Knowing God
4
Knowing God
disastrous shift in the way science was being understood
and practiced, experienced by Polanyi especially through
his contacts with the Soviet leadership during the 1930s,
prompted him to move from the work of research science to the
study and teaching of philosophy. The Soviet leaders regarded
science simply as a necessary tool for the implementation of
their social planning. The idea that pure science should be
practiced as an avenue to truth was dismissed as bourgeois
nonsense. Science was a necessary instrument in the pursuit of
power. And it was obvious that the Russians were only pushing
more logically in the direction that was being taken elsewhere.
Polanyi had to ask himself, "What are the grounds for believing
that the findings of science are not merely useful but true?" In
the attempt to answer this question, he came to the conclusion
that we had been misled by the illusion of a totally objective
knowledge. If objectivity means that we must aim for the greatest
possible truthfulness in our thinking and speaking about realities
beyond our own minds, then of course it is a proper goal. But
if it means that all subjective elements are excluded, then it is
obviously absurd to suppose that total objectivity is possible;
for, if there is no subject who knows, there is no knowing. As
we have seen, Polanyi used the term "personal knowledge" to
designate a conception of knowledge as the responsible activity of a person who is required to make costly and risky commitments. In the growing atmosphere of nihilism, Polanyi sought
to reaffirm the possibility and the necessity that we should have
the courage to confidently affirm beliefs which can be doubted;
and he strived to show that the idea of a certainty which relieves
us of the need for personal commitment is an illusion.
This illusion is so much part of the accepted worldview of modern societies that it is not easy to separate oneself from it. Its debilitating effect on the articulation of the Christian faith in contemporary Western society is so far-reaching that it affects all levels of the life of the church. At the popular level, it is assumed that Christianity is merely one of a class of opinions called religious and must be described as such in public discussion. Thus Christianity is looked at from outside, from the point of view of a generally accepted belief about a world of facts which are neutral in their relation to the varieties of religion. At the academic level, a distinction is made between the confessional and the scientific study of theology. The scarcely concealed assumption is that the word "scientific" refers to a kind of study which has no prior commitments about the nature of truth but has a totally open mind, as though the scientific mind were a sort of empty page on which nothing had already been written. The truth, of course, is that both approaches - the confessional and the scientific - presuppose (as all rational inquiry must presuppose) a long tradition of thought and practice that determines which beliefs are plausible and which are not.
But we are now entering a postmodern period, a time in which the seemingly assured assumptions we have inherited from the Enlightenment are being deconstructed. The assumptions of the modern scientific worldview can no longer be taken as secure foundations. Everyone recognizes that science works; it delivers desirable things. But we are left in a world which the Chinese writer Carver Yu has summarized in the phrase "technological optimism and literary despair." Looking at contem porary Western society from his standpoint as a Chinese philosopher and theologian, he sees not only the unstoppable dynamism of our science-based technology but also the bleak nihilism and hopelessness that is reflected in the literature, art, and drama of our society. Science combines to deliver an evergrowing abundance of things to have and to do, beyond all the dreams of earlier ages. It offers no guidance, however, on the questions of worth: What things are worth doing? What things are worth having? Perhaps the most poignant example of this tragic situation is the way in which the wizardry of satellite television is now employed to pour a cataract of trash into every living room. In the 28th chapter of job, the glowing description of the marvels of human technology is followed by the haunting question: "But where shall wisdom be found?" This same question haunts us today. How can it become possible to affirm confidently as public truth the reality of those things which are not amenable to the tests Descartes laid down for certain truth? How can we speak confidently about truth, beauty, and goodness when we know that what we say can always be doubted?
Polanyi was seeking to articulate a position which would make possible confident affirmation of belief in matters which can be doubted. His explorations ranged beyond the work of the natural sciences and into the areas of public debate about the life of society as a whole. He did not directly extend his work into the area of theology, but it obviously has very direct relevance to my present discussion of the possibility of confidence in theological discourse. More specifically, Polanyi's concept of personal knowledge has four particularly important implications for theology.
