Chapter 6 Beyond the Scientific Horizon
Chapter 6
Beyond the Scientific Horizon
In 1885, Thomas H. Huxley, the great champion of Charles Darwin’s ideas in Victorian England, delivered a speech to mark the completion of a statue of Darwin, which would soon grace a London museum. In drawing the speech to a close, Huxley declares that science “commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”1 It is one of his most perceptive statements, and it deserves close attention.
Huxley is not simply noting the dangers which arise when science becomes the servant of the church or of any religious organization or theological orthodoxy. He sees equal danger in science’s becoming the servant of a doctrinaire atheism, or being seen as a weapon in a war against religious belief. Science, he argues, is science, not a tool in the hands of those with aggressive religious or manipulative anti-religious agendas. Though often portrayed as a critic of religion, Huxley’s main concern is to ensure that science is free to pursue its pursuit of truth without interference from dogmatism of any kind—whether religious or anti-religious.2
Science, when at its best and most authentic, has no creed, whether religious or anti-religious. As Huxley himself points out, it nevertheless has one, and only one, article of faith:
The one act of faith in the convert to science, is the confession of the universality of order and of the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not susceptible of proof.3
While there are those who insist that science makes and requires no judgement of faith, this is clearly not the case, in Huxley’s view. Science finds itself dependent upon certain working beliefs which are not “susceptible of proof,” which Huxley rightly terms “acts of faith.”
For obvious reasons, New Atheist writers have been reluctant to draw attention to Huxley’s insight, which contrasts sharply with the dogmatic insistence of Richard Dawkins that science is a faith-free zone. Dawkins is out of line with the philosophy of science here. Science has to make some basic assumptions—the sort of thing that the psychologist William James helpfully terms “working hypotheses.” The astonishing, almost pathological aversion of the New Atheism to faith-based judgements in science ultimately seems to reflect little more than a prejudice against religion and its vocabulary. The philosopher of science Michael Polanyi is one of many writers to emphasize the fundamental importance of the scientific belief in the rationality of the natural world, along with an expectation that this will continue to manifest itself in the empirical investigation of the world.
Yet is science by itself capable of satisfying the human quest for meaning? One of the most perceptive discussions of this question comes from the pen of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), who celebrates science’s capacity to explain our observations of the world, while nevertheless insisting on its failure to satisfy the deeper longings and questions of humanity. “Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems, leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions.”4 The fundamental virtue of science is that it knows when to stop. It only answers questions that it knows it can answer on the basis of the evidence. But human curiosity wants to go further than this. Human beings are unable “to do without all-around knowledge of the world, without an integral idea of the universe. Crude or refined, with our consent or without it, such a trans-scientific picture of the world will settle in the mind of each of us, ruling our lives more effectively than scientific truth.”
Ortega y Gasset declares that the twentieth century witnessed unparalleled efforts to restrain humanity within the realm of the exact and determinable. A whole series of questions are needlessly and improperly declared to be “meaningless,” because they go beyond the limits of the natural sciences. Ortega y Gasset declares that this premature dismissal extends to the great questions of life, such as “Where does the world come from, and whither is it going? Which is the supreme power of the cosmos, what the essential meaning of life?” However, we continue to wrestle with such ultimate questions of life, ignoring the demands of those who insist that they are meaningless. We cannot evade these questions, because wrestling with them is an inalienable aspect of being human. “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.”
To be human is to yearn for meaning and answers to the riddles of existence. Yet the scientific enterprise stops short of those ultimate questions, and rightly so. It knows its limits, and its limits are determined by evidence. But sometimes that evidence seems to point beyond itself, to another world just over the horizon, beyond scientific investigation. Ortega y Gasset uses an illuminating image in making this point.
Science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop. If the physicist detains[,] at the point where his method ends, the hand with which he delineates the facts, the human being behind each physicist prolongs the line thus begun and carries it on to its termination, as an eye beholding an arch in ruins will of itself complete the missing airy curve.
Ortega y Gasset’s evocative image of the ruined arch enables us to grasp an important point. We are not talking about a blind leap of faith in the dark, but the continuation of an intellectual trajectory beyond the thresholds of the scientific method. Faith may go beyond reason and evidence; it does not go against them, but continues their lines of thought.
