On the Religious Dimensions of Scientific Activity

The activity of knowing, like any major cultural activity, points beyond itself to a ground of ultimacy which its own forms of discourse cannot usefully thematize, and for which religious symbolization is alone adequate. These remarks about science as a human activity, as will be obvious, are based on many wiser heads than my own: on historians of science such as Charles Gillispie, John C. Greene, and Thomas Kuhn, on a student of the language of science such as Stephen Toulmin, on such philosophers of science as Michael Polanyi and Bernard Lonergan, and finally on the philosophical-theological work in this field of Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich.

Each of these men, in his own way, has challenged the traditional naturalistic account of science as an impersonal activity based on a cool, tentative, logical intellect alone, drawing inductions by rules from given data, to form theories or hypotheses which can then be objectively tested by experience. If science be in fact such an impersonal activity of a disembodied, uncommitted intellect, the only relevant questions about this method are of course logical questions, and a complete understanding of science is thus achieved when the logical structure of its method, the status of its theoretical terms, and the logical meanings of such acts as verification or falsification are expounded. Such a view of science as the imposition of an impersonal method on the given data of experience, and therefore to be characterized only by its logical structure and implications, is, to be sure, still widely held today; if it be accurate, then there are, needless to say, few theological elements in science.

One might also add that there are few human elements there. Science so understood seems less a creative act of human autonomy than the automated act of logical machines. Ironically, science, which has been that aspect of modern culture which historically has most evidenced the power and vigor of human autonomy over against the imposition of supernatural authorities, has in our latter scientific day tended to be understood so as almost completely to dissolve again these human elements in favor of an impersonal logical system of inference, deduction, and verification. If the human act of creativity involved in knowing was once lost in a supernaturalist framework, it is no less currently obscured when scientific method is interpreted in purely objectivist terms as merely a mixture of objective experience and an objective logic.

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The history of science, then, reveals that in actual practice science is based on creative leaps of imaginative vision. The heuristic process of knowing is, therefore, not founded merely on impersonal principles of inquiry and of validation applied to given facts, for at its inception each new view would merely be rejected by every current relevant mode of inquiry and of verification. Only those "converted" to the fundamental vision of a new point of view would allow as scientifically plausible the way the new vision poses questions and the problems it brings to light; only the "converted" would recognize the relevance and even the existence of its data, and regard its results as authoritative.

The most fundamental principles of science, therefore, are not based on objective proof; rather they are based on the convictions of those who hold them that this way of viewing things has relevance and fruitfulness. And even "fruitfulness" can be established objectively only in the future, through work accomplished in the slow inquiries of the normal science that results when the new vision has become orthodoxy. In itself, therefore, and at its inception the new vision is affirmed in risk and therefore in passion, and essentially it is self-validating, providing reasoned answers and valid tests apparent only to those who hold its general contours to be true.

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When man knows, as when he values, he makes contact with something ultimate or unconditioned within and yet distinct from the relative and contingent character of what he knows.

As we recall, Augustine reasoned that in all acts of cognition, man's mind came into contact with something that transcends it, something eternal, absolute, unconditioned, and divine, which judged the mind and its knowing and so was not created by man's mind. This was Truth and so, argued Augustine, in relation to Truth in knowing, man was related to an absolute, eternal reality. This platonic analysis in its ancient form is not possible for us: in modern experience all truth is tentative, earthy, conditioned, and relative – we know no absolute truth anywhere, and do not expect to find any. Our question thus concerns the present validity of Augustine's view: what in the method and enterprise of modern science, as the process of human inquiry, is there, now translated into our contemporary modes of thought, that roughly corresponds to the absolute and unconditioned of which Augustine spoke? Does cognition, now as then, reveal a dimension of ultimacy in human experience?

Let us begin with the most fundamental basis of scientific inquiry as a human enterprise, that urge, drive, or passion in man which it presupposes and so which makes it possible as a human act. This is the sense of wonder of which Aristotle spoke, the unremitting eros to know, the unrestricted passion of the rational consciousness to explain, to understand, and to judge validly – that lies back of all science as a human activity. This is, as Tillich insisted, an ultimate concern, an ultimate commitment. This concern in the scientist as he conducts his inquiry is the most fundamental of the prerequisites for knowledge. Without method, as the history of cognition shows, no knowledge is possible, but without passion no method is possible. For method demands care, a determination to know and so an unceasing dissatisfaction with not knowing; it thus requires also patience, rigor, self-discipline, and hope – and all of these presuppose a deep passion to know, cool and untemperamental as inquiry may seem from the outside.

Such passion or eros can take many forms, among them perhaps the following tonalities or commitments: whatever else I might wish, I will assent to nothing that is not established; I am not content to falsify or even to guess; I will accept no surrogate for understanding and verification; and I will continue relentlessly to ask questions, to probe, and to inquire until all the pertinent questions I can raise are answered – even if these questions render my own hypothesis more shaky than if I had desisted. As is evident, there can be no relevant meaning to those standards of scientific disinterestedness and objectivity, which are essential to scientific inquiry, if the scientific community as a whole does not share this passion. And clearly, all scientific repugnance at prejudice, the closed mind, unexamined answers, and lack of rigor in facing uncomfortable truths, depends on this underlying eros to know. […]

Our culture has wrongly separated passion and commitment from objectivity. This is one thing that the great John Dewey understood with fine clarity; only, I believe, he did not press far enough the phenomenological analysis of the human concern that underlies inquiry. Some commitments and passions, to be sure, do subvert the disinterested mind. But in the welter of other pressures, personal and social, science has been maintained only by the common passion and commitment to the truth shared by the scientific community and passed on as a fundamental eros from master to student as an essential part of his training.

It is this passion to know that guides, as we have seen, the isolated and often lonely creator of a new vision against all the logic and experience of his contemporaries; it is this that sustains arduous research into the implications of that vision in normal scientific research; and it is this that makes it possible for the community to maintain and transmit its self-set standards, thus to be subject to fundamental revision of even its most firmly held orthodoxies, and so to continue the society of science in history. This is by no means "faith" in the strictly religious and certainly not in the Christian sense, and it would be quite wrong so to argue. But it is a commitment in the sense that it is a personal act of acceptance and affirmation of an ultimate in one's life, of the good of knowing for its own sake, and thus of knowing according to a set of undemonstrable but commonly shared standards and aims, and it involves a quite undemonstrable belief in the continuing rationality of experience. And finally it is this commitment or belief that sustains the search for an intelligibility not yet found but believed to be there – all of this falling far short of any empirical or rational demonstration.