2. Profile of a Culture
A missionary going to serve in another country is advised to make a thorough study of its culture. When I was preparing to go to India, and during my years there, I spent much time in trying to understand the whole complex of ideas and practices that make up what Western peoples during the past 150 years have called “Hinduism.” (Hinduism is just as useless or useful a word as Europeanism might be in the mouth of a Japanese person summarizing everything thought and said in Europe from Pythagoras to Whitehead.) Obviously, I studied Indian religion and culture with the intellectual tools of a twentieth-century European. But with what tools could I study my own culture? There is a Chinese proverb that says, “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.” Indians had no word for “Hinduism” until Europeans imposed it on them. They spoke of dharma, which is simply the ultimate principle of how things are and therefore the rule that should govern our lives. Until I had spent many years in India, I was an innocent specimen of modern European culture. I had learned from childhood through school and university how things really are, and it as on this basis that I could begin to understand and evaluate the world of dharma under the name of Hinduism. Where shall I find the stance from which I can study Europeanism? On the basis of what perceptions can I evaluate my own perceptions of “how things really are”—perceptions that are part of my mental make-up from childhood?
As a young missionary, I was confident that the critical evaluations I made about Hindu beliefs and practices were securely founded on God’s revelation in Christ. As I grew older, I learned to see that they were shaped more than I had realized by my own culture. And I could not have come to this critical stance in relation to my own culture without the experience of living in another, an Indian culture. The assumption of these chapters is that the gospel provides the stance from which all culture is to be evaluated; but the gospel, as I have said, is always embodied in some cultural form. The typical apologetic for Christianity in our Western culture has been one that attempts to “explain” it in the terms of our culture, to show that it is “reasonable” in terms of our ultimate beliefs about how things really are. But what is meant by the word explain? We accept something as an explanation when it shows how an unexplained fact fits into the world as we already understand it. Explanation is related to the framework of understanding we inhabit, the firm structure of beliefs we never question, our picture of how things really are. Explanation puts a strange thing into a place where it fits and is no longer strange. Thus it comes about that one person can give a psychological explanation for a political stance and another a political explanation for a theory in psychology. Whether you accept the explanation depends upon the way in which you understand how things really are. What may be an explanation for one is no explanation for another. The question with which I am wrestling in these chapters is this: As people who are part of modern Western culture, with its confidence in the validity of its scientific methods, how can we move from the place where we explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific world-view to the place where we explain our modern scientific world-view from the point of view of the gospel?
Part of the answer will be to listen to the witness of Christians from other cultures. I shall speak more of this in the last chapter. But we can hardly start here. The difficulty is that most of us are not able to listen to them until they can speak to us in our language. Only those who have been co-opted into our culture by receiving what we call a modern scientific education are able to join in dialogue with us. The others, however charming they may be, however profitable to the tourist industry, are not potential partners in dialogue. They are still candidates—often eager candidates—for what is called “modernization.”
A more useful way of starting is to look at the genesis of our modern culture and especially at the decisive point where it becomes fully conscious of itself, the point which those who experienced it called “the Enlightenment.” That word is itself a very significant pointer to the nature of the experience that created modern Western culture. It expresses the joy and excitement of those who have seen the day dawn over a dark world, for whom what was obscure and confusing is now clearly seen as it is, for whom the unexplained has been explained—or at least made explicable. It is a conversion word; not, however, the experience of an individual—like the enlightenment of the Buddha—but one of whole peoples. Europe, or at least the community of its thinkers in those decisive years, went through a kind of collective conversion. “We were blind, now we see. The iron grip of dogma has been loosened. The mists of superstition are dissolving in the warmth of the dawning day. Now we see landscape as it really is.” If we want to grasp the essential elements in what we call modern Western culture, the best place to begin is with that exhilarating feeling that light has come into the world and banished the darkness, the experience Paul Hazard has called “the crisis of Europe’s consciousness.”
