RELIGIOUS WORLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 279, 24 November 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGIOUS WORLD.

PRESENT-DAY OUTLOOK.

(Contributed.)

IS SCIENCE TOO COCKSURE?

IT CANNOT TAKE THE PLACE OE PHILOSOPHY OR RELIGION.

In a provocative article in "The Outline," Mr. C. E. M. Joad, whose writings on philosophy have attracted widespread notice, criticises some tendencies of modern science. The chief blunder of which he finds it guilty "consists first in making the unwarrantable assumption that everything is amenable to scientific methods, and then in falsely concluding that what is not amenable docs not exist." Mr. Joad writes: —

Scientists often write as if science presented us with certain and definite knowledge about the universe, which, once established, remained fixed and unassailable, an enduring monument to the triumph of the human intellect. • In this respect science is complacently distinguished from philosophy, which is regarded as a welter of contradictory theories, and from theology, which is dismissed as the invention of bad reasons for what we instinctively . want to believe.

Einstein's Denial. Most of the peopTe, including presumably most of the scientists, that have lived, believed that the earth occupied the centre of the universe, and the sun, a small white-hot ball, went round it. Then came Galileo and Copernicus who showed that the earth was small and the sim large, and that the earth went round the sun. This, said Newton, is due, among other things, to the law of gravitation which operates in absolute, space; time, he continued, is also absolute. Eor three hundred years the Newtonian universe remained fixed and unassailable, and then it broke up. The MichelsonMorley experiment. showed that facts connected with the velocity of light over large distances were incompatible with the Newtonian theory of absolute time and absolute space. As a result we have Einstein's theory of relativity which informs us that there is no law of gravitation,.that neither space nor time taken separately is absolute, and that it is immaterial whether we say that the sun goes round the earth or the earth goes round the ' sun.' Science, by its very nature, is only capable of dealing with a particular sort of facts; what is more, it can only deal with them in a particular sort of way. What, then, are the facts with which science deals, and how does it deal with them? Professor Eddington's Problem. In a famous article in "Science, Religion and Reality" Professor Eddington takes an instance of a stock scientific problem. Suppose an elephant weighing two tons slides down.a grassy hillside fifty yards long and sloping at an angle of sixty degrees. How long will it take to' get to the bottom? Now the answer to this problem, given in seconds, tells us nothing about the elephant and nothing about the hillside. What it does do is to give us information about a certain relation subsisting between two tons, sixty degrees and fifty yards: that is to' Bay, about the relation between certain measurable aspects of .the elephant and the hillside. On the basis of this illustration, Professor Eddington proceeds to point out that science gives us information not about things in themselves, but only about certain selected aspects of them, those aspects, namely, which lend themselves to precise and definite measurement, in terms of weight, mass, size, density, space or time.

Quite Arbitrary. Certain consequences of great importance follow:— (1) The selection of the measurable aspect- of a thing from the total number of aspects it presents is quite arbitrary. Measurable aspects are not necessarily the most important.. They are ■ selected simply because they happen to bo those about which- as scientists we can get definite knowledge. Their selection, that is to say, represents a peculiarity, if you like, a limitation, of human minds.

(2) It is obvious that in the case of some things the aspects which matter to us— for example, their aesthetic, ethical, or spiritual aspects —are not those which are measurable. About these things, therefore, science can tell us nothing that is important. Paced, for instance, with a symphony, all it can do is to separate it into its component notes, and then present us with a set of figures representing the number and frequency of certain sound' vibrations .in the atmosphere. These are the measurable aspects of the series of sounds we call a symphony. But an account of a symphony, in terms of vibrations leaves out the one thing in the symphony that matters, namely, its aesthetic effect.

(3) Even when the measurable aspects of a thing are important,' they can never give us the whole truth about it. Hence to take the scientific truth about a thing as the whole truth is to fall into error. Where Science Falls Short. Confront the scientist with a living organism, and he will take it to bits and give you a complete inventory of its parts. But a hiving body is more than a catalogue of the blood, bones, nervous tissue, and brain of which it is composed. In addition to these parts which are measurable, there is something which makes them go, which is not. This something is consciousness or life, and any account of the living organism which leaves out what makes it live is bound to mislead.' Yet from the very fact that consciousness or life is not measurable, it is not amenable to scientific treatment. Hence a scientific account of the human body presents it as a piece of mechanism, just as Darwin's account of the process of evolution represented it as a mechanical process, and the universe in which it occurred as a mechanical universe.

A False Conclusion. The conclusion is that although science can tell us about the relationships subsisting between some of the things in the universe, it can tell us nothing about the nature of the things themselves.' It can arrive at results of the highest practical ■value, but it cannot give us a conception, of the universe as a whole. It cannot, that is to say, take the place of philosophy or religion.

Faced with ethical, aesthetic, or religious phenomena, the scientist has in the past been too apt to regard them as illusory. This is a mistake; a mistake "which, consists first in making the unX&rcantable assumption that everything

is amenable to scientific methods, and then in falsely concluding that what is not amenable does not exist. In dismissing religion as illusory, the_ scientist is not invalidating what he dismisses; be is merely confessing the impotence of his methods to deal with it.