ULTIMATE TRUTH

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 112, 14 May 1930, Page 9

ULTIMATE TRUTH

"; .WHERE SCIENCE FAILS

[ THE ROAD TO REALITY

PLAGE OF KELIGION

" The incompleteness of the sciences to explain the ultimate truth'of life was the theme of a paper entitled " Science .and the Ultimate Truth" read by Canon A'rehdall, of Auckland, before the annual mooting of the Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy. He said that scientific and humanistic studies were too often prosecuted in isolation, and large numbers of scien- ' tifie students received little or no logical or philosophical education, and there was danger of a jaundiced outlook on life. Many prominent thinkers an" the fields of science, philosophy, and religion were now searching for a synthetic or synoptic point of view, in order to rescue .modern culture .irom chaos. The speaker traversed the theories of mathematics, physics, and biology in relation to life, and quoted the suggestion of Lord Balfour that it was a wise procedure to press mechanical theories to the material world to their utmost limits and search for that which can be measured and calculated, while asserting that in the practice of life we ought not to be limited by ■mechanistic presuppositions. The psychological or humanistic sciences gave vet-another and more concrete interpretation of experience, but science, whfether physical, biological, or psychological, did not furnish one with a philosophy or a religion. Science provided; a hierachy of categories of interpretation of one's experience, but no science could by itself provide a ready-made "philosophy. There had been attempts to base philosophy on physical science, but such attempts had never explained the higher phenomena of life or conscious behaviour, and had ended in endowing.the merely physical with a marvellous, lot of powers strange to actual experience. Again a philosophy based on biological- categories, even though they now seemed capable of being extended partially to the inorganic world, could not even cover the facts of conscious, behaviourj let alone explain them. It seemed that science of any kind failed to furnish what.one would describe as .objective truth. It gave a subjective picture of reality valid as far as it went for certain practical purposes. Just as there was no branch of knowledge from - which exact science was wholly excluded, so it would seem that there was no branch which exact gcienee wholly covered. SPIRITUAL VALUE. In the case of the new physics,- the abstraction of exact knowledge was, obtained by shutting out' the fundamental fact of actual perception, i.e., Ihe value of actuality. The actuality of the world was a spiritual value. It was evident that the sciences, both as individual sciences' and as correlated,' presented problems which as. mere sciences they were unable to solve. The task of philosophy was to grasp these problems and try to reach some solution of them. That was what philosophy had always been striving to do 'and what, on the practical side, religion had been striving after. ' ; Tlie speaker went on to deal with evolution, cause and law, and said that the wor,d "evolution" seemed to be used loosely in two incompatible senses. One felt that people falsely fancied that the word explained both what tlie world was and.the problem of causation implied in its development. Many scientists apparently did not realise the' complexity of the metaphysical puzzle underlying the fact of real change. There Was a need for ametaphysie to explain the problems which the sciences left over. . In the course'of man's history and ""at the present day he had tried to believe that all was but mat-ter,-or that mind was just a shadow cast by-matter; or he had fancied there was nothing at all behind phenomena either material or mental, or he had set up a view that reality was just a heap of disconnected pieces of mat-' ter or pieces of mind, or' he had sat down and had been very certain of one piece of knowledge—that, he knew "or could know nothing. THEISTIC HYPOTHESIS. , "I believe," he said, "that all these , (to give them their technical names, materialism, epiphenoinenalisin, positivism, pluralism,- and ■ agnosticism) are ■unsatisfactory. I plead frankly for the, theistic hypothesis as involving fewer difficulties than any other view and as infinitely preferable to a deistie separation of God from His world, or to a pantheistic identification of God with the universe. I'We cannot penetrate the mind of the Infinite God, but we can know ; the outline of the path which leads to Him. We must just learn to accept the world and see jt as open-eyed scientific inquiry, shows it to be, then we must realise that we are on the stage and have a function to fulfil, which is at once to find our true selves and serve God. One great means to this is to see the world of. Nature and history as symbolic of a deeper reality, and to learn to pass through, symbol to sacrament, as all the great nature poets and great naturalists have done, until we can say with the Psalmist 'The Heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork,' and until we find in pur,earthly experience the sure.traces of the eternal values, which independently of time and independently of. the sequence of events, have a being in themselves in the mind of God.

"At the same time we can speculate as to how the world is related to its Creator. Though the innermost naturo pf the Supreme Being may he unknown to us apart from revelation, He lias certainly shown Himself under the three attributes of goodness which is the goal of moral endeavour, truth which is the goal of scientific and philosophical inquiry, "'and beauty which. all pure art strives to realise. These eternal values are not inactive thoughts; they necessarily produce an eternal world, a sphere of spaceless and timeless existence in which they live. This ia the intelligible world of the Platonist and the Kingdom of GoE of the Christian. This is ultimately tlje.real world."