Of course, like all conversion experiences, this one has a prehistory. It was prepared for by events and movements of thought many centuries before. One could mention especially the ferment introduced into the Western world by the translation of Arabic texts into Latin through which Greek science and metaphysics, and especially the thought of Aristotle, were brought into contact with the Western Christian world. Following this came the rise of the universities, the flood of classical ideas in the Renaissance, the fierce theological and political controversies of the Reformation, the wars of religion, and—above all—the new developments in science associated with the names of Bacon, Galileo, and Newton, and the new method in philosophy opened up by Descartes. However one assesses the role played by all these factors, it is clear that around the middle of the eighteenth century there was a profound and widely shared feeling among thinking people in western Europe that a new age had come, and that its essential nature was “Enlightenment.” It was, in fact, a conviction that Europeans now knew the secret of knowledge and therefore the secret of mastery over the world.
What were the elements in the new vision? Central and fundamental was the vision of the nature of reality opened up by science and above all by the work of Isaac Newton. Greek physics had worked with the idea that change and movement in the world of nature are to be explained in terms of purpose. Medieval thought saw divine purpose manifest everywhere in the world of nature. The revelation of that purpose had been given in those events confessed in the church’s creed, and thus all study of nature had its place within the framework that the creed articulated. The condition for entry into the world of scholarship was the acceptance of that framework.
The effect of the work of the new scientists, and above all the brilliant vision of Newton, was to replace this explanatory framework with another. The real world disclosed by the work of science was one governed not by purpose but by natural laws of cause and effect. Teleology had no place in physics or astronomy. All the movements of tangible bodies and the changes in the visible world could be explained without reference to purpose and in terms of efficient cause. The rotation of the planets manifested not the perfection of the divine will but the uniform operation of the laws of inertia and gravitation. As the methods of science achieved greater and greater triumphs, both theoretical and practical, the old picture of how things are, the picture derived from the Bible and vividly sketched, for example, in the medieval mystery plays, was replaced by a quite different one. The real world, as distinct from the world of appearances, was a world of material bodies—as vast as the sun or as small as an atom—moving ceaselessly according to unchanging and mathematically stable laws in a fixed and infinite space through time, which moved with unvarying velocity from an infinite past to an infinite future. All causes, therefore, are adequate to the effects they produce, and all things can be in principle adequately explained by the causes that produce them. To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it. There is no need to invoke purpose or design as an explanation. There is no place for miracles or divine intervention in providence as categories of explanation. God may be conceived, as in eighteenth-century Deism, as the ultimate author of it all, but one does not need to know the author personally in order to read the book. Nature—the sum total of what exists—is the really real. And the scientist is the priest who can unlock for us the secrets of nature and give us the practical mastery of its workings.
Science, so understood, does not work by deduction either from revelation or from first principles. It works by observation of the phenomena and induction from the results of observation. But it does not simply take the phenomena at their face value, so to speak. It uses the tools of analysis to dissect, separate, and observe each of the elements that constitute the phenomena. This process of analysis has no limit in principle, and any appearance of ultimate unity is a challenge to further analysis. Analysis is followed by reconstruction, and for this mathematics provides the tools. Mathematics enables all reality to be quantified and arranged in a relatively comprehensible structure. What the eighteenth century celebrated as “the geometric spirit” is thus applied to all forms of human knowledge.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment spoke of their age as the age of reason, and by reason they meant essentially those analytical and mathematical powers by which human beings could attain (at least in principle) to a complete understanding of, and thus a full mastery of, nature—of reality in all its forms. Reason, so understood, is sovereign in this enterprise. It cannot bow before any authority other than what it calls the facts. No alleged divine revelation, no tradition however ancient, and no dogma however hallowed has the right to veto its exercise. Immanuel Kant, in answer to the question of what Enlightenment was, used the famous phrase “dare to know.” The eighteenth century accepted the challenge, and from that day to the present, even though so much in the philosophy of science has changed, this phrase of Kant has defined the central thrust of our culture.
