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Yarn · 01-14-2008, 07:45 PM

Heres something an ancestor of mine wrote in 1953:

Religion and the limitations of science

Karl F. Muenzinger

Science is making the proud claim that all natural events are its subject matter and that if any event can be studied by its methods it is thereby proven to be a natural event. Supernatural events and forces have no place in science. To admit them as explanatory principles would destroy the power of that superb set of rules which we have come to call the scientific method. If an earthquake occurs we cannot, as scientists, ascribe it to an act of God, insurance contracts notwithstanding; we must look for its causes in antecedent natural conditions and events. The success of the scientific method during the past three hundred years in exploring, explaining, and controlling natural events is in a large measure due to the rigid exclusion of all references to supernatural forces. To the scientist, the eclipse and comet, flood and drought, famine and disease, war and genocide are not divine punishments, but events whose operations have to be adequately described so that they may eventually be brought under control.

It was inevitable that such a way of looking at nature and life should severely restrict the area in which religious teaching was the supreme source of explanation, guidance, and comfort. Science, in its impatient strength, kept on narrowing the boundaries of religion until many people regarded religious values and religious behavior as a closed chapter in human history. However, such an attitude disregards the obvious fact that science itself has its own definite limits. Its own rules prevent it from going beyond these limits, and any proper evaluation of science and religion demands that the limits of science be taken into account. It is my contention that religious behavior begins where scientific thinking comes to a definite and perhaps permanent halt.

The question of the limits of science is not new, although it has been disregarded frequently. It was eighty years ago that the German physiologist, Emil DuBois-Reymond, delivered a lecture entitled “Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens”or “On the Limitations of the Knowledge of Nature.” What is so remarkable about this lecture is not its actual content but the fact that it boldly proclaimed that science, which was already on its unprecedented rise, did possess limitations. At the end of each section, dealing with one of the limitations, DuBois-Reymond exclaimed: “Ignoramus; Ignorabimus!” (“We do not know; we shall not know”). Like a refrain in a revolutionary song, this exclamation has since been repeated by not a few scientists who have been able to rise above the above the minutiate of their specialties and look at science as humanists, so to speak. That science, or rather the scientific method, has certain limitations is a claim that should be periodically examined. It might also be fruitful to look at these limitations in relation to those that science has imposed upon religion.

A brief sketch of the main facets of traditional Hebrew-Christian religion will make it possible to point out the inroads made upon each one of them by sciences.

Religion offers to the faithful a cosmology, how the heaven and earth were formed, how plants and animals came to be, and how man was made in God’s image, only “a little lower than God Himself.” Religion gives to the believer the security and the warmth that he once possessed when he was a child. Now, although an adult, he still is a child, the child of God, and he belongs to the great family of the faithful, the chosen. Religion supplies him with an ethical code, telling him what is right and wrong: thou shalt,” and “thou shalt not.” Religion paints the drama of his fate, which is a part of the drama of mankind, starting at Eden and moving inexorably, and with signs and portents, to an apocalyptic climax followed by the millennium of the blessed. Religion thus illuminated his existence with radiant meaning: he knows his destiny; he knows where he came from and where he is going. Earthly life may be a journey through a vale of tears and sorrows, but the faithful see a glorious light at the end of the passage.

Most of our forefathers enjoyed the gifts of security and assurance bestowed by religious faith, and not a few of our contemporaries still do. But for many of us they exist no more. It is science that has radically altered the picture of the universe and has divesed man of his anthropogenic delusion of grandeur. Knowledge of the universe is no longer a fixed truth, but an ever growing and ever tentative scientific edifice of fact and theory. As science sees it, life has in some unknown fashion appeared on this earth and produced its choicest flower in man, who is nothing but dust capable of asking the profound question about the meaning of it all, and also capable of doing many other things, some trivial and some cruel, some compassionate and some wise. Life may disappear again from this earth, and whether its exists anywhere else we do not know.

