Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: ... brother. But he is above us and these are the Warfield Lectures, the second Warfield Lectures. I'm sure that Bishop Newbigin has resigned himself to being introduced these days more times than he would like to count, but I must add my own unnecessary word. Confucius would say, "It's the thing to do."
I first met Bishop Newbigin in a proper, ecumenical setting, for a proper, ecumenical figure. I met him at a meeting of the four theological colleges at Cambridge. We were meeting in Wesley Hall, properly Methodist. Our Anglican brothers from Ridley and from Westcott welcomed him as a
bishop of the Church of South India, in communion with Canterbury. But those of us who were there from Westminster went back to more fundamental roots and we considered Bishop Newbigin a Presbyterian. To cap it all, he was about to be elected the moderator of the United Reformed
Church of England, as ecumenical as anyone could get. I know him best, and most of us I think know him best through his books. "The Reunion of the Church." 1947. A landmark on the basis of union of the Church of South India. My own favorite was "The Household of God;" I had just come out of China
and this challenge that Christian unity was for mission, not just for unity's sake, revived my own missionary spirit after some bruising. Just a few years ago, this was almost required reading for the faculty here, "The Open Secret." And I just picked up
this week's "Presbyterian Outlook," the whole front cover is given to quotations from the latest book from Dr. Newbigin, "The Other Side of 1884." And we'll look forward to that book and to all these lectures with great anticipation. His subject today is "Profile of a Culture: The Inward and Outward Forms
of Modernity." Dr. Newbigin.
NEWBIGIN: Thank you very much, Dr. [Moffett?]. I can only hope that the great Benjamin Warfield will still be smiling at the end of the lecture. A missionary going to serve in another country is advised to make a thorough study of its culture. So when I was preparing to go to India, and during my years there, I spent a good deal of time trying to understand the whole complex of
ideas and practices which go up to, make what Western people in the last 150 years have called "Hinduism." Hinduism is, of course, a nonsense word. If, it had happened that instead of the British taking over India, the Japanese had taken over Europe, they would no doubt have coined a word, Europeanism, to cover everything that had been said and done in Europe from Pythagoras to Margaret Thatcher
and it would have been equally useful. Hinduism is a nonsense word. Obviously, I studied Indian religion and culture with the intellectual tools of a twentieth-century European. But with what tools can I study my own culture? There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb which says that "If you want a
definition of water, you don't consult a fish." Indians had no word for "Hinduism" until it was imposed upon them by Europeans less than two centuries ago. They spoke of dharma, which is just the ultimate principle of how things are and therefore of how one should behave. Until I had spent many years in India, I was, I suppose, an
innocent specimen of modern European culture. I had learned from childhood and at school and university how things really are, and it was on that basis that I could begin to understand and evaluate the world of dharma under the name of Hinduism. When or where shall I find the tools, the stance from which I can study Europeanism?
On the basis of what perception can I evaluate my own perceptions of "how things really are" -- perceptions which are part of my own mental framework from my childhood? As a young missionary, I was confident that my critical evaluations about Hindu beliefs and practices were securely founded on God's revelation in the gospel. As I grew older,
I learned to see that they were shaped far more than I had realized by my culture. And I could not have come to this critical stance in relation to my own culture without the experience of having been immersed in another. It is the assumption of these lectures that it is the gospel which provides the stance from which all cultures have to be evaluated; but the gospel, as I said yesterday,
is always itself already embodied in some cultural form. The typical apologetic for Christianity in our modern culture has been one which attempts to "explain" it in terms of our culture, and to show that it is "reasonable" in its terms. That is to say, in terms of our own ultimate beliefs about how things are. But what is meant by the word
"explain"? We accept something as an explanation when it shows how an unexplained fact fits into the world as we already understand it. Explanation is relative to the framework of understanding which we inherit from all our education, the structure of beliefs which we never question, our picture of how things really are.