Since scientists are—and remain—human beings, Ortega y Gasset suggests that many scientists find themselves experiencing a tension between their scientific calling and their basic humanity. As scientists, they restrict themselves to the domain of the empirical and demonstrable; as human beings, they know the need to go beyond the empirical and speak about issues of meaning and value. The quest for the “good life” is just as important for scientists as it is for everyone else. Yet the scientist realizes that the natural sciences are not going to help us determine what is good. We noted earlier Richard Dawkins’s observation that “science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.”5 I know of no scientist who dismisses ethical questions as meaningless or improper because science cannot answer them. Nor is the quest to lead the “good life” made redundant or delusional just because it involves going further than science can take us.
Science cannot deal with questions of meaning or value: it can only deal with matters of fact. Yet it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether deeper assumptions about the nature of reality—including the existence and nature and God—are embedded within the scientific method. Science makes no such explicit assumptions. But are such assumptions implicit? Does the scientific enterprise itself point to something which lies beyond its scope to investigate, yet upon which its successes ultimately depend? The theoretical chemist Charles A. Coulson, for example, points out the importance of religious convictions in explaining the “unprovable assumption that there is an order and constancy in Nature.”6 The British philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne takes this further, arguing that the explanatory capacity of faith in God is not limited to the fine details of reality, but extends beyond these to include the great questions of life that are either “too big” or “too odd” for science to explain.7
It is quite clear that many of the deepest and most engaging questions about the nature of the universe have their origins in a fundamentally religious quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe, with order that can be understood and trusted, emerged largely out of fundamental beliefs about the nature of God, expressed in the notion of the “laws of nature.” Scientific advance has disclosed the fundamental explicability of much of the natural world. Though some might see this as eliminating any notion of mystery, others have rightly pointed out that it raises a far deeper question: Why can we explain things at all? Scientists are so used to being able to make sense of the world that they take it for granted.8 Yet this is actually a rather curious phenomenon.
As Albert Einstein pointed out in 1936, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”9 The fact that the world “is comprehensible is a miracle.” For Einstein, explicability itself clearly requires explanation. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. The intelligibility of the natural world, demonstrated by the natural sciences, raises the fundamental question as to why there is such a fundamental resonance between the human mind and the structures of the universe. Here we see a general pattern: science raises questions which transcend its capacity to answer them. So where do we look for those answers?
All guides have their limits. Science is a good guide to truth, which falters when we yearn for meaning. If there is meaning within the world, science is simply not going to be able to disclose it. This is not a criticism of science. It is simply a plea to avoid discrediting science by making it say things that it can’t defend by its own methods—such as whether there is a God.
So what of God? As the noted biologist Stephen Jay Gould and countless others have insisted, the question of the existence and nature of God lies beyond the scientific method.10 It is certainly true that some aggressive atheists have tried to use science as a weapon against religion. Richard Dawkins, for example, argues that science and religion are locked in mortal combat today, just as they always have been. Scientists who believe in God are nothing more than collaborators or traitors, he claims.
Sadly, these views remain widespread in popular scientific culture. Yet as we noted earlier, historians of science have long since abandoned this “warfare” model of the relation of science and religion, as well as most of the alleged evidence in its support,11 pointing out that the relationship is far more complex than this simplistic stereotype suggests. Yet this historically outdated and scholarly debunked notion seems to be integral to Dawkins’s defence of his atheism in The God Delusion and elsewhere. The God whom Dawkins rejects is substantially derived from media stereotypes and urban myths, and his understanding of the relationship between science and theology seems to originate from the writings of Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), most notably his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896), whose shallow scholarship has been soundly rubbished by historians of science.
Dawkins also argues that science explains (or has the potential to explain) everything, including matters traditionally regarded as lying within the religious realm. The traditional scientific positivist outlook that seems so characteristic of the New Atheism holds that science and religion offer competing explanations. One day science will triumph, and religious explanations will fade away. There cannot be multiple explanations of the same things, and only the scientific explanation can be valid, claims the New Atheism.
Yet this is actually a very nineteenth-century way of arguing, resting on a failure to think critically about the nature of scientific explanation. Neuroscientist Max Bennett and philosopher Peter Hacker have recently explored the science-explains-everything outlook that Dawkins and others espouse: they have found it seriously wanting.12 For example, scientific theories cannot be said to “explain the world”—only to explain the phenomena which are observed within the world. Furthermore, Bennett and Hacker argue, scientific theories do not, and are not intended to, describe and explain “everything about the world,” such as its purpose. Law, economics, and sociology are examples of disciplines which engage with domain-specific phenomena, without in any way having to regard themselves as somehow being inferior to the natural sciences or dependent upon them.