Polanyi points out that knowing is always part of a tradition. The mental activity involved in trying to make reliable contact with reality can function only by indwelling a tradition of language, concepts, models, images, and assumptions of many kinds which function as the lenses through which we try to find out what is really there. The critical movement initiated by Descartes sought to subject all tradition to questioning and to build a structure of knowledge which would be accredited by pure unaided reason, having the precision and the certainty of mathematics. Polanyi says that the period following Descartes has been the most brilliant in all human history, but he also adds: "Its incandescence has fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when the fuel was exhausted the critical framework burned away" (Personal Knowledge, p. 265). This is why Polanyi describes his work as an attempt to develop a "postcritical philosophy" No one can deny the achievements of the critical period. But it was a mistake to suppose that the enterprise of knowing the reality of which we are a part can begin, so to speak, with an empty page, that it can take off from an act of pure thought. With hindsight, it is now easy to see how many of the self-evident truths of the Enlightenment were self-evident only to those who were the heirs of a thousand years of Christian teaching. They were not self-evident to the peoples of India or Africa. The critical movement intended to clear the ground of beliefs and superstitions inherited from the past so that it could create a structure of indubitable truth; instead, the movement has ended by creating a vacant site into which new follies and superstitions are crowding. Could the leaders of the Age of Reason have ever imagined that, two centuries after their work, the forces of astrology, witchcraft, and black magic would once again capture hearts and minds in a Europe that enjoyed, at the same time, just that universal public education which was one of their dreams?
At this point, Polanyi refers to Augustine's dictum "I believe in order to know" and points out that, while both faith and critical reason have necessary roles to play in the enterprise of knowing, modern man has renounced the first of these and left himself bereft of the possibility of knowing anything. But we cannot simply go back.
We have plucked from the tree a second apple which has forever imperilled our knowledge of good and evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforward in the blinding light of our new analytical powers.... Innocently we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity - and our own critical powers have shattered this hope.
In this situation, what Polanyi is doing is
seeking to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive. (Personal Knowledge, p. 268)
This blind and deceptive creed, presenting itself as knowledge in contrast to belief, inhibits Christians from confidently affirming their faith as something which provides the criteria for judging all other claims to knowledge and which does not itself submit to judgment by this other creed, the inverted into science.
All efforts to know must begin with something given. This given includes what we normally call the data, the facts that form part of the foundation from which our reason works. It also includes, as previously argued, the tradition of knowing which has been developed in a human community and which includes the language and all the conceptual tools used in that tradition. All of these constitute the given elements that are the precondition for any rational thought. And all of this can be the object of critical questioning. It is not self-evident truth. Specifi cally, Christian thinking stands in the tradition of discipleship (a matter of both thought and action) stemming from the acts of God, these acts being the substance of the good news communicated by the church. In a society that has accepted another creed, the "blind and deceptive" creed referred to by Polanyi, and that - moreover - does not recognize it as a creed but thinks that it is a religiously neutral account of the facts, confident affirmation of the Christian faith as public truth is regarded as sectarian and dogmatic. And this charge comes precisely from those who have accepted the reigning dogma of their society without question.
The dependence of all systematic thought upon assumptions that are accepted by faith has been well documented in the work of the American philosopher Roy Clouser. In his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality (1991), he examines major theories in the areas of mathematics, physics, and psychology and shows how all such theories involve a prior decision as to what is fundamental in the area studied. If we define the word Theos as that on which everything else depends but which itself depends on nothing else - a reasonable definition - then none of these scientific theories is theologically neutral. All of them rest on fundamental assumptions which can be questioned. But the questioning, if it is to be rational, has to rely on other fundamental assumptions which can in turn be questioned. It follows (and this is Polanyi's point) that there can be no knowing without personal commitment. We must believe in order to know.
Polanyi emphasizes the fact that knowing is a form of activity. Like all activity, it involves the interaction of the person with a word beyond him or her. It is an activity which (as we have seen) involves the whole person in a passionate commitment to make contact with reality. Knowing is not something that happens to us; it is something we seek to achieve. As with all activities, there is always the possibility of failure. "The possi bility of error is a necessary element of any belief bearing on reality, and to withhold belief on the grounds of such a hazard is to break off all contact with reality" (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 315).