Science shows that what is right or wrong in one community may not be so in another. Social history and present conditions determine the “thou shalt” and the “thou shalt not” of a given time and place. In the end it is up to man himself to determine the right and wrong of his actions, and he must do so without divine guidance.

Science has robbed man of the sense of security which has been his as a child of the heavenly father. Modern man has to struggle for his existence and can never be certain what tomorrow may bring. He has to learn that security is hard won and comes only as a result of his own efforts and that at best it has a precarious basis. Our present age is marked by increasing insecurity, and man seems to counteract by giving himself up to societies with ever tightening control over individual acting and thinking. Man will still have to learn that this trust in strong leaders is impelling him into a fearful blind alley out of which it will be difficult to retreat.

Science has left man without a sense of the ultimate significance of life. Birth and death seem like two chance happenings between which lies a meaningless succession of joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures, excitements and depressions. Man may find meanings in life by setting himself goals to be attained and joining with others in the pursuit of common goals. But such meanings are ephemeral and of short duration. And in many lives the foals are concerned with the small things of daily existence, shelter, food, and some comforts. Don’t we see to it that our domestic animal leader similar livers?

If it is true, then that science has substituted tentative knowledge of facts and uncertain theories for fixed truth, man-made ethics for divinely ordained codes of right and wrong, the insecurity of earthly existence for the security of being under the protection of a heavenly father, a sense of the insignificance of individual existence for the assurance of having a significant role in the history of the universe,--if all this be true, then it is also true that man has left the happy days of childhood and grown to maturity. Life may, under the influence of scientific thinking, have become colder, less secure, and more baffling; it has also become more challenging and capable of assuming a new dignity.

What of the limitation s of science itself? In the answer to this question there might lie the possibility of recapturing some religious values, in particular an intimation of the significance of existence.

The proud boast of science that all natural events can be studied by scientific methods and that supernatural forces are required to furnish explanations—this boast is valid; but it is nevertheless true that seemingly impassable barriers present themselves to the inquiring mind at certain points. Take the factor of time and history of the universe. We have plausible about at which life appeared on earth, when the earth itself was formed as a satellite of the sun, when our own galaxy was formed, and when the universe itself congealed into stars and moons and started to move in all directions. If this was a beginning, it cannot have been the beginning, for the mind must continue to ask: And what came before? An endless chain of beginnings is as impossible to deal with by the scientific method as is a first beginning out of nothing. Likewise, if we move forward in time, an ultimate dissolution into nothing be admitted as a possibility. It does not make what we human beings call “sense,” and faced with the questions of the beginning and the end of the universe we must exclaim with DuBois-Reymond: “Ignoramus; Ignorabimus!” But here it is possible to make a transition to what may be called a religious value by asking: It it not a manifestation of what I have earlier called an “anthropocentric delusion of grandeur” if we assume that there is no intellect somewhere in this world that does grasp what baffles us mortals, an intellect that encompasses the beginning and end of time? And if such an intellect exists, would this fact not perhaps supply meaning to our existence, a meaning, to be sure, ever so vague and dim? Let me hasten to insist that these imaginings are not to be understood as a proof of the existence of a God. They represent merely a play with certain ideas, as man has played with them ever since he acquired a language.

Take again the factor of time, now not as a characteristic of the physical universe, but as a characteristic of consciousness. It seems to be a fact that just as existing plant and animal forms developed out of more primitive forms and ultimately perhaps out of a fortuitous molecular organization of inanimate matter of hospitable earth, so did conscious life develop out of more primitive forms of awareness. This life span of consciousness on earth is but a small time interval compared with the probable time of the existence of the universe, if this last phrase has any meaning at all. Again, should our anthropocentric delusion of grandeur prevent us from seeing the high probability that earthly awareness is not the only one in this world, and that it is equally probable that the present level of intellectual development in man is not the highest ever attained or attainable? Human consciousness is cosmic dust so organized that it is capable of reflection upon itself. Should not humbleness permit us to speculate on the existence of higher intelligence? If human consciousness were the only one in this world, then the world would have without consciousness once upon time and would be so again. Is it possible to imagine a world without a consciousness? To me, playing with such ideas outside the limits of scientific methods, it seems highly implausible that the universe has ever existed without a consciousness of some kind, and that this intellect did not “play with ideas” one a higher level than ours is capable of doing.

