The cosmos as memento mori: the ultimate significance of modern science

Modern Age, Summer, 2005 by Bryce Christensen

"IN TERMS OF FULFILLMENT of declared intentions," writes medical researcher and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, "science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon. Visit and land on the moon? A fait accompli. Abolish smallpox? A pleasure. Extend our human life span by at least a quarter? Yes, assuredly, but that will take a little bit longer." (1) Even in the late nineteenth century, science had accomplished so much that Friedrich Nietzsche feared that the boundless philosophical "optimism" inherent in "the spirit of science" had driven all sensitivity to tragedy out of Western culture. (2) And writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, neo-Darwinian philosopher of science John Gray has complained that many people now suppose that "science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realised. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal." (3)

When the focus shifts from the technological to the theoretical, from what science can do to what it can explain, the same attitude of triumphal optimism often prevails. After all, science can now explain the beginning of the universe in a pre-Big Bang fluctuation in a quantum vacuum, can account for the origins of species (including Homo sapiens) through the winnowing effects of natural selection on random mutations, and even appears close to linking the physics of relativity to the physics of quantum mechanics through the sophisticated eleven-dimensional mathematics of String Theory. Science has grown so conceptually powerful that many regard other sources of truth as quite superfluous. Many of those well-versed in the sciences regard religion and theology as particularly irrelevant. As twentieth-century American physicist I.I. Rabi once declared in the youthful exuberance of his initiation in astrophysics, "It's all very simple, who needs God?" (4)

Such sanguine scientific godlessness strengthens what Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecky identifies as the central belief governing modern scholarship: namely, "the deeply stimulating conviction that man ... can alone and unaided by any divine grace or revelation reach in thought the Absolute, discover the ultimate nature of the world and his own nature." (5) A hopeful scientific atheism also swells the litany of beliefs that philosopher Leszek Kolakowski characterizes as a type of modern Prometheanism: "Human self-creativity has no limits, evil and suffering are contingent, life is infinitely inventive ... the human mind does not need any revelation or teaching from without." (6)

However, the modern confidence in science as a prop for ebullient atheism turns out to be grievously misplaced. For only a shallow and largely technological perspective on modern science harmonizes with a godless optimism. The theoretical pioneers of modern science actually offer cheery-minded atheists very little to support their optimism. Instead, these scientific pioneers actually confront those who are deeply knowledgeable with their findings with a stark choice: either a rigorous and exclusive reliance upon science within a universe of hopelessness, barren of any ultimate grounds for meaning or morality and doomed to eventual extinction, or a chastened and partial reliance upon science within a universe endowed with hope, meaning, and morality by a Deity whose wondrous powers transcend scientific categories.

To their considerable credit, scientists do force hard choices by insisting on hard realities. Unlike the many modern scholars who have reduced truth to mere individual interpretation, socially negotiated, scientists still dare use the word truth without the skeptical quotation marks now de rigueur among academic sophisticates. Biologist Richard Dawkins, for instance, ridicules modern sophists whose doctrines of the cultural relativity of all socially constructed meanings imply that "a tribe which believes that the moon is an old calabash tossed just above the treetops ... [holds a view] just as true as our scientific belief that the moon is a large Earth satellite about a quarter of a million miles away" (7) Such theorists, Dawkins asserts, betray the falsity of their doctrines every time they make a journey by relying on aerospace engineers rather than flying-carpet fabulists. "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite," he writes. (8)

Science writer A.K. Dewdney likewise attacks cultural relativists who would dissolve all objective truth in a sea of cultural relativism. "A stone thrown in a vacuum will [actually] execute a parabola with a precision great enough to rule out any other polynomial function as a possible path," Dewdney insists, as he mocks the cultural relativists who suppose that "Galileo and Newton lay this fantasy upon us because they were Italian or English" or because they were "expressing a post-Renaissance yearning for perfection." (9) Philosopher Robert Fogelin highlights the epistemological importance of science in an age of skeptical relativism when he discusses how the initial failure of the Hubble Telescope "illustrates what is it is like to encounter reality--to be constrained by it.... There are certain things that you can't talk your way out of." (10) Fogelin thus takes the Hubble episode as paradigmatic of the way empirical science "provides a check against our thought," its experiments bringing us up against an "external permanency ... something upon which our thinking has no effect." (11)