The real issue has to do with levels of explanation. We live in a complex, multi-layered universe. Each level has to be included in our analysis. Physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology—to note only four sciences—engage with different levels of reality and offer explanations appropriate to that level. But they are not individually exhaustive. A comprehensive explanation must bring together these different levels of explanation, in that (to give an obvious example) the physical explanation of an electron is not in competition with its chemical counterpart.
My Oxford colleague John Lennox, who is a mathematician and philosopher of science, uses a neat illustration to make this point. Imagine a cake being subjected to scientific analysis, leading to an exhaustive discussion of its chemical composition and of the physical forces which hold it together. Does this tell us that the cake was baked to celebrate a birthday? And is this inconsistent with the scientific analysis? Of course not. Science and theology ask different questions: in the case of science, the question concerns how things happen: by what process? In the case of theology, the question is why things happen: to what purpose?
Imagine a cake being subjected to scientific analysis, leading to an exhaustive discussion of its chemical composition and of the physical forces which hold it together. Does this tell us that the cake was baked to celebrate a birthday? And is this inconsistent with the scientific analysis? Of course not. Science and theology ask different questions.
Here we see the important scientific principle of different levels of explanation, which supplement each other. This principle can easily be explored from everyday life. Consider a performance of your favourite piece of music. This can be scientifically described in terms of patterns of vibrations. Yet this perfectly valid explanation requires supplementation if it is to account for the full significance of the phenomenon of music and its impact upon us. Similarly, there is far more to a great painting than an analysis of its chemical components or the physical arrangement of its elements. Scientific and religious explanations can thus supplement each other. The problems start when scientists start pretending to be religious or theologians start pretending to be scientists. Science tells us a story about the history and nature of the world which we know and inhabit. But it does not tell the full story. Christianity is consistent with the story told by science, but it takes that story further. It tells the full story, of which science is but part.
At a very simple level, we could apply this approach like this. A scientific description of the world accounts for how it arose from an initial cosmological event (the fiery singularity of the “big bang”), which led, over a long period of time, to the formation of stars and planets, creating conditions favourable to the origination and evolution of living creatures. No reference is made or needs to be made to God. The Christian will speak of God bringing the world into existence and directing it towards its intended outcomes. For some, this process involves direct divine action; for others, it involves God’s creating and working through natural forces to achieve those goals. Yet these supplement each other’s accounts rather than contradicting each other.
A further argument advanced by Dawkins is that belief in God can be explained away on scientific grounds. One of Dawkins’s most characteristic and influential beliefs, which is repeated in the leading works of the New Atheism, is that belief in God is a delusion caused by “memes.” Dawkins first introduced the idea of the meme back in 1976. Towards the end of his Selfish Gene, he argues that there is a basic analogy between biological and cultural evolution: both involve a replicator. In the case of biological evolution, this replicator is the gene; in the case of cultural evolution, it is a hypothesized entity, which Dawkins called a “meme.”
For Dawkins, the idea of God is perhaps the supreme example of such a meme. People do not believe in God because they have given long and careful thought to the matter: they do so because they have been infected by a powerful meme, which has somehow “leapt” into their brains. Clearly the psychology of this approach is deeply problematic. Human minds don’t just passively absorb or generate ideas. Dawkins seems to think that we develop ideas in much the same way as we develop flu—we become infected by someone else.
In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins sets out the idea of memes as if it were established scientific orthodoxy, making no mention of the inconvenient fact that it has been relegated to the margins of mainstream scientific thought.13 Dawkins presents the “meme” as if it were an actually existing entity, with huge potential to explain the origins of religion. Dawkins is even able to develop an advanced vocabulary based on his own convictions—such as “memeplex.” Daniel Dennett also makes extensive use of the idea in his New Atheist manifesto Breaking the Spell (2006). The intellectual case for New Atheism has come to depend heavily on the idea of the meme, yet the serious problems with this notion have decidedly awkward consequences for this supposedly “scientific” approach to atheism.
To illustrate some of the difficulties of this approach, we may consider Dawkins’s characteristically bold and confident statement that “memes can sometimes display very high fidelity.”14 On the surface, this appears to be a statement of scientific fact. Yet on closer examination, it is nothing of the sort. Dawkins is actually restating an observation into his own idiosyncratic theoretical framework. The observation is the uncontestable and uncontroversial fact that ideas can be passed from one individual, group, or generation to another; Dawkins’s controversial theoretical interpretation of this observation—which is here presented as if it were fact—involves attributing fidelity to what most regard as being a non-existent entity. This is perhaps the greatest failing of memetics: its “achievements” are limited to simply redescribing a range of phenomena in its own idiosyncratic terms.
