Gospels of Science

Because its prestige is so great, science has been acclaimed as a new revelation. Cults have attached themselves to scientific hypotheses as fortune-tellers to a circus. A whole series of pseudo-religions have been hastily constructed upon such dogmas as the laws of nature, mechanism, Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian evolution, and psychoanalysis. Each of these cults has had its own Decalogue of Science founded at last, it was said, upon certain knowledge.

These cults are an attempt to fit the working theories of science to the ordinary man's desire for personal salvation. They do violence to the integrity of scientific thought and they cannot satisfy the layman's need to believe. For the essence of the scientific method is a determination to investigate phenomena without conceding anything to naive human prejudices. Therefore, genuine men of science shrink from the attempts of poets, prophets, and popular lecturers to translate the current scientific theory into the broad and passionate dogmas of popular faith. As a matter of common honesty they know that no theory has the kind of absolute verity which popular faith would attribute to it. As a matter of prudence they fear these popular cults, knowing quite well that freedom of inquiry is endangered when men become passionately loyal to an idea, and stake their personal pride and hope of happiness upon its vindication. In the light of human experience, men of science have learned what happens when investigators are not free to discard any theory without breaking some dear old lady's heart. Their theories are not the kind of revelation which the old lady is seeking, and their beliefs are relative and provisional to a degree which must seem utterly alien and bewildering to her.

Here, for example, is the conclusion of some lectures by one of the greatest living astronomers. I have italicized the words which the dear old lady would not be likely to hear in a sermon:
I have dealt mainly with two salient points--the problem of the source of a star's energy, and the change of mass which must occur if there is any evolution of faint stars from bright stars. I have shown how these appear to meet in the hypothesis of the annihilation of matter. I do not hold this as a secure conclusion. I hesitate even to advocate it as probable, because there are many details which seem to me to throw considerable doubt on it, and I have formed a strong impression that there must be some essential point which has not yet been grasped. I simply tell it you as the clue which at the moment we are trying to follow up--not knowing whether it is false scent or true. I should have liked to have closed these lectures by leading up to some great climax. But perhaps it is more in accordance with the true conditions of scientific progress that they should fizzle out with a glimpse of the obscurity which marks the frontiers of present knowledge. I do not apologize for the lameness of the conclusion, for it is not a conclusion. I wish 1 could feel confident that it is even a beginning.

This great climax, to which Dr. Eddington was unable to lead up, is what the layman is looking for. We know quite well what the nature of that great climax would be: it would be a statement of fact which related the destiny of each individual to the destiny of the universe. That is the kind of truth which is found in revelation. It is the kind of truth which men would like to find in science. But it is the kind of truth which science does not afford. The difficulty is deeper than the provisional character of scientific hypothesis; it is not due merely to the inability of the scientist to say that his conclusion is absolutely secure. The layman in search of a dogma upon which to organize his destiny might be willing to grant that the conclusions of science to-day are as yet provisional. What he tends to misunderstand is that even if the conclusions were guaranteed by all investigators now and for all time to come, those conclusions would still fail to provide him with a conception of the world of which the great climax was a prophecy of the fate of creation in terms of his hopes and fears.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. The science of Aristotle and of the Schoolmen, on the other hand, was a truly popular science. It was in its inspiration the instinctive science of the unscientific man. "They read into the cause and goal of the universe," as Dr. Randall has said, "that which alone justifies it for man, its service of the good." They provided a conception of the universe which was available for the religious needs of ordinary men, and in the Divine Comedy we can see the supreme example of what science must be like if it is to satisfy the human need to believe. The purpose of the whole poem, said Dante himself, "is to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness." Mediaeval science, which follows the logic of human desire, was such that Dante could without violence either to its substance or its spirit say at the summit of Paradise:

"To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled--even as a wheel that moveth equally--by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

This is the great climax which men instinctively expect: the ability to say with perfect assurance that when the truth is fully evident it will be seen that their desire and will are rolled by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. They hope not only to find the will of God in the universe but to know that his will is fundamentally like their own. Only if they could believe that on the basis of scientific investigation would they really feel that science had 'explained' the world.

Explanation, in this sense, cannot come from modern science because it is not in this sense that modern science attempts to explain the universe. It is wholly misleading to say, for example, that the scientific picture of the world is mechanical. All that can properly be said is that many scientists have found it satisfying to think about the universe as if it were built on a mechanical model. "If I can make a mechanical model," said Lord Kelvin, "I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through, I cannot understand it." But what does the scientist mean by "understanding it"? He means, says Professor Bridgman, that he has "reduced a situation to elements with which we are so familiar that we accept them as a matter of course, so that our curiosity rests." Modern men are familiar with machines. They can take them apart and put them together, so that even though we should all be a little flustered if we had to tell just what we mean by a machine, our curiosity tends to be satisfied if we hear that the phenomenon, say, of electricity or of human behavior, is like a machine.

The place at which curiosity rests is not a fixed point called 'the truth.' The unscientific man, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, really means by the truth an explanation of the universe in terms of human desire. What modern science means by the truth has been stated most clearly perhaps by the late Charles S. Peirce when he said that "the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all those who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real." When we say that something has been 'explained' by science, we really mean only that our own curiosity is satisfied. Another man, whose mind was more critical, who commanded a greater field of experience, might not be satisfied at all. Thus "the savage is satisfied by explaining the thunderstorm as the capricious act of an angry God. … (But) even if the physicist believed in the existence of the angry god, he would not be satisfied with this explanation of the thunderstorm because he is not so well acquainted with angry gods as to be able to predict when anger is followed by a storm. He would have to know why the god had become angry, and why making a thunderstorm eased his ire." But even carrying the explanation to this point would not be carrying it to its limit. For there is no formal limit. The next scientist might wish to know what a god was and what anger is. And when he had been told what their elements are, the next man might be dissatisfied until he had found the elements of these elements.

The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with this analogy that he is through with searching any further. That is his business, as long as he does not insist that he has reached a clear and ultimate picture of the universe. For obviously he has not. A machine is something in which the parts push and pull each other. But why are they pushing and pulling, and how do they work? Do they push and pull because of the action of the electrons in their orbits within the atoms? If that is true, then how does an electron work? Is it, too, a machine? Or is it something quite different from a machine? Shall we attempt to explain machines electrically, or shall we attempt to explain electricity mechanically?

It becomes plain, therefore, that scientific explanation is altogether unlike the explanations to which the common man is accustomed. It does not yield a certain picture of anything which can be taken naively as a representation of reality. And therefore the philosophies which have grown up about science, like mechanism or creative evolution, are in no way guaranteed by science as the account of creation in Genesis is guaranteed by the authority of Scripture. They are nothing but provisional dramatizations which are soon dissolved by the progress of science itself.

That is why nothing is so dead as the scientific religion of yesterday. It is far more completely dead than any revealed religion, because the revealed religion, whatever may be the defects of its cosmology or its history, has some human experience at its core which we can recognize and to which we may respond. But a religion like scientific materialism has nothing in it, except the pretension that it is a true account of the world. Once that pretension is exploded, it is wholly valueless as a religion. It has become a collection of discarded concepts.