Again I would like to say that the possible existence of such a mind—an imaginary fact with which science cannot deal, because it is beyond its imitations—would seem to lend significance to human life, which would appear as a milestone in the development to a higher level.

Helge Lundholm has expressed this extra-scientific reasioning in his boo God’s Failure, or Man’s Folly? as follows:
Should human mind forever be destroyed,
And should a sea of death and cold, the world remain
For no one to revere and contemplate;
Should human mind which from eternity
A second borrowed, and in that brief second,
A glimpse of Universal Order viewed,
To everlasting silence be confined;
Then were, indeed, creation void of theme.

Science has taken away the meaning of existence and has not been able, and does not seem to be able ever again, to provide a new meaning. Life and the universe, as viewed by science, are devoid of plan and design. It does not lie in the nature of the scientific method to yield answers to questions of ultimate beginnings and ends. In exchange for the loss of the meaning existence science has nothing to offer. This is the result of the major limitations of science.

Man’s thirst for knowledge, his craving for physical and moral security, and his gropings for the meaning of existence will continue to be dominant motives of his behavior. However, for a fixed picture of the universe, science has substituted the never ending search for knowledge about it. And modern man has that continuous search for tentative knowledge presents a greater challenge to his intellect and is more deeply satisfying than acceptance of fixed and revealed truth.

What is left for us to do is to supply imaginative and probable imaginary meaning to existence. As the painter works with colors, the composer with tones, and the poet with words, so can we fashion answers to ultimate questions in an area that is beyond the limitations of science. As the artist’s creations induce in us aesthetics experiences, so can the concern with the ultimate questions and last answers have the quality of religious experience.

----------------------------

Any thoughts?

