11. Intelligibility and Coherence
11
Intelligibility and Coherence
The Christian Vision of Reality
I’ve always been struck by a phrase from the writings of Sir Peter Medawar, a biologist who championed the public engagement of science: “Only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on.” Human beings seem to possess some desire to reach beyond the mechanics of engagement with our world, looking for deeper patterns of significance and meaning. This does not mean, of course, that such patterns exist for that reason! Yet there seems to be something about human identity that involves a quest for something deeper. I hesitate to attempt a distillation of the large body of research literature on this topic, but it seems that we cope better with our complex and messy world if we feel we can discern meaning and value within our own lives and in the greater order of things around us.
Science is one of humanity’s most significant and most deeply satisfying achievements. In the sixth form at school, I focused on physics, chemistry, and mathematics. I gained a scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry, and went on to do doctoral research at Oxford in the laboratories of Professor Sir George Radda, working on physical means of studying complex biological systems. Yet though I loved science as a young man, I had a sense that it wasn’t complete. Science helped me to understand how things worked, but what did they mean? Science gave me a neat answer to the question of how I came to be in this world. Yet it seemed unable to answer a deeper question: Why was I here? What was the point of life?
The question is whether the natural sciences can help us engage with these deeper issues, which the philosopher Karl Popper famously termed “ultimate questions.” For Popper, these were existentially significant questions, rooted in the depths of our being, yet that transcended the capacity of the natural sciences to answer. Popper isn’t on his own here. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega (1883–1955), one of Spain’s greatest philosophers, argued that we need more than the partial account of reality that science offers; we need a “big picture,” an “integral idea of the universe” that possesses existential depth, not merely cognitive functionality. Science has a wonderful capacity to explain, while nevertheless failing to satisfy the deeper longings and questions of humanity.
For Ortega, the great intellectual virtue of science is that it knows its limits, which are determined by its methods. It only answers questions that it knows it can answer on the basis of the evidence, but human curiosity wants to go further. We feel that we need answers to the deeper questions that we cannot avoid asking. Human beings want to press beyond the point at which science declares that it must stop. As Ortega rightly observed, human beings—whether scientists or not—cannot live without answering them, even in a provisional way: “We are given no escape from ultimate questions. In one way or another they are in us, whether we like it or not. Scientific truth is exact, but it is incomplete.”
There are two themes that stand out as important here—intelligibility and coherence. The first is easily grasped. We long for a framework that helps us make sense of what we observe around us and experience within us. I was drawn to Christianity partly because I sensed it allowed me to grasp and hold on to the intelligibility of our world, an insight expressed in C. S. Lewis’s signature affirmation: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.” Yet there is another theme, hinted at so powerfully in our reading from the Letter to the Colossians (1:9–20)—the quest for coherence.
Christianity provides a web of meaning, a deep belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things. It’s like standing on top of a mountain and looking down at a patchwork of villages, fields, streams, and forests. We can take snapshots of everything we see. Yet what we really need is a panorama that holds the snapshots together, letting us see that there is a “big picture” and each of these little pictures has its place within the greater whole. The fear of many is that reality consists simply of isolated and disconnected episodes, incidents, and observations. Yet Christianity whispers reassurance here, providing us with a frame of vision that both illuminates our world and helps us to make it whole.
Our modern age has seen doubts about the coherence of reality, many arising from the “new philosophy” of the Scientific Revolution. Do new scientific ideas destroy any sense of a meaningful reality? The English poet John Donne (1572–1631) spoke movingly of this concern in the early seventeenth century, as scientific discoveries seemed to some to erode any sense of connectedness and continuity within the world. “’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone,” he wrote of this unsettling new world. How could it be held together?
Christians find this theme eloquently engaged in the New Testament, as we saw from our reading, which speaks of all things holding together or being knit together in Christ (Col. 1:17). There is a hidden web of meaning and connectedness behind the ephemeral and incoherent world that we experience. This was the insight that constantly eluded the novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), who occasionally experienced short, stabbing moments of clarity, which seemed to her to disclose “some real thing behind appearances.” These transitory and rare “moments of being” (as she called them) convinced her that there were hidden webs of meaning and connectedness behind the world she knew. Yet she could never enter this hidden world; it always seemed to retreat from her as she approached its door, as if she were grasping at smoke.
Christianity thus provides us with a reassurance of the coherence of reality—that however fragmented our world of experience may seem, there is a half-glimpsed “bigger picture” that holds things together, its threads connecting in a web of meaning what might otherwise seem incoherent and pointless. This theme resonates throughout the poetic and religious writings of the Middle Ages. As might be expected, it is a major issue in perhaps that greatest of medieval literary classics—Dante’s Divine Comedy. As the poem draws to its close, Dante catches a glimpse of the unity of the cosmos, in which its aspects and levels are seen to converge into a single whole.
So, have we lost sight of the idea of some deeper unity of reality? Where once there was a sense of intellectual and moral coherence to reality, there now seems to be what the German poet and novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) once described as a mere aggregation of “intellectual fashions” and the “transitory values of the day.” Other intellectual developments have also posed a threat to the notion of a coherent reality, including Nancy Cartwright’s idea of a “dappled world.” Where C. S. Lewis argued that “we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated,” Cartwright holds that we are imposing an order or rationality when there may be none—or, indeed, there may be a variety of orderings, requiring multiple accounts of the natural world and its structures. For Lewis, we are responding to the universe as it actually is; for Cartwright, we run the risk of inventing our own universe and disregarding the one around us.
