WILL SCIENCE EVER TAKE NO FOR ANY ANSWER...?

This week we took down the candles from our windows. During the Christmas season they symbolized humanity's search in the night. Science, however, will never extinguish its candles, for it relentlessly continues its great search. For answers. For explanations. For ultimate scientific truths about our species and its universe.

Fundamentalist believers will say humanity has already found the answer in the birth of Jesus. Rationalist believers will say there is indeed an intelligible higher-power, only we can't be precisely sure who and/or what it is. Secular scientists will say the only higher-power is in the many cosmic laws and forces it continues to uncover.

This search by science has become a great obsession in the West. However, in recent years, a reaction has grown among believers who challenge the integrity of this search. To some, it seems almost heretical, and thus the accusation of "scientism." The philosophical assumption that the real in our world is reducible to what the empirical sciences alone can verify or describe. Energy or matter or gravity or the Big Bang. In effect, scientism is the assumption, by the general public reading daily science reports, that matter is in the end all that matters.

Science writers like Hawking, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens seem to agree that anything outside the range of the empirical and measurable is mostly fantasy, the stuff of superstitions and primitive beliefs. That there might be a dimension of reality knowable in a non-scientific but still rational manner does not occur. This bias -- this blindness to literature, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, religion -- is best encapsulated in the term scientism

And yet, when today's scientists consider the shoulders upon whom their great works have been built, they will find the founding figures of modern science -- Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe -- were themselves religious. Including giant physicists of the 19th C like Faraday and Maxwell.

I was thinking about all this while packing our candles away. You want to embrace the undeniable contributions of modern science, but without denying your own long-finessed beliefs in the divine. Wrapping the candles you remember the proud Enlightenment writers of the 18th C who told us religion had only been a temporary delusion from which humanity was now freed. You also remember your philosophy prof who counter-suggested that this new secular, scientific way of thinking is more likely just one more existential choice; a particular moment in human development rather than the final stage in human development.

Good to get these candles tucked away for another season. Might also be good if modern scientism reflected more carefully on the fact that every time it pierces a cosmic curtain, another curtain seems to be waiting. Just maybe the cosmos is answering scientism's presumption that humanity can empirically crack all the mysteries.

Maybe the answer is "no." And maybe aren't some of us kinda glad....