The challenge is addressed to the rational individual. It implies that the individual has the potential and therefore also the right freely to exercise his reason in the search for reality. This right can only be exercised if other rights are also acknowledged, especially the right to hold private property, since some such property, even if it is only the body and food and shelter to sustain it, is the precondition of any human activity. If no alleged dogma can stand in the way of the right to know, equally no alleged authority can negate the right to life, liberty, and property. The new concept of the “rights of man” comes into the center of the stage. Medieval society was held together by a complex network of reciprocal rights and duties, and the idea of “human rights” in general, apart from this actual web of reciprocal duties and rights, would have been unintelligible. In fact (according to Alasdair MacIntyre), there is no way in which the idea of human rights could have been expressed in classical or medieval Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic. The idea would have been incomprehensible.
In its earliest form the concept of human rights referred to life, liberty, and property. The most famous and influential statement of the rights of man, however, defines them as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is reason to think that what was originally intended was “public happiness,” that is to say, the happiness that comes from participating as free men and women in the management of public affairs. In practice, however, the pursuit of happiness without this definition came to be seen as the right of all people. Happiness is, of course, a word with multiple meanings. The question “What is true happiness?” can only be finally answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world, and so “happiness” had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give it. Each individual has the right not only to pursue happiness but to define it as he wishes. Moreover, there is a further element of pathos in this idea of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Medieval people believed with great seriousness that final happiness lay on the other side of death. They did not expect it in its fullness on this earth. But the methods of modern science provide no grounds for belief that there is anything beyond death. Hence, the whole freight of human happiness has to be carried in the few short and uncertain years that are allowed to us before death ends it all. The quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, more fraught with anxiety than it was to the people of the Middle Ages.
There is a further implication of the emergence of the concept of human rights. I have already said that the concept would have been meaningless in an earlier age. “Rights” only exist where there is a legal and social structure that defines them. Anyone can, of course, assert a need or express a wish apart from such a legal or social structure. But a claim to a right must rest upon some juridical basis. Asserting a right where there is no such basis would be like writing a check on a nonexistent bank. Therefore, if the right of every person to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is asserted, one has to ask, “Who is under obligation to honor the claim?” In the Middle Ages the answer was found within the network of reciprocal rights and duties. The man farming the land had a duty to provide troops to fight his lord’s battle and a corresponding right to his lord’s protection. Duties and rights were reciprocal. One could not exist without the other, and all were finite. But the quest for happiness is infinite. Who, then, has the infinite duty to honor the infinite claims of every person to the pursuit of happiness? The answer of the eighteenth century, and of those who have followed, is familiar: it is the nation-state. The nation-state replaces the holy church and the holy empire as the centerpiece in the post-Enlightenment ordering of society. Upon it devolves the duty of providing the means for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And since the pursuit of happiness is endless, the demands upon the state are without limit. If—for modern Western peoples—nature has taken the place of God as the ultimate reality with which we have to deal, the nation-state has taken the place of God as the source to which we look for happiness, health, and welfare.
One further element must be involved in any account of the conversion experience that ushered in our modern Western world: it concerns its eschatology. The medieval Christian, taught by the Bible, saw as the end to which all history moves, the second coming of Christ, the judgment of living and dead, and the holy city in which all that is pure and true in the public and private life of the nations is gathered up in eternal perfection. This vision of the end is, of course, part and parcel of the teleological view of creation and history, which has the will and purpose of God as its center. The eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this. No longer would it be a gift of God from heaven; it would be the final triumph of the science and skill of the enlightened peoples of the earth. The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the doctrine of progress, a doctrine that was to rule—with fateful consequences—well into the twentieth century. The emancipation of the human spirit from the pressure of dogma, tradition, and superstition, and the purposeful exercise of the newly liberated powers of human reason would lead to such a growing understanding and a growing mastery that all the evils that enslave men and women would be conquered.