It seems to me that the Christian faith is able to enrich a scientific narrative by preventing it from collapsing into what John Keats described as a “dull catalogue of common things.” The sociologist Max Weber used the term “disenchantment” to refer to an excessively intellectual and rationalizing way of looking at nature that limited it to what could be measured and quantified. Now there will be scientists in this congregation, and they will perfectly reasonably point out that these processes are integral to the scientific method. And I agree. It’s just that there’s more that needs to be said. Science is really good at taking things apart so that we can see how they work. Faith is about putting them back together again so that we can see what they mean.
A religious perspective does not in any way deny the scientific utility of such a rationalizing approach. It simply insists that there is more that needs to be said if a full and satisfying account of reality is to be provided, and offers a supplementation of a scientific narrative by which this deeper and more satisfying account of life might be achieved.
The philosopher Mary Midgley is a leading defender of what she terms a “multiple maps” approach to grasping the depths and detail of reality. Midgley argues that we need “many maps, many windows” if we are to represent the complexity of reality, reflecting the fact that “there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge.” She suggests that it is helpful to think of the world as a “huge aquarium”: “We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows. . . . We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. But if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far.” For Midgley, no single way of thinking is adequate to explain, on its own, the meaning of our universe. “For most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.” If we limit ourselves to the methods of science in general, or one science (such as physics) in particular, we needlessly lock ourselves into a “bizarrely restrictive view of meaning.”
Midgley’s basic principle of using multiple maps to represent a complex reality raises some challenges and some significant questions—such as the need to develop and deploy an appropriate interpretative framework to settle boundary disputes. Yet it also opens up some important possibilities for integration and enrichment of our vision. We need a rich palette of colors to represent the complexities of our observations of the world around us and our experiences within us.
My approach in this sermon is best described in terms of the “interweaving of narratives.” Human beings construct their identities using multiple narratives. That’s how we function as social animals. We weave together religious, political, social, and cultural narratives as we try to make sense of our world. It’s natural for us to weave these threads together, just as it’s natural for us to try to sort out how they interact—which takes priority—and how we resolve tensions or seeming contradictions between them. No one story, no one angle of gaze or tradition of investigation, is adequate to deal with human existence in all its richness and complexity.
This interweaving of narratives is essential as we try to deal with the “ultimate questions” that persistently refuse to go away. To answer these properly, we need to bring together multiple approaches and recognize the existence of multiple levels of meaning—such as purpose in life, values, a sense of individual efficacy, and a basis for self-worth. What I am proposing is not some crude homogenization of narratives. They are like the patches of paint on an artist’s palette; each color needs to be valued in its own right and used appropriately to render the rich texture and vibrancy of our world.
Perhaps I might offer an example to illustrate what I have in mind. I recall looking at the night sky in winter in the late 1960s and seeing the Belt of Orion—three bright stars in the constellation of Orion. I was an atheist back in those days, with no interest in God, but already knowing a deep sense of awe at the wonder of nature. I knew enough about astronomy to know that light took hundreds of years to travel to earth from those stars. To look at those stars was, in effect, to travel back in time. I was seeing them as they were, not as they are. I found the thought deeply troubling. Why? Because by the time the light now leaving those stars reached earth, I would be dead. Those stars became for me symbols of my own mortality, chilling silent reminders of the brevity of human life. The universe might be very beautiful, but it also seemed totally pointless.
It’s a melancholy thought, known to many scientists who have written about their feelings of despair at the futility and utter pointlessness of the world that they are studying. Here’s a good example. Ursula Goodenough, a biologist at the University of Washington, recalls being “overwhelmed with terror” at the thought of the immensity of the universe and the fact that it would one day come to an end. No longer could she appreciate the beauty of the stars; they came to represent or symbolize deeper and unsettling truths that she found unbearable. She wrote, “The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again. I wept into my pillow, the long slow tears of adolescent despair. . . . A bleak emptiness overtook me whenever I thought about what was really going on out in the cosmos or deep in the atom. So I did my best not to think about such things.” But what happens if you put on a different set of theoretical spectacles? What if the world is seen through a God lens? Through a Christian map of meaning? I discovered that the night sky looked rather different when seen from the standpoint of faith. Yes, it was still a symbol of immensity, against which I seemed insignificant. Yet I now realized that I mattered.
One of the world’s most famous photographs was taken in 1990 from the Voyager space probe during its mission to study the outer solar system. Twelve years after its launch, it reached the planet Saturn and sent back images of that great planet. The astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that the probe’s cameras should be realigned to send back an image of earth, as seen from a distance of about six billion kilometers. After much discussion, NASA agreed. Back came the famous image of a “pale blue dot,” set against the darkness of space—a “lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.” As Sagan rightly pointed out, this “distant image of our tiny world” set everything in perspective. How small, how insignificant, we are, compared with the vastness of space!
To this day, I keep on looking at that image from Voyager—that minuscule “pale blue dot” that is our cosmic home. I find my thoughts straying to one of the Psalms, which seems to anticipate the thoughts and emotions I now experience when looking at that “lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? (Ps. 8:3–4)
The psalm exults that human beings are part of God’s creation and thus are named and loved by the God from whom all things come. Our lives are touched by transcendence, in that God chooses to relate to those whom he created.
We all need a greater narrative to make sense of the world and our lives, naturally weaving together multiple narratives and multiple maps to give us the greatest traction on reality. Reality is just too complex to be engaged and inhabited using only one tradition of investigation. We need the best picture of reality that we can devise if we are to inhabit it meaningfully and authentically. In my opinion, precisely such a view of reality is presented in the grand vision of the Christian faith. We are invited to inhabit and enact this vision, both in our lives and in the world, in the process of reflective habitation that stands at the heart of Christian discipleship.
The Hulsean Sermon, preached before the University of Cambridge at Great St. Mary’s Church, Cambridge, on March 1, 2015.