Are there
Limits to
Rationalistic Science?
by Rabbi B. Horovitz
Perception flows from the structure of the
human mind, and is therefore partly subjective. Facts of science change
from generation to generation, and are the subject of constant
controversies. Newton's Law of universal Gravitation and the Law of the
Immutability of the Elements, considered facts not long ago, are
rejected today. Einstein wrote: "There are no eternal theories in
Science".
Let us begin with a crucial point. "The laws of science are
not inviolable. They represent a constantly changing logical
complex, changing from decade to decade, and even from year to
year. Lest this may surprise you, let me remark that the
world of science is not identical with the physical world itself, with
the real world if you life. Science is a model of the real
world that we construct inside or own heads." (F.
Hoyle) It is, and "abstraction arrived at by confining
thought to formal relations. The concrete world has slipped
through the meshes of the scientific net. The exploration of
the external world by methods of science leads not to a concrete
reality, but to a shadow world of symbols."
(Whitehead) This comes from the paradox that exists between
all objective thought (which is in terms of universals and
abstractions), and personal human experience which is concrete personal human experience (which is concrete).
"Faith in reason cannot be justified by any inductive
generalisation." (Whitehead) "All scientific knowledge must
be built upon intuitive beliefs," (B. Russell) for reasoning is only a
method of proving that which itself cannot be proven.
Reason is an instrument of the mind which
analyses the material given to it. The motive that impels a
person to use his reason in a certain direction, and to select facts,
is his emotional interest in a subject, and a certain goal - a
university degree, a scientific discovery , or a new theory that he
wishes to attain. It all depends on what reason attempts to
prove and which master it serves. The over-weaning confidence
of man in his own intellectual powers plays in important part in
rationalistic world-views.
Schools of thought in
psychology and history reach opposing conclusions, although they
proceed from a rationalistic basis. The weight which is
attached to specific facts is often left to emotional bias.
This is apparent in the national trends in philosophy (British -
'fairplay' and 'commonsense;' French - naturalism; German -
systematized idealism - 'Ordnung,' which is ambivalent; American -
pragmatic, 'what-pays').
Man strives to live by
values, but the world which is apparently presented by science is blind
to values of good and evil. One cannot define what man ought
to be from that which he actually is. Free choice, moral
responsibility and guilt are basic experiences without which man's life
loses it's sense of purpose. Yet some rationalists regard
them as illusions.
Science can only provide the 'what' but
not the 'why' or purpose of the phenomena of Nature, nor 'who' produces
them. But do not faith and reason really belong to two
different spheres, two different faculties in the make-up of
man? Can the eye perceive the grandeur of music, or the
tongue taste the beauty of colours? So too the soul cannot be
analyzed with a microscope, nor G-d scanned with a telescope.
Neither can one, in retrospect, view G-d's speaking with man by using
the spade of the archaeologist. To deduce that the soul, G-d,
prophecy and revelation do not exist, is to reason like the fisherman
who proved that water did not exist because his net never brought it
up. Reason can come near to these concepts, yet it can never
fathom them to the full, much as science may be able to analyze a
person chemically (worth only a few dollars in the drug store) without
conveying real knowledge of the person. Similarly, religious
faith is required for a knowledge of a Personal Ethical G-d.
These dimensions of
experience have variously formulated: synthetic and analytic, intuitive
and discursive, inward and external, attachment and detachment,
subjective (I-Thou) and objective (I-It). Faith deals with
meaning, truth and ends, but reason deals with measurements, facts and
means.
Reason often begins with
doubt, faith with certainty. Faith is from the feeling of the
heart, reason from the thinking of the mind. "Le coeur a ses
raisons que la raison ne connait pas." (Pascal) "Do
not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?" (Keats)
Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame."
(Einstein) "Truth should never be suppressed to conform to
our notion of coherence." (Hutchinson) In science, paradoxes
are accepted, as in the Theory of Complementarity: experiments
demonstrate that light possesses the properties of particles
(corpuscles - Newton), while other experiments show it to be composed
of waves. (Huyghens) Logically it cannot be both,
but empirically it is. So, "Religion and science, dealing
with different spheres, complement one another."(Max Plank)
When people discard faith because
of reason, they bring disaster not only to their own and their
neighbor's world-view and personality, but to the stability and peace
of society. The events of the Twentieth Century have taught
us that reason and the scientific method based on it bay be an
invaluable servant, but when it becomes master, it may destroy
humanity's faith, sense of values of good and evil, and moral
responsibility.