Believing Scientists

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 772, 7 May 1954, Page 4

Believing Scientists

HEN scientists speak of religion it is usual to expect from them a note of scepticism. The two words, faith and science, have been put into opposition; and many people, still influenced by controversies of the 19th Century, believe them to be irreconcilable. A series of talks ‘now being heard from 2YC (see page 6) should help to remove this misconception. For the speakers, although scientists, are also Christians; and their purpose is to show the relation in their own lives between religious and scien- | tific attitudes. Few notions now prevalent are more false or dangerous than the | belief that "scientific? man is somehow different from other _men, and that our present troubles have been brought upon us by an unholy curiosity. We are all scientists to some extent; and we are all believers. No man could live usefully or safely in modern /society without some knowledge of cause and effect; and no man could live sanely who kept exclusively to a scientific mood. The bias may be towards faith in one _person, and away from it in another; but the two attitudes can never be entirely separated. They are different ways of looking at the world. The methods of science depend on abstraction; they are _concerned with only a part of experience, and. never with the whole. Observation and experiment have allowed men to discover that causes and effects in _certain processes are predictable _to a high degree of accuracy. Yet _the man who can describe physical events is not able to explain why they should occur in that way, and in no other. He can find processes in nature, but no linking purpose. And he is so constituted as a human being that the idea of plan or purpose is a necessary part of his existence. There are some who say that all things can be made plain if scien-

tific methods are used to examine them. But when they speak of "all" things they keep within the limits of death and time. A large area, the "unknowable," must be sealed off in the way that a shaded map is marked "unexplored." The difference is that, although exploration remains impossible, it is eqyally impossible to cease speculating about what lies beyond the boundaries. Indeed, men would be false to the scientific spirit if they remained incurious. The true scientist does not dismiss the incomprehensible; and he knows that life without it would be narrow and brutish. A man who says that he has no faith, and who declares that science has all the answers we need to know, may still turn to the arts for relief and solace. Yet without faith, or a belief in the values with which science can have ,no_ concern, music and literature would disappear. A man who works in one of the sciences is like the rest of us when he stands among the hills or under the stars. For him, too, the world is not merely a concourse of atoms, but a changing landscape and a place where he has his home, and is acquainted with love and death and the voices of children. He does not deny the part of living we call spiritual, for he meets it whenever he enters his house, or moves among men, or encounters beauty and goodness. Knowledge can make men arrogant; but they can afford to indulge their pride only because other men, equally learned, have reached humility. Scientists who confess their faith may help us to see that. even in our highest achievements we are children of the earth, using its gifts for our own purposes, but returning through them to the miracles of existence which no man can exrlain or destroy.