The pandemic has taught us we need to “follow the science”. How thankful we are for science’s insights and power, increasing our understanding of the world through systematic observation, measuring and experimentation. The benefits for us all are immense. So much so that its limitations can easily be overlooked.
The feelings that motivate and shape most human behaviour, such as love, hate, courage, guilt, fear and wonder are not easily accessible to science. Such scientific explanations that are forthcoming are often expressed in evolutionary terms, claiming that such feelings have developed as subjective emotions so that our species can survive and prosper. Such explanations do not allow these feelings or the intellectual concepts they represent to have any objective identity in their own right.
Take, for example, a glorious sunset or the wild roar of a stormy night. In purely scientific terms, both they and our feelings about them are purely a matter of physics, chemistry and biology. We may be inspired to write music or paint pictures about them, but to think they have any inherent beauty or magnificence in themselves is nonsense. Were we not there to observe and hear them, the notions of beauty, glory and wildness would have no meaning at all.
Considered in this materialistic, scientific light, the same could be said about justice and goodness. It is only because we, as humans, give such abstract ideas reality by inventing and naming them, that they exist at all. We do so because we need them to guide our behaviour and make life tolerable. Humanism, at least in the way it is often understood today, claims that our human ability to create and develop them, and to persuade each other to respect them, is the only source of their significance or authority.
This proposition strikes me as both unconvincing and dismal. Anything that today we decide to call good (or bad) can equally well be dismissed as bad (or good) tomorrow. We are quite capable of building regimes founded on racist, nationalist and imperialist ideologies, proudly advancing them by means of violence and cruelty, and there is no reason why we could not do so again. In human hands, the notions of justice and goodness are flexible. The claim that reason and science provide a secure and reliable foundation for them is an empty one, for they lie beyond the scope of either.
As both science and philosophy continue to explore the profound questions of existence and life, the answers seem as illusive as ever. The nature of space and time, the uncertainties that lie at the heart of matter at the quantum level, the existence of dark matter and dark energy, the origin and destiny of the universe, why the fundamental laws of physics take the character they do, what it means to be self-conscious – such questions occupy the best minds in our world, but as soon as moments of clarity emerge they lead to further uncertainties and conundrums.
Understanding the most fundamental issues we face about ourselves and the universe we inhabit – even knowing what the right questions should be – seems to be beyond us. Perhaps this is the way it should be. Who are we to think we are capable of such knowledge?
What we need is humility in the face of our obvious limitations. We may be tempted to think that we are on our way to mastering ourselves and our environment, but the truth is that, in spite of the great technological strides we have made, we are no closer to discovering the fundamental truths of what it means to exist and be human than our ancestors were.
Throughout human history, people have looked to religious faith for help, not so much to understand the world as to cope with living in it well. This is not to abandon reason but to accept our limitations, and to acknowledge our need for a secure and meaningful foundation for life. Intellectually, it is possible that we live in a meaningless universe where supposedly grand concepts such as beauty and justice are merely passing fancies we invent for ourselves. On the other hand, it is possible that the yearning we have for purpose and meaning is pointing us towards a more reliable foundation for existence and morality, one which by its very nature is inaccessible to intellectual investigation or proof. When Jesus Christ called people to recognize that the Kingdom of God had come near, this latter possibility was what he was talking about.
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