The certainty that Descartes sought and claimed to have achieved is thus available only within a mental world that is not in contact with a reality beyond itself. His "I think, therefore I am" may be indubitable, but it makes no contact with anything beyond his own mind. We meet again the radical dualism between the mental world and the material world which is so fundamental in the legacy of Descartes. It is natural in this dualistic world that mathematics is seen as the necessary language of certain scientific knowledge, for mathematics operates in a mental world detached from anything outside the mind. Even as a schoolboy learning Euclid, I remember reflecting (perhaps because my pencil was blunt) that there is really no such thing as a point which has position but no dimensions or a line which had length but no breadth. All the elements in Euclidean geometry are ideal concepts which can only be related to material realities by approximation. The certainty of mathematical propositions, as Einstein often observed, is strictly proportionate to their remoteness from reality. That the only objective and therefore reliable knowledge is that furnished by science and that the proper form of scientific statements is mathematical - these are the popular ideas, so dominant in modern societies, that continue to inhibit us from making confident statements of (for example) religious faith because they are not amenable to this form of statement. Kurt Godel's demonstration that the fundamental axioms of mathematics are not self-justifying does not seem to have weakened the influence of the idea of mathematical certainty.
But we are moving into a postmodern era. This morning, as I am writing these words, there is much anxious discussion in the news both among leaders of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in the government about how to arrest the growing disinclination of students to take up science for their university studies. The only solutions offered consist of ways to make scientific work more financially lucrative. It does not seem to occur to those I heard on a news program this morning that there may be a deep and growing skepticism about science as a whole, and about its capacity to give meaning to human life even if it should prove to be financially rewarding. Polanyi draws attention to the lessons to be learned from the collapse of Greek mathematics after the death of Apollonius in 205 B.C. and speculates about the possibility of a similar collapse in our day (Personal Knowledge, pp. 192-93). What is clear is that the Cartesian confidence in mathematics as the locus of certainty is part of the same dualism that dominated classical thought, the dualism that separated a world of pure forms known by the mind from the world of material things known through our senses. Certainty belongs to the former, not to the latter. Only statements that can be doubted make contact with reality.
In his parable of the oxygen and the fuel, Polanyi speaks of the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism. That heritage is essentially a story, the story told in the Bible. The community of the Christian church understands itself and the human and cosmic history of which it is part in terms of the biblical story. Its being and life are incomprehensible apart from this story. Its liturgical actions are the reliving of this story. Of course we have to recognize that Christianity as it has developed and changed over the centuries has much in common with other religions, with various philosophies, and with various worldviews. But Christianity, as it presents itself at any time or place in history for inspection as an empirical reality, is always subject to judgment and correction in the light of that which it seeks to express and to embody, namely, God's actions for the creation and redemption of the world. The gospel, the account of these actions, is always in narrative form: "The Word became flesh," "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son... ," and so forth. The ecumenical creeds are also in narrative form. Above all, the Bible, taken as a whole and in its canonical form, is a unique interpretation of cosmic and human history in which the human person is seen as a responsible actor in human history, always being called to respond to the initiatives of the one who is both Creator and Savior. This book is unique. None of the other sacred scriptures of the world's great religions have a character anything like this. And it was this narrative which made Europe a cultural entity distinct from Asia, of which it was and is simply a peninsula.
It would contradict the whole message of the Bible itself if one were to speak of the book apart from the church, the community shaped by the story that the book tells. For more than one thousand years, during which the successive waves of invaders from Asia were slowly schooled into a new society, the Bible was the place where reliable truth was to be found. In the absence of printing, of course, it was not in the hands of more than a few scholars. But through the liturgy and preaching of the church and through all the avenues of art, drama, and popular festival, it provided the framework through which the world and its affairs were understood. And, of course, this understanding was not merely an intellectual affair. It was part of a total way of life, corporate and individual. The church was the bearer of the story. The story shaped the church. As a continually lived narrative, of which contemporary life was a part, the narrative gave shape to public life.
