IT will be metaphysics - that place where science and religions truly meet - that gives us the big answers, writes biologist
Colin Tudge. (pic)
The present view of life, or at least the view that informs the policies of the most powerful governments, is hard-nosed, no-nonsense, stripped to the bone - and rooted in science. All of which would be fine, and just what the world needs, if only the politicians, bankers and corporate bosses who run the world really understood what science is, and what it isn't; what it can do and what it cannot.
The version of science that prevails and, alas, is often encouraged by the scientists themselves in the interests of making a living is crude in the extreme. And then, in turn, this crude and ultra-materialist science is co-opted to the cause of an even cruder economic dogma known as neo-liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human beings are made most happy by material goods, and that progress means more stuff.
The piles of money thus generated are used in part to support more of the same kind of science, and so it goes on, round and round, in a positive feedback loop. As the merry-go-round continues, the world falls apart and humanity grows more desperate; the poor obviously so, the rich looking over their shoulders.
But science doesn't have to be like this. When science first began in the Middle Ages, and through the 17th century when it began to come into its own, it was conceived as an exercise in metaphysics; an aspect of scientific discourse that has, over these past few hundred years, gone missing.
As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at The George Washington University, Washington DC, observes, the loss of metaphysics from the western psyche "is most directly responsible for our modern predicament".
Because science, stripped of its metaphysical context, has encouraged us to treat other people, our fellow creatures, and even the Earth itself, with what amounts to contempt. And it has caused us to horribly overreach.
In his now almost 15-year old TV documentary Man and Nature, Professor Nasr summarised beautifully what metaphysics actually is: "the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the Absolute and, in its light, the relative". And crucially: "It can only be obtained through intellectual intuition and not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually understood".
Metaphysics does not necessarily or exclusively belong to religion, but in practice it seems to: and the great founders of modern Western science - Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Robert Boyle, John Ray (all Christians) - were deeply devout albeit in a huge variety of ways; and so too were their medieval predecessors, both Christian and Muslim. All these great thinkers saw their science in the same way that the composer J.S.Bach, some decades later, saw his music: all was for the glory of God.
The early scientists practised science so that they, and the world, could appreciate God's works more fully. For them, science was an act of worship. Certainly they thought that their science could be useful. Newton, for example, was financed for a time by the admiralty because astronomy, obviously, could improve navigation. But, even knowing that their science might have practical application, they surely would not have supposed as their modern successors have that they could understand the universe so exhaustively that they could take over the world. The scientists of old sought to work more harmoniously and fruitfully with Nature, which they took to mean with God. They did not presume to usurp.
So, what changed? A whole succession of events, is the answer. Firstly, in the 18th century, came the Enlightenment: the supreme age of rationalism. It began to seem to thinkers at that time that all facts could be known, and - guided by the inexorable logic of mathematics - that, simply by applying the power of reason, all could be understood. To be sure, the greatest thinkers of the 18th century, including David Hume and Immanuel Kant, warned that rationality itself, and indeed the human mind, has its limits.
There is a limit, of course, to what we can understand, and there are flaws in the methods by which we seek that understanding. However, the message that emerged from the Enlightenment was quite the opposite. Omniscience, it seemed, was within our close grasp, and rationality - straight thinking: empirical observation and math - would be the way to achieve it. Thus theology, and religion in general, began to seem embarrassingly old-fashioned.
And as the 18th century rationalist zeal continued, the 19th century brought a lot more change in similar vein. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the rise of modern earth sciences and, in particular, of modern palaeontology, both of which threw serious doubts on the bible's Creation story in Genesis: suggesting, at the very least, that this account, if taken literally, was hard to square with the now known facts on the ground.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection has often been blamed for the loss of faith in the 19th century, but the truth is that this trend was gathering momentum well before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Indeed, the theme ran right through 19th-century literature and philosophy, from Dostoyevsky to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
The 19th century also brought the rise and rise of big-time engineering, from the bridges of Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the steam locomotive and the towering skyscrapers of Chicago, and by the end of that century, the rise, too, of industrial chemistry. It began to seem, to many, that humanity really could and would finally control the world - that God really was now redundant.
Finally, towards the end of the 19th century came the rise of positivism: basically, the belief that we could understand everything we needed to understand and that was possible to understand, and that we could achieve this simply by observation; by reasoning and maths - in other words, by science. Science, it was fondly supposed back then, provided certainty and would prove its assertions.
In the early 20th century, the logical positivists went further, insisting that any assertion that could not be proved was literal nonsense. Since they accepted the assumption that science could prove its theories, and nothing else could, they believed this meant science alone should be taken seriously. Metaphysics, though, does not ask questions of a kind that can be answered with certainty, and with proofs; and so it was that metaphysics went right out the window and right out of people's heads.
The behaviourists, too, contrived to explain the psychology of animals and of human beings as simply a series of reflexes. Physicists and biologists alike provided more and more detailed knowledge of the workings of the universe, down to and including the structure and modus operandi of DNA.
By the 1970s, we had "genetic engineering" - the transfer of DNA between different individuals that could be of quite different species - and so it to seem that we human beings really could control life itself, even create brand-new life forms to order.
GMOs - genetically modified organisms, notably in the form of GM crops such as maize and soya - began being presented as "the saviours" of the world, as if we would all starve without them (this being a key theme of The Future of Food and Farming, the latest report by Professor Sir John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser).
But the 20th century also, for those who cared to listen, sowed huge seeds of doubt. The physicists showed that the universe is innately unpredictable. The fundamental particles of which it is composed behave randomly to a significant extent.