01-14-2008, 07:45 PM	#1 (permalink)
Yarn Reeve Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 71 Country: Country:	Religion and the limitations of science Heres something an ancestor of mine wrote in 1953: Religion and the limitations of science Karl F. Muenzinger Science is making the proud claim that all natural events are its subject matter and that if any event can be studied by its methods it is thereby proven to be a natural event. Supernatural events and forces have no place in science. To admit them as explanatory principles would destroy the power of that superb set of rules which we have come to call the scientific method. If an earthquake occurs we cannot, as scientists, ascribe it to an act of God, insurance contracts notwithstanding; we must look for its causes in antecedent natural conditions and events. The success of the scientific method during the past three hundred years in exploring, explaining, and controlling natural events is in a large measure due to the rigid exclusion of all references to supernatural forces. To the scientist, the eclipse and comet, flood and drought, famine and disease, war and genocide are not divine punishments, but events whose operations have to be adequately described so that they may eventually be brought under control. It was inevitable that such a way of looking at nature and life should severely restrict the area in which religious teaching was the supreme source of explanation, guidance, and comfort. Science, in its impatient strength, kept on narrowing the boundaries of religion until many people regarded religious values and religious behavior as a closed chapter in human history. However, such an attitude disregards the obvious fact that science itself has its own definite limits. Its own rules prevent it from going beyond these limits, and any proper evaluation of science and religion demands that the limits of science be taken into account. It is my contention that religious behavior begins where scientific thinking comes to a definite and perhaps permanent halt. The question of the limits of science is not new, although it has been disregarded frequently. It was eighty years ago that the German physiologist, Emil DuBois-Reymond, delivered a lecture entitled “Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens”or “On the Limitations of the Knowledge of Nature.” What is so remarkable about this lecture is not its actual content but the fact that it boldly proclaimed that science, which was already on its unprecedented rise, did possess limitations. At the end of each section, dealing with one of the limitations, DuBois-Reymond exclaimed: “Ignoramus; Ignorabimus!” (“We do not know; we shall not know”). Like a refrain in a revolutionary song, this exclamation has since been repeated by not a few scientists who have been able to rise above the above the minutiate of their specialties and look at science as humanists, so to speak. That science, or rather the scientific method, has certain limitations is a claim that should be periodically examined. It might also be fruitful to look at these limitations in relation to those that science has imposed upon religion. A brief sketch of the main facets of traditional Hebrew-Christian religion will make it possible to point out the inroads made upon each one of them by sciences. Religion offers to the faithful a cosmology, how the heaven and earth were formed, how plants and animals came to be, and how man was made in God’s image, only “a little lower than God Himself.” Religion gives to the believer the security and the warmth that he once possessed when he was a child. Now, although an adult, he still is a child, the child of God, and he belongs to the great family of the faithful, the chosen. Religion supplies him with an ethical code, telling him what is right and wrong: thou shalt,” and “thou shalt not.” Religion paints the drama of his fate, which is a part of the drama of mankind, starting at Eden and moving inexorably, and with signs and portents, to an apocalyptic climax followed by the millennium of the blessed. Religion thus illuminated his existence with radiant meaning: he knows his destiny; he knows where he came from and where he is going. Earthly life may be a journey through a vale of tears and sorrows, but the faithful see a glorious light at the end of the passage. Most of our forefathers enjoyed the gifts of security and assurance bestowed by religious faith, and not a few of our contemporaries still do. But for many of us they exist no more. It is science that has radically altered the picture of the universe and has divesed man of his anthropogenic delusion of grandeur. Knowledge of the universe is no longer a fixed truth, but an ever growing and ever tentative scientific edifice of fact and theory. As science sees it, life has in some unknown fashion appeared on this earth and produced its choicest flower in man, who is nothing but dust capable of asking the profound question about the meaning of it all, and also capable of doing many other things, some trivial and some cruel, some compassionate and some wise. Life may disappear again from this earth, and whether its exists anywhere else we do not know. Science shows that what is right or wrong in one community may not be so in another. Social history and present conditions determine the “thou shalt” and the “thou shalt not” of a given time and place. In the end it is up to man himself to determine the right and wrong of his actions, and he must do so without divine guidance. Science has robbed man of the sense of security which has been his as a child of the heavenly father. Modern man has to struggle for his existence and can never be certain what tomorrow may bring. He has to learn that security is hard won and comes only as a result of his own efforts and that at best it has a precarious basis. Our present age is marked by increasing insecurity, and man seems to counteract by giving himself up to societies with ever tightening control over individual acting and thinking. Man will still have to learn that this trust in strong leaders is impelling him into a fearful blind alley out of which it will be difficult to retreat. Science has left man without a sense of the ultimate significance of life. Birth and death seem like two chance happenings between which lies a meaningless succession of joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures, excitements and depressions. Man may find meanings in life by setting himself goals to be attained and joining with others in the pursuit of common goals. But such meanings are ephemeral and of short duration. And