Believe Differently

I started writing this as a response to Saj’s comment on my post on scientific truth, but actually I got a little airborne in my thinking and decided to frame it as a new post.

Saj quoted James Watson:

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

… and got me thinking.

I must emphasize that my posts in the category on Faith & Science are not an attempt to invalidate scientific endeavour but more about trying to situate it in its proper perspective. I am frustrated by the positivistic attitude which tends to equate truth with scientific truth – what has been called scientism. I kind of like the Watson quote because it does emphasize that there is an “everything else” – and it is that “everything else” which really matters to me.

“Everything else” cannot be reduced to simple matters of cause and effect; and this is where I see scientific endeavour limited. Although we, as human beings, inhabit what seems a deterministic reality, I passionately understand myself to be free. I am subject to deterministic “laws” but I am not ruled by them. I realize that there is a view that I might simply have been fooled into believing in my freedom but I do not subscribe to such reductionist ideologies.

 It is the human condition which interests me. There is truth which cannot be captured within scientific theory; truth that perhaps can only be heard in a melody, or glimpsed in a work of art. This is why I am drawn to consider the “human coefficient” within scientific endeavour.1 It not so much the theories in themselves which intrigue me but more the poetic imagination and creativity that conceives of them; not the inductive method but more the wonder about how that method actually works. This is why I am at pains to emphasize the subjectivity of scientific discovery.

There is a mystery surrounding our humanity which cannot be explored using scientific means. It is knowledge too delicate to survive reductionist enquiry. It cannot be ascertained impersonally or objectively but perhaps inhabits the interpersonal. Although it can be glimpsed in the beauty of a mathematical equation it cannot be captured by such.

As far as I am concerned, we live in a world of “metaphor rather than measure”.  Although we dissect our reality into categories for interrogation, there is something beyond those categories that eludes us. I believe there is a mystery at the heart of our humanity. A wondering that cannot be figured but only explored. We create theories, philosophies, works of art, write stories, poems, songs and music and somehow, in all of this, reach for something unreachable. There is an insatiable wondering at the centre of our humanity and, for me, caught up in the midst of all of this mystery, I sense God.  It is not so much that he turns up as the answer, but more that I find him asking the same questions.  It is as if he too is appreciating the mystery, that there is a sense of participation and shared experience.

Such musing are not so orthodox, but I wonder, if when in the book of Genesis it talks of us bearing the image of God, that there is not also a hint, that in our humanity, we share more than we might realize with the divine.
 

1. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Rouledge, 1958), 17 [↩]