While this expectation was an important element in the exhilaration that marked the pioneers of the Enlightenment, its long-term consequences have been fateful—especially when combined with the expectation vested in the nation-state. If all hope is vested in a future that those now living will not share, and if the nation-state is posited as the guarantee of “rights” that are in principle infinite, it opens the way for the kind of totalitarian ideologies that use the power of the state to extinguish the rights of the living for the sake of the supposed happiness of those yet unborn. And even when this extreme development does not take place, the vesting of all hope in an earthly future means that the relative positions of the young and the old are reversed. The young become the symbols of hope, while the old can be neither objects nor subjects of hope but only an increasingly burdensome embarrassment. The transmission of traditional wisdom in families from the old to the young is replaced by systems of education organized by the state and designed to shape young minds toward the future that is being planned.
In attempting to sketch the broad outlines of the movement of thought that marked the birth of modern Western culture, I have spoken as if it all began in the realm of pure ideas. This, of course, would be a foolish notion. Ideas develop in a context of actual life—political and private. Without opting for either the view that ideas are primary and their political and social consequences secondary, or the view that ideas are merely a by-product of social change, one can accept the fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between them and that one does not truly account for one without attending to both. I have briefly referred to the rise of the nation-state as one of the key factors of the emergence of the post-Enlightenment Western world, and also to the new conception of education as a responsibility of the state. And plainly what we call modern Western culture is much more than a body of ideas. It is a whole way of organizing human life that both rests on and in turn supports and validates the ideas I have been referring to.
For example, analytical and mathematical reason is not content to deal with physics or astronomy; it must extend its operation to human behavior, work, and society. The work of the traditional craftsman that spanned the whole process from raw material to finished product is analyzed into its smallest parts and then broken up into separate operations, each given over to a different workman. By this division of labor, it is possible to increase enormously the quantity of finished articles produced, but the individual worker no longer shares directly in the vision of the final product that governs the whole process. His work is assimilated more and more into the repetitive action of a machine rather than to the purposeful work of the craftsman, whose operations are all governed by a vision of the end. Craftsmanship is replaced by labor, and human work is assimilated into the pattern of the Newtonian universe, from which teleology is banished. The individual worker, for example, does not know whether his product is going to make a family car or a fighter plane.
Hannah Arendt, in her profound study The Human Condition, divides human activity into labor, work, and action. Labor is “the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body”; it is “man’s metabolism with nature” (Marx). It is the cyclical process that has to be repeated endlessly if life is to continue. It leaves nothing enduring behind. Work is the activity that transcends the merely biological character of human existence. It looks to the creation of something that will endure in the world of things after the worker is dead—an artifact, a poem, a system of laws. Work creates a world that outlasts the individual. Action, on the other hand, is the activity that goes on in the mutual interaction of human beings. It arises from the fact that human beings are different from one another, and finds expression in the shared life of a society. The effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption. The modern conception of “built-in obsolescence” makes this clear. The cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order. Likewise, the world of action, of politics, is reduced to a conflict of views about how to keep the cycle of production and consumption going. Questions of ultimate purpose are excluded from the public world.
The division of labor has as a further consequence the growth of a market economy. In an earlier age, as in contemporary premodern societies, farming and the various skilled crafts were mainly for the use of the family or the local community. The market in which money operated as a means of exchange was only a minor and marginal part of the economy. But as the principle of the division of labor gained ascendancy, the market moved into the central place as the mechanism that linked all the separate procedures with each other and with the consumers. The modern science of economics was born. Once again teleology was removed, because economics was no longer part of ethics. It was not concerned with the purpose of human life. It was no longer about the requirements of justice and the dangers of covetousness. It became the science of the working of the market as a self-operating mechanism modeled on the Newtonian universe. The difference was that the fundamental law governing its movements, corresponding to the law of gravitation in Newton, is the law of covetousness assumed as the basic drive of human nature. What does not enter the market is ignored. Gross National Product refers only to what enters the market. It excludes the work of the housewife, of the gardener growing his own food. It includes the operations of the gambling syndicate, the arms salesman, and the drug pusher.