Explanation puts a strange thing into a place where it fits and is no longer strange. Thus it comes about that one can give a psychological explanation of a political stance or a political explanation of a psychological theory. Whether the explanation is accepted depends upon the way in which you understand how things really are. What is an explanation
therefore for one person is no explanation for another? And the question with which I am wrestling in these lectures is this: How, as people who are part of modern Western culture, with its confidence in the validity of its scientific methods, how is it possible to move from the place where we explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific worldview to the place where we explain
our modern scientific worldview from the point of view of the gospel? Part of the answer will of course be to listen to the witness of Christians from other cultures. And I shall speak about that in the last lecture. But we can hardly start here because the difficulty is that most of us are not able to listen to them until they can speak to us in our language. Only those who have been, so to speak, co-opted into our
culture by receiving what we call a modern scientific education are able to join in dialogue with us. The others, however charming they may be, and however profitable to the tourist industry, are still candidates -- often eager candidates -- for what is called "modernization." A more useful way of starting, I think, is to look at the genesis of our modern culture
and especially at that decisive point where it became fully conscious of itself, the point which those who lived through it called the Enlightenment. That word, "enlightenment," is to me a very significant pointer to the nature of the experience which created our modern Western culture. It expresses the joy and excitement of those who have begun to feel that things are
being explained, who have seen the day dawn over a dark world, for whom what was obscure and confusing is now clearly seen as it is, for whom the unexplained has been explained -- or at least made explicable. It's a conversion word; not, however, like the enlightenment of the Buddha, referring to the experience of an individual -- but referring to the experience
of a whole people. Europe, in those decisive years in the middle of the eighteenth century, went through a kind of collective conversion. It is as though they could say, "We were blind, and now we see. The grip of dogma has been loosened. The mists of superstition are dissolving in the warmth of a dawning day. Now we see the landscape as it really is." If we want to grasp
the essential elements in what we call our modern Western culture, I think that the best place to begin is with that exhilarating feeling that light has come into the world and banished the darkness, that marked the moment of European history which the French historian, Paul Hazard, called "a crisis of Europe's consciousness." Of course, like all conversion
experiences, this one had a pre-history. It was prepared for by the events and movements of thought long centuries before. One could mention especially the ferment introduced into the Western world by the translation of Arabic texts into Latin through which Greek science and metaphysics, and especially the thought of Aristotle, were brought for the first time into contact with the
Western Christian world. Following that, one could speak of the rise of the universities, the flood of classical ideas at the Renaissance, the fierce theological and political controversies of the Reformation, the wars of religion, and -- above all -- the new developments of science associated with the names of Bacon, Galileo, and Newton, and the new method of philosophy
which we associate with the name Descartes. However, one assesses the roles played by all these factors, it is clear that around the middle of the eighteenth century there was a profound and widely shared feeling among thinking people in western Europe that a new age had come, and that its essential nature was "Enlightenment." It was, in fact, a conviction that
European people now had the clue to understanding how things really are. What were the elements in that new vision? Central and fundamental was the vision of the nature of reality opened up by science and above all by the work of Isaac Newton. Greek physics had worked with the idea that change and movement
in the world of nature are to be explained in terms of purpose. Medieval thought saw divine purpose manifest everywhere in the world of nature. The revelation of that purpose had been given in the events which were confessed in the church's creed, and therefore all study of nature had its place within the framework which that creed articulated. And therefore, it followed naturally that the condition for entry
into the world of scholarship was the acceptance of that framework. The effect of the work of the new scientists, and above all the brilliant vision of Newton, was to replace this framework, this form of explanation, by another. The real world described by the work of science was one governed not by purpose but by natural laws of cause and effect.
Teleology had no place in physics or astronomy. All the movements of tangible bodies, the changes in the visible world could be explained not in terms of purpose, but in terms of efficient cause. The rotation of the planets manifested not the perfection of the divine will but the uniform operation of the laws of inertia and gravitation. As the methods of science achieved
greater and greater triumphs, both theoretical and practical, the old picture of how things are, the picture derived from the Bible and vividly sketched, for example, in the medieval mystery plays, was replaced by a quite different one. The real world, as distinct from the world of appearances, was a world of material bodies -- as vast as the sun or as small as the atom -- moving
ceaselessly according to unchanging and mathematically statable laws in a fixed and infinite space through time, which moved with unvarying velocity from an infinite past to an infinite future. All causes, therefore, are adequate to the effects which they produce, and all things can be in principle explained by the causes which produce them.
To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it and there is no need to invoke purpose or design as explanation. There is no place, therefore, for divine intervention in providence or miracle as categories of explanation. God may of course be conceived, as in eighteenth-century Deism, as the ultimate author of it all, but one does not need to know the author
personally to be able to understand the book. Nature -- the sum total of what exists -- is the really real. And the scientist is the priest who can unlock for us the secrets of nature and give us practical mastery over its workings. Science, so understood, does not work by deduction from alleged revelation or first principles. It works by
observing the phenomena and by induction from the results of observation. But it does not simply take the phenomena at their face value, so to speak. It uses the tools of analysis to dissect, separate, and observe each element which goes ti constitute the phenomena. This process of analysis has no limit in principle, and any appearance of unity is a challenge to further analysis.
Analysis is followed by reconstruction, and for this mathematics provides the tools. Mathematics enables all reality to be quantified and arranged in rationally comprehensible structures. What the eighteenth century celebrated so enthusiastically as "the geometric spirit" is thus to be applied to all forms of human knowledge. The people of the Enlightenment spoke of their age as the age of reason, and by reason they meant essentially those analytical and mathematical powers by the exercise of which human beings could attain, at least in principle, to a complete understanding of how things are, and therefore a full mastery of nature -- of reality in all its forms. Reason, so understood,
is sovereign in the enterprise. It cannot bow before any authority other than what it called the facts. No alleged divine revelation, and no tradition however ancient, and no dogma however hallowed has the right to veto its exercise. Immanuel Kant, in answer to the question of what is Enlightenment, used the famous phrase "dare to know."