in many lives the foals are concerned with the small things of daily existence, shelter, food, and some comforts. Don’t we see to it that our domestic animal leader similar livers? If it is true, then that science has substituted tentative knowledge of facts and uncertain theories for fixed truth, man-made ethics for divinely ordained codes of right and wrong, the insecurity of earthly existence for the security of being under the protection of a heavenly father, a sense of the insignificance of individual existence for the assurance of having a significant role in the history of the universe,--if all this be true, then it is also true that man has left the happy days of childhood and grown to maturity. Life may, under the influence of scientific thinking, have become colder, less secure, and more baffling; it has also become more challenging and capable of assuming a new dignity. What of the limitation s of science itself? In the answer to this question there might lie the possibility of recapturing some religious values, in particular an intimation of the significance of existence. The proud boast of science that all natural events can be studied by scientific methods and that supernatural forces are required to furnish explanations—this boast is valid; but it is nevertheless true that seemingly impassable barriers present themselves to the inquiring mind at certain points. Take the factor of time and history of the universe. We have plausible about at which life appeared on earth, when the earth itself was formed as a satellite of the sun, when our own galaxy was formed, and when the universe itself congealed into stars and moons and started to move in all directions. If this was a beginning, it cannot have been the beginning, for the mind must continue to ask: And what came before? An endless chain of beginnings is as impossible to deal with by the scientific method as is a first beginning out of nothing. Likewise, if we move forward in time, an ultimate dissolution into nothing be admitted as a possibility. It does not make what we human beings call “sense,” and faced with the questions of the beginning and the end of the universe we must exclaim with DuBois-Reymond: “Ignoramus; Ignorabimus!” But here it is possible to make a transition to what may be called a religious value by asking: It it not a manifestation of what I have earlier called an “anthropocentric delusion of grandeur” if we assume that there is no intellect somewhere in this world that does grasp what baffles us mortals, an intellect that encompasses the beginning and end of time? And if such an intellect exists, would this fact not perhaps supply meaning to our existence, a meaning, to be sure, ever so vague and dim? Let me hasten to insist that these imaginings are not to be understood as a proof of the existence of a God. They represent merely a play with certain ideas, as man has played with them ever since he acquired a language. Take again the factor of time, now not as a characteristic of the physical universe, but as a characteristic of consciousness. It seems to be a fact that just as existing plant and animal forms developed out of more primitive forms and ultimately perhaps out of a fortuitous molecular organization of inanimate matter of hospitable earth, so did conscious life develop out of more primitive forms of awareness. This life span of consciousness on earth is but a small time interval compared with the probable time of the existence of the universe, if this last phrase has any meaning at all. Again, should our anthropocentric delusion of grandeur prevent us from seeing the high probability that earthly awareness is not the only one in this world, and that it is equally probable that the present level of intellectual development in man is not the highest ever attained or attainable? Human consciousness is cosmic dust so organized that it is capable of reflection upon itself. Should not humbleness permit us to speculate on the existence of higher intelligence? If human consciousness were the only one in this world, then the world would have without consciousness once upon time and would be so again. Is it possible to imagine a world without a consciousness? To me, playing with such ideas outside the limits of scientific methods, it seems highly implausible that the universe has ever existed without a consciousness of some kind, and that this intellect did not “play with ideas” one a higher level than ours is capable of doing. Again I would like to say that the possible existence of such a mind—an imaginary fact with which science cannot deal, because it is beyond its imitations—would seem to lend significance to human life, which would appear as a milestone in the development to a higher level. Helge Lundholm has expressed this extra-scientific reasioning in his boo God’s Failure, or Man’s Folly? as follows: Should human mind forever be destroyed, And should a sea of death and cold, the world remain For no one to revere and contemplate; Should human mind which from eternity A second borrowed, and in that brief second, A glimpse of Universal Order viewed, To everlasting silence be confined; Then were, indeed, creation void of theme. Science has taken away the meaning of existence and has not been able, and does not seem to be able ever again, to provide a new meaning. Life and the universe, as viewed by science, are devoid of plan and design. It does not lie in the nature of the scientific method to yield answers to questions of ultimate beginnings and ends. In exchange for the loss of the meaning existence science has nothing to offer. This is the result of the major limitations of science. Man’s thirst for knowledge, his craving for physical and moral security, and his gropings for the meaning of existence will continue to be dominant motives of his behavior. However, for a fixed picture of the universe, science has substituted the never ending search for knowledge about it. And modern man has that continuous search for tentative knowledge presents a greater challenge to his intellect and is more deeply satisfying than acceptance of fixed and revealed truth. What is left for us to do is to supply imaginative and probable imaginary meaning to existence. As the painter works with colors, the composer with tones, and the poet with words, so can we fashion answers to ultimate questions in an area that is beyond the limitations of science. As the artist’s creations induce in us aesthetics experiences, so can the concern with the ultimate questions and last answers have the quality of religious experience. ---------------------------- Any thoughts?