It is impossible to understand the distinctive character of Europe, that which makes it different (in spite of great internal diversity) from Asia or Africa, without grasping the uniqueness of this narrative. What makes the narrative unique is the character of the One who is the chief actor in the whole story, God - the God of Abraham, of Israel, of Jesus. Of course there is nothing unique about the word "God." There is, I suppose, no human language on earth which does not have a word which can be plausibly translated as "God." At least the Bible Societies have not yet found one. But, in terms of sovereignty over all creation and all history, there is nothing comparable to the God of the Bible. Throughout vast tracts of Asian culture the ultimate reality is not a personal God at all but such impersonal entities as Dharma, the Tao, or that ultimate reality of whom the Upanishads can only say Neti, neti- "not that, not that." Even when, as in many forms of Indian religion, there is a strong sense of a personal God to whom loving devotion is clue, there is not the sharply etched and unforgettably real character that we recognize in the God of the Bible. No one who has been deeply immersed in the biblical narrative could ever again entirely escape from the presence of that One, God, so tender and yet so terrible, so passionate in his wrathful love and his loving wrath, forever calling on those who turn their backs on him, forever humbling himself in tender appeal, forever challenging his children to the heights of utter purity, and finally accepting the shameful death of a condemned sinner in order to open for us the gate of glory. There is absolutely nothing in all the world's sacred scriptures that can be compared for a moment with this. And a society that has lived with this God for more than a thousand years can never, even when revolting against him, wholly cast off that memory. It can never again be sunk into the half-light of impersonal pantheism or primitive polytheism.
Now the point to be made here is as follows: A story cannot provide the kind of indubitable certainty which was the ideal of Descartes. As Lessing said, accidental happenings of history cannot prove eternal truths of reason. If we are in search of the kind of indubitable certainty which Descartes claimed, the Bible must be set aside. The Bible claims to be a true interpretation of universal history. Since we are not yet at the end of history and since it may yet contain many surprises, we cannot have indubitable certainty. The only possible responses to the claims that the Bible makes are belief or unbelief. There can be no indubitable proofs. No one has seen God so as to verify the claim that he exists. No one has seen the end of the world so as to be sure of the direction in which we have to go. There is no scientific way of testing the claims and promises that the Bible makes. There is no way of being indubitably certain that this is what history is really about and that this gives us the direction of our lives. It must be, as the church has always said, a matter of divine revelation accepted in faith (John 1:18).
But this, of course, is what the Age of Reason rejected. It saw reason and revelation as mutually opposed and called upon human beings to be bold enough to use their reason, to put away a childish dependence on divine revelation, and to use the God-given gift of reason to establish the facts for themselves. The question to be asked is, What do we mean by "the facts"? In an amusing phrase, Alasdair Maclntyre says that "fact" in modern parlance is "a folk concept with an aristocratic ancestry," the aristocrat in question being Lord Bacon, who advised his contemporaries to "abjure speculation and collect facts" (Mac- Intyre, After Virtue, p. 7). In using the term "speculation" Bacon referred to the universals of classical and medieval philosophy, such as essence, existence, substance, cause, and purpose. By "facts" he meant things which, unlike these others, are tangible and measurable. The original meaning of the word is, as I said earlier, that of the Latin factum, "something which has been done, or accomplished." In this original sense, one may properly say that the gospel is a statement of facts, of what God has done. But in the contemporary folk usage, of course, the gospel is not about facts.
