defer to the social critics themselves, registering what I take to be representative statements by a social scientist, a humanist, and a natural scientist in turn.
First, a social scientist, Manfred Stanley, who speaks in this passage for Max Weber: "It is by now a Sunday Supplement truism that the modernization of the world is accompanied by a spiritual malaise that has come to be called alienation. At its most fundamental level, the diagnosis of alienation is based on the view that modernization forces upon us a world that, although baptized as real by science, is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities: beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, salvation and damnation. It is not, of course, being claimed that such matters are not part of the existential realities of human life. It is rather that the scientific world view makes it illegitimate to speak of them as being 'objectively' part of the world, forcing us instead to define such evaluation and such emotional experience as 'merely subjective' projections of people's inner lives.
"The world, 'once an enchanted garden,' to use Max Weber's memorable phrase, has now become disenchanted, deprived of purpose and direction, bereft╤in these senses╤of life itself. All that which is allegedly basic to the specifically human status in nature comes to be forced back upon the precincts of the 'subjective' which, in turn, is pushed by the modern scientific view ever more into the province of dreams and illusions. ("Beyond Progress" in Robert Bundy [ed.], Images of the Future [Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1976], pp. 115-16)
Next, Hannah Arendt, a humanist, assesses the consequences that have followed the eclipse of transcendence: "What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the suprasensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses...is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses. Meanwhile, in increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development; and although they themselves seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor: it is indeed true that once the suprasensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual. No one knew this better than Nietzsche, who with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of Idols, he clarifies what the word God meant in Zarathustra. It was merely a symbol for the suprasensual realm as understood by metaphysics; he now uses instead of God the words true world and says: "We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh, no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.'" (Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Consideration," Social Research 38 [Autumn 1971]: p. 420)
The final appraisal of our situation is registered by a Nobel-Prize-winning biologist, Jacques Monod, and it is this appraisal that led me to title this article "The Conceptual Crisis in the Modern West": "No society before ours was ever rent by contradictions so agonizing. In both primitive and classical cultures the animistic tradition saw knowledge and values stemming from the same source. For the first time in history a civilization is trying to shape itself while clinging desperately to the animistic tradition to justify its values and at the same time abandoning it as the source of knowledge.
"Just as an initial 'choice' in the biological evolution of a species can be binding upon its entire future, so the choice of scientific practice, an unconscious choice in the beginning, has launched the evolution of culture on a one-way path: onto a track which nineteenth-century scientism saw leading infallibly upward to an empyrean noon hour for mankind, whereas what we see opening before us today is an abyss of darkness." (Chance and Necessity [New York: Vintage Books, 1972], p. 171)
At this point I have given my entire attention to the first two headings of my article╤the problem science has occasioned our spiritual lives and the consequences it is causing them╤but the disproportion is not serious, for I can compress what I want to state about the remaining matters into a brief paragraph for each.
III. SOLUTION
The solution to the problem I have dwelt on lies in recognizing that science concerns itself with a part of reality only, not its whole. There is no conflict between science and religion when the rightful domain of each is honored. Science deals with the natural world, religion with the supernatural, including its relation to the natural world. Science deals with matter and what is visible (at whatever needed degree of amplification); religion deals with spirit and the invisible, while including again the relation of these to the visible. Because religion's primary objects╤God, spirit, and the like╤are more remote than those of science, it must perforce take into account their relation to the natural world in which we most obviously live. The reverse does not hold, however; science does not need to take into account religion's objects. Therefore the accurate relation between science and religion is between part and whole. To repeat this important point, religion has to include the world with which science deals (not in the same detail in which science deals with it, of course), whereas science need not take religion's objects into account. If we could really understand and accept this, we would be more open to potential intimations of╤signals from╤transcendence than we now are.
IV. PROSPECTS
I cannot of course predict whether we will align science and religion in this improved way, giving religion more autonomy than the last four centuries have allowed it to explore existential realities concerning which science has no say. I do, though, sense one encouraging sign. We are, I think, coming to see that science doesn't speak for the whole of reality. The distinction between science and scientism is finally getting through.