Two further consequences follow. One is the removal of work from the home to the factory, with immense consequences for the nature of society. The home is no longer the place of work, and the family is no longer the working unit. The way is opened for a deep divide between the public world of work, of exchange, of economics, and the private world that is withdrawn from the world of work and remains under another vision of how things are. In the public world the workers in the factory are related to each other anonymously as units in a mechanical process. They are replaceable parts. They may not even know each other’s names. In the home people are known to one another as irreplaceable persons, and their mutual understanding as persons is what constitutes the home. Moreover (at least during the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution), it was the men who operated the public world of the factory and the market, and the women who were relegated to the private sector. The fissure in society divided the sexes: the man dealt with public facts, the woman with personal values. The man was the producer, the woman the consumer (even though, in fact, she worked as long and as hard in the home as her man worked in the office or the factory). Today’s feminism, which is characteristic of modern—as distinct from traditional—societies, represents in part the revolt of women against these distortions.
A second consequence of the mechanization of work was the growth of huge cities. Urbanization is one of the most obvious visible symptoms of what is called modernization. Before the harnessing of electrical power and the recent developments in electronics, division and mechanization of labor required the concentration of workers in factories, and of factories in cities where goods could easily be moved from one stage of production to the next. Urbanization breaks up traditional family-based communities and introduces people into a world where there is a multiplicity of human networks, each controlled by different purposes. In traditional rural societies, each person is securely fixed in a single human milieu that embraces work, leisure, family relationships, and religion. These all form part of a given world that is accepted as real and within which the individual person has a secure and well-defined identity. In a city the individual is in the presence of multiple possibilities. His neighbors—perhaps in a multistory apartment—may all have their work in different parts of the city, and he has no necessary relationship with them. Each one has a variety of possible networks with which he can decide to connect or not to connect; he is in the midst of a plurality of worlds among which he chooses. And to that extent his identity is a matter for his own choice, and so for anxiety and doubt. In the milling crowds of the city, composed of individuals each pursuing goals of his or her own choice, the individual’s sense of being in a world without landmarks is heightened—sometimes to the point of despair.
The division and mechanization of labor, the development of a market economy, the dichotomy of private and public worlds, and the growth of big cities—these are all key characteristics of modern culture that are not found in the premodern cultures of Asia and Africa, except insofar as those cultures have succumbed to “modernization.” They rest upon and in turn reinforce the new view of the human individual that marked the birth of the modern world at the Enlightenment. One further stroke must be added to this rough sketch of the public aspects of our culture. Many observers have noted that bureaucratization plays a central role in modern societies. The division of labor and the consequent pluralization and complexification of society require the development of techniques for large-scale control. Bureaucracy applies the mechanical model to this task. It provides machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor, of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity. It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit. The introduction into bureaucratic procedures of the personal relationships that govern the private life of the home is—in bureaucratic terms—corruption and nepotism. Bureaucracy applies the principles of reason as understood at the Enlightenment to human life in the public sphere: the analysis of every situation into the smallest possible components and the recombination of these elements in terms of logical relationships which, ideally, can be expressed in mathematical terms and handled by a computer. In its ultimate development, bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny. The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility. Action—in the sense in which Hannah Arendt uses the word—is absorbed along with work into labor. It becomes part of the cycle of production and consumption. While the growth of huge cities in the early decades of the modern age was mainly due to the growth of the factories and their power-based mechanization, the contemporary growth in the cities is more largely attributable to bureaucratization. The typical new building in a modern city is a block of offices.
I have tried in a few strokes to sketch what seem to me to be the essential features of our culture, first by looking at the manner in which the thinkers of the Enlightenment expressed their new way of understanding the world, and then at the manners in which these have been embodied in the life of modern Western societies. By this arrangement of material, I must repeat, I am not implying a one-way, cause-and-effect relationship between ideas and social and industrial realities. Hannah Arendt has argued that the invention of the telescope was among the most fundamental causes of the emergence of the modern mind because it showed that the world is not what it appears to be and thus led directly to Cartesian doubt and to the attempt to found all certainty upon the experience that the conscious self has of its own thinking processes. It can also be argued that one of the powerful sources of the new thinking of the Enlightenment was the opening of new horizons and the discovery of new cultures through the long voyages of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, which were made possible by improved instruments for navigation. And certainly there is a reciprocal influence (as I have argued) of the growth of factories, cities, and the market economy on the way people understand human life. But we shall not be wrong, I think, if we take the abandonment of teleology as the key to the understanding of nature for our primary clue to understanding the whole of these vast changes in the human situation. I shall argue that this is what underlies that decisive feature of our culture that can be described both as the division of human life into public and private, and as the separation of fact and value.