With respect to the speculations he rejected, however, it is important to note that Bacon did retain one of these universals. He rejected the concept of purpose as a category of explanation but retained the concept of cause. This has had momentous consequences for the subsequent history of science. Even though in later philosophy the concept of cause has been rejected (David Hume), it has played a central role in the development of science. To understand the causes of things or to unravel the cause-effect linkages between different things is, in popularized science, to explain them. It is to show how things work. But to understand the purpose for which things exist has not been part of the work of science. Even in the study of animal behavior, where it would seem natural to the unscientific mind to sav that birds build their nests for the purposes of hatching and protecting their young, it is thought by (at least) some scientists that this is an unscientific way of talking and that the behavior of birds can be explained without the use of this concept. And in the much wider field of evolutionary studies, some scientists seek to explain the whole story of the genesis and development of human life as being entirely due to the operation of impersonal causes - though they often forget their principles by letting slip such phrases as "Nature has made provision for . .. ," or "natural selection has seen to it that...." If nature is the ultimate reality with which we have to deal, then - almost inevitably - nature has to be personified.
The elimination of the concept of purpose from our efforts to understand the world has momentous consequences. With one stroke it creates the split between fact and value, a split which is such an important part of our culture. The reason why it causes this split is obvious. If one has no idea of the purpose for which a thing exists, one cannot say whether it is good or bad. It may be good for some purposes but not for others. It has been a central axiom of modernity that one cannot argue from a statement of fact to a judgment of value.
Maclntyre counters this with an example: "This watch has not lost ten seconds in five years; therefore, it is a good watch." To most people this would seem an obvious contradiction of the fact-value dichotomy. But, as Maclntyre points out, we only move from the factual statement to the value judgment because we take it for granted that a watch is understood to be an instrument for measuring time. It is defined by its purpose. But if a visitor from outer space who had never seen a watch and had no idea whether it was for decorating the living room or for throwing at the cat were told that it had not lost ten seconds in five years, he would have no grounds for the conclusion, "It is a good watch." The visitor could discover by examination what made the watch work. He could discover, given time, all the causeeffect links from the tension on the spring to the movements of the hands on the face of the watch. Observation and reason would be enough for him to, in these terms, explain the watch without leaving any unsolved puzzles. But this research would not enable him to discover the purpose for which these pieces of metal were put together in this particular way. For him to discover this, someone would have to tell him - either the maker of the watch, or someone who was accustomed to using it for its proper purpose. In other words, he would have to depend on a personal communication or revelation. And he would have to accept this, at least initially, by faith in the one who told him.
Cause is something that can be discovered by observation and reason. Purpose is not available for inspection because, until the purpose has been realized, it is hidden in the mind of the one whose purpose it is. Suppose that going along a street, we observe men at work with piles of bricks and bags of cement, and we guess that a building is being erected. What is it to be? An office? A house? A chapel? There are only two ways to discover the answer: we can wait around until the work is complete and inspection enables us to discover what it is. If we cannot wait until then, we must ask the architect, and we will have to take his word for it. If the work in question is not the building of a house but the creation and consummation of the cosmos, the first alternative is not available to us. We shall not be present to examine the end product of cosmic history. If the whole thing has any purpose (and of course we may decide, as postmoderns do, that it has no purpose), the only way we can know that purpose is by a disclosure from the one whose purpose it is, a disclosure which we would have to take on trust. There is no escape from this necessity. The modern antithesis of observation and reason on the one hand versus revelation and faith on the other is only tenable on the basis of a prior decision that the whole cosmic and human story has no purpose and therefore no meaning. It is possible to make this assumption, but it is not necessary The question whether the cosmos and human life within it have any purpose other than the individual purposes we seek to impose on things is one that cannot be decided by observation. If we live with a prior assumption that human life has no purpose; then we shall act accordingly, and there will be no possibility whatsoever of discovering its purpose. As I have argued, only by an act of disclosure of the purpose of human life can we learn that it indeed has a purpose, and such an act of disclosure can only be personal, a revelation. Here we have what William James called a "closed option." There is no possibility of keeping an open mind. We have to act in order to live, and our actions will be determined by whether we believe the universe embodies a purpose other than our own or do not so believe. There is no third possibility
Polanyi used the phrase "personal knowledge" to define an understanding of human knowing that transcends the false dichotomy of objective and subjective. The argument I have pursued now brings me to the point where I have to ask whether or not we must recognize our knowing as personal knowledge in a further sense. Our argument leads to the suggestion that our knowing of reality will be defective if it does not recognize that this reality is only fully explicable by reference to a personal being. (I use the word "suggestion," not "proof.") This would lead to the thought that Polanyi's conception of a hierarchy of levels of explanation has to include a level beyond those we considered when discussing this part of Polanyi's thought. Atomic structure determines the way in which matter behaves and therefore defines the limits of what chemical configurations are possible, but it does not itself explain these configurations. Therefore, chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. Similarly, biology cannot be reduced to chemistry or to mechanics, although the behavior of all living animals is limited by the atomic, chemical, and mechanical features of their makeup. So also, to use the key example of Polanyi, the structure and composition of a machine can be explained in terms of the laws governing the physical and chemical properties of its parts, but these laws cannot explain the proper functioning of the machine; this can only be explained in terms of the purpose of the one who designed and constructed the machine. The physical, chemical, mechanical, and biological principles are all valid and necessary at their respective levels but are not adequate at the levels above them. Failure to recognize this is the fallacy in all forms of reductionism.