And so even if we could really understand the universe (which we cannot), we could never with any accuracy predict its behaviour. Science philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out that in reality science does not prove anything beyond all doubt. At best, it can simply disprove what is impossible. All its theories are provisional.
Kurt Godel, the Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher, showed us that all mathematical statements that are not simply matters of definition (as in 2 + 2 = 4) contain some component that itself cannot be proved, which means they, too, to some extent are all arbitrary and that math is not the great unequivocal arbiter of truth that it was once taken to be.
Specifically, the late 20th century naturalists and psychologists showed that the psychology of animals cannot sensibly be described in behaviourist terms - essentially as a string of reflexes: in particular, Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, is now writing of the politics of animals, and the empathy that exists between them. And that the once simple thinking behind genetic engineering - the notion that if we fiddle with DNA we can turn out new organisms in order - is now known to be extraordinarily naive, because the relationship between individual genes and the form and behaviour of the whole animal or plant is far from simple.
The British biologist Sir Peter Medawar summarised this pretty well when he pointed out that science is nothing more or less than "the art of the soluble". That is, scientists address only those questions they think they have a reasonable chance of answering. And they appear to provide such certain answers only because they take such care to tailor the questions.
In the end, science, like all human understanding, is just narrative: a story that we tell ourselves. What we call "truth" in science is just the story that we happen to find the most convincing. Clearly, the notion that science can make us omniscience is nonsense. The greater and even more dangerous idea that we might achieve omnipotence is an even bigger nonsense.
So, what do we do now?
We need to acknowledge that the past 300 years, from the Enlightenment onwards, has largely been a diversion. Perhaps this was necessary - to show us the limits of rationality, which includes the limits of science. But now it should be obvious that this particular party is well and truly over. We need to return to an earlier position. We need to reinstate the concept of metaphysics.
Metaphysics asks the very biggest questions, including questions of values, which scientists are so careful not to address because they are not "soluble" by the methods of science.
Rational thinking is of course vital to serious inquiry, but it is not sufficient. If we don't want to limit our understanding to what we can see and measure and stub our toes on, we have to employ ways of thinking that are not, strictly, those of ratiocination. In practice, this means we must cultivate our intuitions.
Intuition is a broad-brush term, like "mind", and "consciousness", but it's none the worse for that. It means, broadly, what we feel in our bones to be true. Thus, intuition includes everything from our reflex fear of heights to our more specific fears of spiders or snakes, and includes our intuitive feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye: an intuitive feel, that is, for transcendence.
Specifically, the idea of transcendence is that the universe isn't just "stuff", with spaces in between. The universe itself is mindful. THe elusive term "spirituality" means just this: a feeling of being directly in touch with the mind of the universe. It isn't simply a hormone-induced dreaminess occasioned by sunsets and Schubert, but truly a feeling for transcendence.
Intuition and, specifically, the intuitive feeling for transcendence - for a reality behind what can be directly seen and measured - is, as i see it, the raw material of religion. Religion is not blind intuition, but the general feeling for transcendence which becomes embedded in a grand, all-embracing narrative. The task of religion is to cultivate intuition.
In theology, intuition and ratiocination are in perpetual dialogue, each testing and drawing on the strengths of the other. In Christianity we can see this in the New Testament with Thomas, the disciple who expressed his doubts because what he was asked to believe seemed to offend his reason. Faith is what we achieve when we decide, rationally, to trust our intuition.
Scientists themselves of course rely on their intuition, as all of us must. The history of science is littered with stories of scientists who suddenly see, in a flash - not quite out of the blue but more or less - what is the case. My own favourite example is that of the Nobel Prize winning cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, who, sitting under a tree (trees seem good for intuition) suddenly perceived that genes may move around within the genome - the beginnings of the "jumping gene". She said it took her half a second to realise this and 3 hours to explain it to her colleagues. In this she was one up on Einstein who said that he perceived relativity in a flash and then spent the rest of his life explaining it.
Scientists must use their intuition, too, to tell them what is true. The math alone doesn't reveal the truth. It merely suggests possibilities. Most famously, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prizewinner Paul Dirac said he judged the truth of an equation by its beauty. As Keats put the matter, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...that is all ye need to know". Indeed, the greatest scientists, like the greatest poets, are the most intuitive.
Science, properly conceived - including its limitations - is wonderful. I love it. I have spent my life on it. But it should be seen as Newton and Ray saw it: not as a means to take the world by the neck and bend it to our will, but as the means by which to admire the world and everything in it as fully as we are able.
Science in its standard form is just an exercise in applied materialism: the world and our fellow creatures are reduced to a resource, to be turned into commodities, to be sold for money.
Anyone who prevents us from doing this - who stands in the way of "progress" - is conceived as the enemy, and pushed aside, with the help of more science. The whole process is vile.
Religion is also conceived as the enemy, and indeed the people who stand in our materialist path are often dismissed as religious fanatics. Unfortunately, there are religious fanatics who respond by dismissing all science. The resulting spat makes for good television if you like that sort of thing, and it engages some of the world's best-paid "intellectuals", but it is nonsense nonetheless and unworthy of us all.
In truth, when science and religion are properly conceived, we can see that they belong together. They are not merely equal-but-separate. Religions properly conceived attempt to provide a complete narrative, a complete account of the world, and so should embrace the more limited agenda of science.
When science is embedded within its religious matrix the two together are the stuff of metaphysics, seeking to understand what the world is really like and where we belong within it, and what, therefore, our attitude should be towards it.
We might appropriately end with a quote from Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
(Source: Resurgence magazine, Sept/Oct 2011)