Furthermore, neither ideas nor cultural artefacts can be said either to be, or to contain, a self-assembly code. They are not “replicators,” as required by the accounts of cultural transmission and development offered by Dawkins and Dennett.15 Indeed, since there is no compelling scientific evidence for these entities, some have playfully—though not without good reason—concluded that there might even be a meme for believing in memes. To its many critics, the meme is just a biological fiction.
One telling indication of the failure of the meme theory to garner academic support can be seen in the history of the online Journal of Memetics, launched in 1997, arguably at the zenith of the cultural plausibility of the meme.16 The journal ceased publication in 2005. Why? The answer can be found in a devastating critique of the notion of the meme, published in the final issue of this journal, in which Dr Bruce Edmonds makes two fundamental criticisms of the notion of memes, which he believes have undermined its claims to plausibility in the scientific community.17
1. Memetics has fundamentally failed because it “has not provided any extra explanatory or predictive power beyond that available without the gene-meme analogy.” In other words, it has not provided any added value and new insights in terms of providing a genuinely new understanding of phenomena.
2. Memetics has been characterized by “theoretical discussion of extreme abstraction and over-ambition.” Edmonds singles out for special criticism unrealistic and over-ambitious attempts, often developed in advance of evidence, “to ‘explain’ some immensely complex phenomena such as religion.” Yet for many of its more fanatical advocates, this is precisely the point of memetics: to explain away belief in God.
Edmonds ends his incisive dismissal of the meme with what has turned out to be its epitaph: Memetics, Edmonds suggests, “has been a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than it has been to enlighten. I am afraid that memetics, as an identifiable discipline, will not be widely missed.”
The importance of this observation will be obvious. As we noted earlier, two of the leading works of the New Atheism make an appeal to the meme an integral part of their scientific case for arguing that belief in God can be explained away (most scientists would prefer to say “reductively explained”). Yet the notion of the meme turns out to be highly speculative, and it is significantly under-determined by the evidence. It remains to be seen what the long-term implications of this excessive reliance on such “a short-lived fad” (as termed by Edmonds) will be for atheist apologetics.
The idea that science “disproves” God is the kind of immensely simplistic statement that has featured prominently in recent populist atheism. It makes atheists feel good and encourages them to believe that the entire scientific enterprise is supportive of their beliefs. But it’s simply not right. It may be slick and simple, but it doesn’t square up with the way things are. Dawkins is simply wrong in asserting that all real scientists are or ought to be atheists. Why are so many scientists religious, despite the professional criticism that their faith often attracts?
The obvious and most intellectually satisfying explanation of this is not difficult to identify. It is well known that the natural world is conceptually malleable. It can be interpreted, without any loss of intellectual integrity, in a number of different ways. Some “read” or “interpret” nature in an atheistic way. Others “read” it in a deistic way, seeing it as pointing to a creator divinity, who is no longer involved in its affairs. God winds up the clock and then leaves it to work on its own. Others take a more specifically Christian view, believing in a God who both creates and sustains. Others take a more spiritualized view, speaking more vaguely of some “life force.”
The point is simple: nature is open to many legitimate interpretations. Science, in itself and of itself, is neutral. It can be interpreted in atheist, deist, theist, and many other ways—but it does not demand to be interpreted in any of these ways. One can be a real scientist without being committed to any specific religious, spiritual, or anti-religious view of the world. This, I may add, is the view of most scientists I speak to, including those who self-define as atheists. Unlike Dawkins, they can understand perfectly well why some of their colleagues adopt a Christian view of the world. They may not agree with that approach, but they’re prepared to respect it.
Yet this leaves open the question that we have explored in earlier chapters. Since nature can be interpreted in many ways, which is the best interpretation? Since the universe can be explained in different manners, which is the best of these explanations? How well does any given framework of meaning make sense of what is actually observed? Earlier, we noted C. S. Lewis’s characteristic assertion that Christianity makes sense in itself and makes sense of everything else. So what is this lens that the Christian brings to the observation of the world? What are its key elements? In the following chapter, we shall consider some of the basic themes of the Christian way of making sense of the world.