Faithful Skeptics

Is science spiritually destructive? Does it throw cold water on every flickering spark of mystery? In chasing the fairies from their hills does it leave in its wake a landscape devoid of spirit? Is science the enemy of the soul? …. I propose the following metaphor:

Let this, then, be the ground of my faith: All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or ever will have, is as an island in the sea of mystery. We live in our partial knowledge as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea. We dike and fill. We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring. And occasionally, at certain disquieting moments in history (Galileo, Einstein, et al) a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts, reclaims knowledge that has been built up by years of patient work, and forces us to retreat to the surest, most secure core of what we know, where we huddle in fear and trembling until the storm subsides, and then we start building again, throwing up dikes, pumping, filling, extending the perimeter of our knowledge and our security.

Knowledge is an island in the sea of mystery. The metaphor takes its power from a firmly held fact: We live in a universe that is infinite, or effectively so. Our brains are finite…our mental maps of the world are therefore necessarily finite. As time passes, the scale and detail of our maps increase, but they no more exhaust the worldscape they describe than a map of the Grand Canyon depletes [its] power….

If we accept the knowledge is a finite island in a sea of inexhaustible mystery then two corollaries follow: 

1) the growth of the island does not diminish the sea’s infinitude and 

2) the growth of the island increases the length of shore along which we encounter mystery…. 

We are at our human best as creatures of the shore, with one foot on the hard ground of fact and one foot in the sea of mystery. Bureaucrats, technocrats and scientific drudges keep to the high ground, their noses fixed in ledgers and laboratory notebooks. New Age dreamers flounder in water over their heads, with near horizons. It is at the shore that the creative work of the mind is done – the work of the artist, poet, philosopher, and scientist….

At its best, scientific skepticism is a manifestation of curiosity, intelligence, and imagination – in a word, the best of the human spirit. It slowly, patiently builds the domain of knowledge, pushes back the encroaching darkness, the demons of the deep, but it never exhausts the infinitude of mystery. Asked if he was religious, Einstein replied: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernable concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion.”

 

—Chet Raymo in "Skeptics and True Believers"

The Root of Empiricism is Rationalism

"Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

– Richard Lewontin