Let us look at the central fact, the elimination of teleology. It is difficult to describe human behaviors without using the category of purpose. While it is, of course, possible to describe what a lecturer is doing in terms of the cause-and-effect nexus between electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex, chemical changes in the muscles, and sound waves in the air of the room, and while this description could in principle be exhaustive, no intelligent person would accept it as the explanation of what was happening. An explanation would have to express the purpose of the speaker to communicate some vision of reality to the hearers. Passing from human behavior to biology in general, while it seems natural to explain the behavior of an animal in terms of purpose, a plausible case can be made for explaining at least some of it without that category. But when we move on to chemistry, physics, and astronomy, it seems obvious, at least to the modern Western mind, that explanation must be in terms of cause and effect, without recourse to teleology. Greek science, as we have seen, did take purpose as a category of explanation in physics. Motion was seen as inexplicable unless it was purposive—a movement from the less good to the good. From the point of view of modern science, that was a blind alley. The breakthrough in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that gave birth to modern science would have been impossible without the methodological elimination of the idea of purpose from the study of physics and astronomy. The enormous achievements that have followed have had the effect of converting (in the minds of very many) this methodological elimination into a disposition to believe that purpose has no place as a category of explanation in any exercise that claims to be “scientific,” and thus to look for the explanation of everything, including both animal and human behavior, without reference to purpose. The result has been the creation of the mental world with which we are so familiar—a world in which everything will ultimately be explained as the effect of antecedent causes that operate with the precision and the predictability of the Newtonian atoms, and in which no alleged knowledge is regarded secure against doubt unless it conforms to this pattern.
And yet purpose remains an inescapable element in human life. Human beings do entertain purposes and set out to achieve them. The immense achievements of modern science themselves are, very obviously, the outcome of the purposeful efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women dedicated to the achievement of something that is valuable—a true understanding of how things are. A strange fissure thus runs right through the consciousness of modern Western man. The ideal that he seeks would eliminate all ideals. With dedicated zeal he purposes to explain the world as something that is without purpose. And, as I have suggested, this fissure becomes visible in two ways: in the dichotomy (one of the outstanding marks of a “modern” society) between the public and the private worlds, and in the dichotomy in thought between what are commonly called “facts” and what are called “values.” The public world is a world of facts that are the same for everyone, whatever his values may be; the private world is a world of values where all are free to choose their own values and therefore to pursue such courses of action as will correspond with them.
At the intellectual level, this fissure expresses itself in the search for “value-free” facts, and for a science of human behavior that shall be “objective” in the sense that no value judgments are allowed to have a place in its operations. Language has to be “purified” so that any suggestion of purpose is removed in order to achieve a “scientific” theory of how societies function. This kind of allegedly scientific sociology is so far from the experience of human life as it is lived that it is perhaps destined to remain marginal in any society that could survive. But the ideal that it embodies—an ideal that one might define paradoxically by saying that the only really valuable things are value-free facts—has enormous power in the public life of modern societies.
Thinkers of the Enlightenment asked how it could be possible to move logically from a statement of fact (“this is so”) to a judgment of value (“this ought to be approved or done”). Because—in the terms of post-Enlightenment thought—there could be no logically viable move from “is” to “ought,” the past 250 years have seen numerous attempts to find a basis for moral judgments somewhere else. Alasdair MacIntyre has described these attempts and shown how, in every case, the moral judgments for which a basis was sought were in fact survivals from the pre-Enlightenment thought-world. It is not surprising that the attempt failed. It was an attempt to base a traditional morality on a new and different view of what is the case. No moral law of universal validity can be founded upon the view of what-is-the-case that post-Enlightenment science taught people to hold. If the world is as post-Enlightenment thought understood it to be, then it is not logically possible to move from a statement in the form “this is the case” to a statement in the form “this ought to be done.”