Therefore, if we are prepared to entertain and act on the possibility that the entire cosmos exists for some purpose and is not a chaos of purely random events, it follows that we have to recognize an upper level of explanation, namely, the theological level. We cannot have a total understanding of things without the cultivation of that particular kind of understanding which is concerned with knowing the nature and purpose of the One whose purpose is being realized in the entire history of the cosmos. Without calling into question the proper competence of all the lower levels of explanation - physical, chemical, biological, mechanical, sociological, and so forth - we must also acknowledge the proper role of theological inquiry as an essential part in the whole enterprise of human knowing.
At this point it is necessary to interject a caution. As for me and (I suspect) many in my generation, one of the crucial insights that made it possible to come to Christian faith was that of Martin Buber in his hook I and Thou. Buber brilliantly expounded the radical difference between two kinds of knowing: that in which I am the masterful actor handling inert material which I am free to interrogate, to manipulate, and to organize, and that in which I am seeking to know another person who can resist my efforts to know and who can interrogate me and make me the object of inquiry. At a time when a reductionist interpretation of science prevented me, like others, from believing in the possibility of God, this opened up a new view of the possibility of knowledge. But this distinction between two kinds of knowing, immensely important as it was, could also lead to a false separation. All our interpersonal relations are made possible by the mediation of material realities through sight, sound, and touch. They are made possible by the fact that, as persons, we share a common world of impersonal realities. To abstract ourselves from this shared world is impossible. The attempt to isolate a personal relationship from its actual context in realities of an impersonal kind leads into serious error. A bizarre example of this was the movement known as group dynamics in which people were asked to interact with each other in the absence of any given impersonal reality, such as a subject for discussion. For those who were not robust enough to dismiss the enterprise as absurd, it led to real damage.
The importance of this for the present discussion, however, is as follows: if we speak of the theological level as the highest level of explanation, we must not mean that theological explanation is allowed to invade the proper territory of the lower levels; they have a proper, God-given autonomy, though it is not an absolute autonomy. To absolutize the autonomy of a lower level is reductionism. Because, as Christian faith affirms, the cosmos is a creation by a personal God and not an emanation from an impersonal absolute, it has a relative autonomy given to it by its creator. This, as I have noted earlier, is one of the four basic creation principles expounded by the fourth century theologians, and without it the development of science would have been impossible. We are given the responsibility of discovering the principles which operate at each of the levels of explanation. Theology cannot take over the business of physics or, for that matter, of economics. We have to understand as much as possible both the laws of physics and the laws of economics, but it may also be necessary to have in mind the laws operating at different levels. The breakdown of a machine may be due simply to a defect in one of its parts: the material used was not strong enough for the part's function in the machine. But the breakdown may also be caused by using the machine for a purpose for which it was not designed. In that case, replacement of the worn-out part will not solve the problem. The breakdown of an economic order, such as we are witnessing in this last decade of the twentieth century, may perhaps be explained by failures to understand the way the economy works: there are indeed many (mutually contradictory) diagnoses being offered. It may also be due to a failure to recognize the purpose for which human life exists; the explanation could be theological. But even good theology cannot replace good economics.
