In the last two posts, the emphasis has been primarily on the nature of science itself as it has developed, especially in the 19^th and 20^th centuries—some sketching of its background, how it might be defined, what its characteristics are, how it operates, what form its results might take. And while I’ve already tiptoed around it a bit, I want us to turn more deliberately now to what “picture” of nature science might give us, with the already expressed caveat that “picture” is the wrong word and we’ll have to fix that as we make our way through the maze that leads to that representation-by-another-name of the natural world that is our human habitat.

The Inherited 18^th Century Viewpoint

            While this topic no doubt seems like a step backward, since clearly a great deal has changed since then, to some degree we are still the heirs of some of the views of the 18^th century. Bertrand Russell—early to mid-20^th century philosopher and, among other things, mathematician, historian and Nobel laureate—in his book, The Impact of Science on Society (1952), noted that there were three ingredients especially important to the scientific outlook of the 18^th century which we have largely inherited and basically adopted.

• First, statements of fact should be based on observation,  not unsupported authority. While we noted that in the last post and it seems obvious to most of us, at least as related to science, this is a conception which hardly existed before the 17^th and 18th centuries. Aristotle, for instance, said women have fewer teeth than men—although he was married twice, it apparently never occurred to him to count his wives’ teeth. He also said that children are healthier if they are conceived when the wind is in the north—one supposes the two Mrs. Aristotles had to run out and look at the weather vane before going to bed!
• Second, the physical world is an autonomous, self-perpetuating system—it is beautifully built to take care of itself. This linchpin of the scientific outlook tended to lead many either to atheism—there is no God—or to deism—the God that created the universe does not intervene in it or interact with humanity. We will venture more later into the relationship of religion to the natural world presented by science. That said, it is still one goal of science to bring all phenomena into the realm of “nature.”
• Finally, abandonment of the notion of purpose. Before Darwin, for example, adaptations of plants and animals to their environments were explained by Divine Purpose. True, some of the explanations were a bit odd. If rabbits were theologians, they might think the exquisite adaptation of weasels to the killing of rabbits hardly a matter calling for prayers of thanksgiving. And there was a conspiracy of silence, even among human theologians, about the Divine purpose of, say, tapeworms and fleas.  Nevertheless, it was difficult to account for such things in any way other than the Creator’s intent.

These days, as inheritors of the 18^th century rejection of divine intention, such “teleological” explanations—the accounting for phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise—are largely obsolete/outmoded. Why do squirrels gather acorns in the fall? It may tickle our fancies or stir our poetic imaginations to talk about their foresight in storing food for the winter, but science would indulge in no such foolery. It would talk about genetic programming, some neurological button pushed by changes in temperature or climatic pressure, or a biological clock set to go off once a year. And some scientists—but not all of them—would speak of human responses in much the same way. J.B.S. Haldane—an early to mid-20^th century scientist known for his work in physiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology—famously quipped,

“Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he is unwilling to be seen with her in public.”

More about that later.

The Elements in the (Changing) Current Scientific Picture

            The current scientific picture (yes, I know, we need to get rid of that word, and we shall!) of nature constantly changes as new knowledge is gained. Some things are “known” but not yet fully, or even partly, understood: such as what the function is, if any, of the human appendix, the nature and source of human consciousness, why we have finger prints or blood types, how life originated.  In other cases—such as black holes, quarks, preons, memory molecules and molecular memory,  or the identity of dark matter—even some of the facts are still in doubt.

One of the foremost researchers in brain function, a Harvard neurobiologist (whose name I seem to have misplaced), told his audience at a conference I attended years ago that while great scientific strides are being made in understanding how the brain works—e.g. how certain neurons “fire”—neurobiology hasn’t a clue what intelligence is.  And I will never forget hearing George Schweitzer—Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, who also held a doctorate in the philosophy of science—saying in an address at Mars Hill College in the mid-1980s, “half of what I tell you will probably not be true . . . I just don’t know which half.”

            So let me “go out on a limb” and venture some reflections from the viewpoint of a humanist layperson.  From that admittedly simplistic perspective, there are three things that emerge in the scientific dominion: the world of the “very large,” the cosmos itself; that of the “very small,” the elementary particles; and that of all the “middle sized things” in between, from the sun and the earth, including humanity itself,  down to the atoms and molecules. If we probe deeply enough into each of the three areas—whether we go out into the deep space of the cosmos, or down into the world of subatomic particles, or probe into the nature of the human psyche—we find ourselves nodding to the oft-quoted observation of Werner Heisenberg, theoretical physicist and key pioneer of quantum mechanics, that “the universe is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.”

            Ironically, at the very time that the average person, like me,  was being awed by the capabilities of science—especially as it was joined with applied technology—scientists themselves recognized that they had no magic key to the nature of things. There is no “bottom line” in nature, no deepest place where it all makes tidy sense. “Out there” we meet the curvature of space and time, and “down there” the strange mirage-like character of elementary particles—some of which seem as disembodied as the grin of the Chesire Cat.  And in the middle-size world the strangest phenomena are the most familiar things of all—the self-awareness that each of us has and the mysterious frontier along which the mental and physical worlds meet. A contemporary philosopher of science (whose identity I also seem to have misplaced) offered the following judgment:

“We can no longer say, the world is like this, or like that. We can only say, our experience up to the present is best represented by a world of such-and-such a character. I do not know what model will best represent the world of tomorrow, but I do know that it will coordinate a greater range of experience than that of today.”

Limitations of the Scientific Portrayal

            Science has obviously given us a great deal of reliable knowledge upon which we can and do agree. But it has done that best, as noted before, when dealing with subjects that lend themselves to mathematical formulation and verification by controlled experiment. Increasingly, the reliance of science on complex instruments, complicated processes, and high order mathematics places its findings out of the range of most of us. It becomes a new Tower of Babel. Not only does it communicate in a language most of us, certainly not I, can neither speak nor understand, it abstracts the quantitative aspects of our experience—what can be counted, weighed, measured—but it has found no way to deal with the qualitative elements of our lives—with values, with “purpose,” or with the “meaning” of the whole.

            In that vein, Huston Smith, acclaimed scholar of religious studies and philosophy,  in his book, Why Religion Matters (2001), states that there are some things science cannot “. . . get its hands on,” such as values in their final and proper sense, existential and global meanings, final causes, and quality (pp. 197-199).  He argues that science leaves much of the world untouched and that a religious worldview is the only entity that gives humanity a sense of purpose and belonging. While science and technology have made and continue to make valuable contributions to the advancement of society, he insists that neither science nor technology can fill the “purpose” and “why” vacuum inside the life of every person. Only religion, he says, can do that.

            Carl Sagan, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, in his book, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979) also spoke of the limitations of science, but in a much different way. He did  not describe himself as an atheist, but he didn’t believe in God in the traditional sense and also rejected traditional religion. He argued that

“the goal of science is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things.  It is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. . . . [And his point is that] science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

            To put it plainly, science can never give us a total account of the world, nor in most cases do scientists claim that it can. The question, then, that each of us must answer is

• whether we will turn to religion, as Huston Smith argued, or to some “way of thinking” other than science to provide us with the sense of meaning and purpose that we crave or require, or
• whether we will be content with what science can tell us about how the natural world works, but not what it means in any religious or metaphysical sense.

Although we have now departed from the original terminology, we began with the question about what “picture” of nature science might give us. While the notion that it gives us anything approaching a consensus picture of nature is pretty much “blowing in the wind,” it is finally the “us” that it now comes down to.

What is our relationship to the natural world that science continues to dissect and describe for us and the one that we experience on a daily basis?  We will explore this final question in the next post . . . or two.