Yet, as MacIntyre points out, the view that no sentence with the verb “ought” can logically follow from a sentence with the verb “is” rests on the assumption that statements of fact do not include statements of purpose. From the factual statement “this watch has lost only five seconds in two years,” it is proper to move to a judgment of value: “this is a good watch”; provided—and only provided—that the word “watch” defines an object whose purpose is to keep time and not a collection of pieces of metal to be used for any purpose its owner as a private person may care to entertain, such as decorating the living room or throwing at the cat. Thus, if it is true that the whole world of observable phenomena, including not only the inanimate world and the world of subhuman life but also the life of human societies, is to be truly understood only in terms of networks of cause and effect and that the idea of purpose must be excluded from any truly scientific account of the facts, then it is quite certain that there is no way in which any system of values can be founded upon the facts so understood. The fissure cannot be healed. If purpose is not a feature of the world of “facts,” and if human beings entertain purposes, that is their personal choice and they will have to create these purposes for themselves. Their purposes have no authority beyond the strength of conviction with which they hold them. These purposes cannot claim the authority of facts: they are personal opinions, and those who hold them can do so, provided they do not interfere with the freedom of others to hold different opinions. But they can claim no universal authority; they belong to the private world.
As I have already pointed out, one of the most influential statements of what this implies, affirmed as an axiom that is self-evident, is that every human being has an equal right to the pursuit of happiness. What this affirms is the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to the pursuit of the end for which humans, as a matter of fact, exist. Happiness is to be defined by each individual in his own way. There is no given, factual, objective standard by which different ideas of happiness might be tested to see whether they conform to reality or spring from illusion. The hard question—true or false—applies to the world of fact, and on this all sane people are expected to agree. On the question of good or bad, there is no such objective standard. A scientific understanding of the world of phenomena must exclude the idea that there is a given purpose running through all things, about which one may be in the truth or in error.
One area in which the fissure becomes very perceptible is in the field of education. Modern post-Enlightenment societies have, as an essential part of their development, set up public educational systems by which children are taken away from their parents and introduced to those areas of knowledge and skill that enable them to function effectively in the public world of facts. Science is taught as a true account of how things really are. But what can be done about values? On what basis are they to be taught? Values in any culture, insofar as they are consciously and reflectively affirmed and not merely embodied in customary behavior, are based on some vision of the ultimate nature of things. In effect, they have traditionally been rooted in religion. The modern scientific view does not provide a basis, for it excludes purpose as a factor in the ultimate constitution of things. That the development of the individual person is governed by the program encoded in the DNA molecule is a fact every educated person is expected to know and accept. It will be part of the curriculum in the public school system. That every human being is made to glorify God and enjoy him forever is an opinion held by some people but not part of public truth. Yet, if it is true, it is at least as important as anything else in the preparation of young people for their journey through life.