Polanyi's reflections on the nature of scientific knowledge suggest a further step in our thinking about the nature of personal knowledge. Polanyi's argument opens the way for an exploration of a higher level of explanation which we would have to describe as the theological level, that is to say, the level at which we seek to know the purpose for which things exist. This, as I have said, implies a further extension of the range of the term "personal" with respect to our knowledge, including our knowledge of impersonal realities. The implication is that all our knowing is personal, not only in the sense that it involves the personal and passionate commitment of the knower but also in the sense that our knowledge will not be complete unless it presses beyond the impersonal realities (explored with the tools of physics, chemistry, biology, and the human sciences) to that personal reality which alone can carry a purpose for the whole, since purpose is a personal category. As I have said, Polanyi opens up the possibility and indeed the necessity of such a further move, but he does not himself enter into specifically theological discussion.
But there is one point in his work where this possibility and necessity seem remarkably clear. In The Tacit Dimension (1966), Polanyi addresses the question to which I have already referred: What is a problem? Scientific discovery begins with the recognition of a problem. If the work of the scientist is to be fruitful, the problem must be a good one; for there have been problems which have exercised human minds for long periods but which turn out to be no good, in the sense that the pursuit of a solution leads nowhere. But what is a problem? To recognize a problem, says Polanyi, is "to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars," and the problem is good if this intimation is true. To recognize a good problem is thus to see something which is hidden, and not visible.
This, however, is a self-contradiction. How is it to be explained? This and the question, What is a problem? were addressed long ago by Plato in the Meno. His answer was that all discovery was a remembering of past lives. Modern science, born and bred in a society that rejected this ancient Asian concept, has never accepted Plato's explanation but has gone on cheerfully making discoveries in spite of the logical absurdity involved. Polanyi's explanation is to acknowledge the power of the human mind to recognize "intimations of things hidden which we may yet discover" (The Tacit Dimension, pp. 21-23). The immediate implication which Polanyi draws is that, if all our knowledge is to be of the kind sought by Descartes, namely, certain knowledge capable of explicit formulation in precise terms, then scientific discovery will he forever impossible. But is it not legitimate to suggest a further implication? Polanyi depicts scientists engaged in research as being continually drawn forward by the intimation of patterns of coherence and intellectual beauty hitherto never explicitly stated. In this sense, scientists must be seen as people drawn by a reality beyond themselves. Is it not reasonable, then, to think of this reality as something more than a lifeless, impersonal "something"? Scientists, and indeed all serious scholars, speak often of the love of truth. But can love be finally satisfied with an impersonal "something"? Have we, perhaps, failed to draw out the full meaning of the words spoken by the apostle Paul to the scholars and debaters of Athens when he said that "the God who made the world and everything in it .... did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:24, 27)?
Here I can only answer that question by speaking of the fundamental affirmation of the gospel, namely, that the ultimate reality which is the object of all our search for truth has been made present in history in the person and work of Jesus Christ. "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us ... and we beheld his glory" (John 1:14). If that is true, then it must define the nature of all our search for truth, including our searches for truth in the world of impersonal entities. The theological level of inquiry, while not invading or calling into question the other levels on which explanation is to be sought, must be recognized as the ultimate one.
And this has immediate relevance to our contemporary situation. I have referred to the disquieting signs of a loss of faith in science. The debate sparked by Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present (1992) must be continued. No one doubts that science has brought immense benefits to humanity. No one wishes to be excluded from these benefits. And yet there is profound uneasiness concerning what science and the technology it has made possible are doing to us all. Polanyi's voice was an early cry intended to alert us to the danger that would destroy science if it was not faced. The debate between science and the Christian faith has for too long been overdramatized and radically skewed by those who want to propose science as the replacement for an outworn faith. The time has come when both scientists and theologians must address the question, Can science be redeemed?
But this brings us to the point at which we must recognize that the scope of the discussion has been too limited. There is a dimension of the question that we have not yet touched, and we must now enter into a discussion of it.