How is this fissure between public truth and private opinion to be dealt with? Should religion be excluded from the public schools, as it is in the United States, or laid down as one of the compulsory subjects, as it is in the United Kingdom? In other words, should the fissure appear within the school curriculum or between the school and the home? I do not venture to speak of the American experience, but the recent British experience is instructive. Up to about 1960, “religious education” in British schools was based on the Bible. But, if we may speak in general terms, the contradiction between what was taught in “religious education” and what was communicated in the rest of the curriculum was such that, for the vast majority of the products of the schools, Christianity remained a rejected option for the rest of their lives. Since 1960, British schools have had to accommodate a large number—sometimes a majority—of children from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist homes. Since that date, and predominantly now, “religious education” in British schools has increasingly been an introduction to some or all of these religions with the invitation to the student to take his choice from the well-furnished shelves of this ideological supermarket. In the physics classroom the student learns what the “facts” are and is expected at the end to believe the truth of what he has learned. In the religious education classroom he is invited to choose what he likes best. It is not surprising that the goods that are most often picked off the shelves are those with an Eastern provenance. Indian, Chinese, and Japanese religions are not only exciting because of their newness to a Western student, they are also compatible with the modern scientific world-view in a way that Christianity is not. It is common knowledge that distinguished exponents of the new physics that has developed from the work of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, and Heisenberg are impressed by the similarities between this view of reality and the one found in Eastern religions. Fritjof Capra’s much-praised book The Tao of Physics sees the cosmic dance as the clue to the nature of the physical world, and the cover of his book is adorned with the well-known image of the dancing Siva. I have often been struck by the fact that, among the Hindus who are leaders in theoretical and practical scientific work, I have never detected any such conflict between science and religion as we have had in Europe.
The reason is clear. The Eastern religions do not understand the world in terms of purpose. The symbol of the dance is an interpretation of movement and change without invoking the idea of purpose. The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated by the idea of divine purpose. This means that one has to say that value judgments are either right or wrong in that they are or are not directed to the end for which all things in fact exist.
This excursion into the recent experience of British schools has led me to an important point. The Indian atomic scientists (most of them trained by Western missionaries) and their counterparts in the rest of Asia are a reminder of the fact that the culture I have called modern Western is at present a world culture and exercises the dominant role everywhere. In almost every country of the world, to modernize is to accept this way of viewing things and this way of doing things. As I have said, the Eastern religions find it easy to be at home in this modern scientific world. And this in turn strengthens those elements in Western Christendom that have tried to find a place for religion within the world-view of post-Enlightenment Europe. Within this world-view it is possible to keep a place for religion as a deeply inward and private experience, whether understood in terms of pure mysticism or in terms of some sort of loving dependence on the ultimate source of being. In this experience people of all religions can find a kinship. It does not challenge the dominant scientific world-view but keeps, so to speak, a private place for religion within the public world of scientifically understood facts. Many writers have celebrated this shared experience and have seen it as the center around which the great world religions could move into unity.
There is something very attractive about this view. It promises peace, not only between the religions but also between faith and science. It avoids a head-on collision between the two because it does not challenge the scientist’s account of how things are; rather, it withdraws into an inner world that the scientist cannot reach, or where, even if he does enter, it is possible to show that there are different kinds of language that can be used, different “language games” that can be played. Yet the one whose world-view is shaped by the Bible finds it hard to accept this. It has often been remarked that Protestant theology since Schleiermacher has had a continual tendency to become a kind of anthropology. It has become the study of an aspect of human experience. The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated by the figure of the living God who acts, speaks, calls, and expects an answer. The biblical language is as much about God, about the created cosmos, and about the world of public events as about what can be called “religious experience.” All of this can, of course, be translated into the language of religious experience and then set alongside other transcripts of religious experience in other cultures. And yet one cannot help at least asking the question, “Might it not be otherwise?” What if it were simply a fact that the one by whose will and purpose all things exist, from the galactic system to the electrons and neutrons, has acted and spoken in certain specific events and words in order to reveal and effect his purpose and to call us to respond in love and obedience? If this were a fact, we might still sit down coolly to consider it in relation to other facts. But by doing so we would be asserting our right to make the final decision, and we have no means of proving that we have that right. It might be that we do not, that the history of Western man in the past two hundred years has been shaped by an illusion. And it might be that the signs, manifest all around us, of the disintegration of this culture of ours are ultimately attributable to that illusion.
All I am daring to say at this stage is that it might be so. In order to carry the argument further, I now need to do two things. The first is to look at the strange book we call “the Book” (the Bible) and ask what it is and how we can understand its authority. The next is to inquire what would be involved in both theory and practice in such a direct challenge to the very foundations of the culture of which we ourselves are a part. What would it mean if, instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific culture, we tried to explain our culture in terms of the gospel?