The eighteenth century accepted that challenge, and from that day to the present, even though so much in the philosophy of science has changed, that phrase of Kant has defined the central thrust of our culture. This challenge is addressed to the rational individual. It implies that the individual has the potentiality and therefore also the right freely to exercise his
reason in the search for reality. This right can only be exercised if other rights are also acknowledged, especially the right to hold private property, since some such property, even if it is only the property of one's own body and food and shelter to sustain it, is the precondition of any human activity. If no alleged dogma
can stand in the way of the right to know, equally no alleged authority can negate the right to life, liberty, and property. The new concept of the "rights of man" moves into the center of the stage. Medieval society was held together by a complex network of reciprocal rights and duties, and the idea of "human rights" in general, apart from this actual web of
reciprocal responsibilities, would have been unintelligible. Alasdair MacIntyre tells us that "there were no words by which the concept of human rights could have been expressed in Hebrew, or classical Greek, Latin, or Arabic. The idea would have been simply incomprehensible. In its earliest form the concept of human rights referred to life, liberty,
and property. In the most famous and influential statement of it, however, which I need hardly remind you of here, the rights of man are defined as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is reason to think that what was originally intended was "public happiness," that is to say, the happiness that comes from participating as free men and women in the management of public affairs.
In practice, however, the pursuit of happiness without that definition came to be seen as the right of all people. Happiness is, of course, a word with multiple meanings. The question "What is true happiness?" can only finally be answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its
way of understanding the world, and so "happiness" had no definition on except what each autonomous individual might give it. Each individual has the right not only to pursue happiness but also what is much more far-reaching in its implications, the right to define happiness as he or she please. Moreover, there is a further element of pathos in this idea
of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Medieval people believed with great seriousness that final happiness lay on the other side of death. They did not expect it in its fullness on this side. But the methods of modern science give no ground for believing that there is anything beyond death. Hence, the whole freight of human happiness has to be carried in the few short and uncertain years that are allowed to us
before death ends it all. And the quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, and more fraught with anxiety than it was for the peoples of the Middle Ages. There is a further implication of the emergence of the concept of human rights. I have already said that the concept would have been meaningless in an earlier age. "Rights" only exist where there is a legal and social
structure which defines them. Anyone can, of course, assert a need or a wish apart from such a legal or social structure. But a need or a wish do not constitute a right. A claim to a right must rest upon some juridical basis. To assert a right where there is no such basis would be like writing a check on a nonexistent bank. Therefore,
if the right of every person to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is asserted, one has to ask, "Who is the one who is under obligation to honor this claim?" In the Middle Ages the answer was found within the network of reciprocal rights and duties. The man farming the land had a duty to provide troops to fight for his lord and a corresponding right to his lord's protection.
Duties and rights were reciprocal and one could not exist without the other, and all were finite. But the quest for happiness is infinite. Who, then, has the infinite duty to honor the infinite claims of every human being to the pursuit of happiness? The answer of the eighteenth century, and of those that have followed, is familiar: it is the nation-state. The
nation-state replaces holy church and holy empire as the centerpiece in the post-Enlightenment ordering of society. Upon it devolves the duty of providing the means for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And since the pursuit of happiness is infinite, the demands upon the state are without limit. If -- for modern Western peoples -- nature has taken the place of
God as the ultimately real with which we have to deal, the nation-state has taken the place of God as the source to which we look for health, welfare, and happiness. One further element must be included in any account of this conversion experience which ushered in our modern Western world: it concerns its eschatology. The medieval Christians,
taught by the Bible, saw as the end to which all history moves, the second coming of Christ, the judgment of living and dead, and the holy city in which all that is pure and true in the public, as in the private life of the nations is gathered up in eternal perfection. This vision of the end is, of course, part and parcel of the teleological view of creation and history, which has the will and purpose of God as its ultimate basis. The eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this. No longer would it be a gift of God from heaven; it would be the final triumph of the science and skill of the enlightened peoples of the earth. The eighteenth century saw the birth of the doctrine of progress, a doctrine that was to rule -- with fateful
consequences -- well into the twentieth. The emancipation of the human spirit from the prison of dogma, tradition, and superstition, and the powerful exercise of the newly liberated powers of human reason would lead to such a growing understanding and a growing mastery that all the evils which enslave men and women would be conquered.
While this expectation was an important element in the exhilaration that marked the pioneers of the Enlightenment, its long-term consequences have been, as I said, fateful -- especially when combined with the expectation vested in the nation-state. If all hope is vested in a future which those now living will not share, and if the nation-state is posited as the guarantor
of "rights" which are in principle infinite, the way is opened for the kind of totalitarian ideologies which use the power of the state to extinguish the rights of the living for the sake of the supposed happiness of those yet unborn. And even when this extreme development does not occur, the vesting of all hope in an earthly future means that the relative positions of the young and the old are
reversed. The transmission of traditional wisdom in families from the old to the young is replaced by systems of education organized by the state to shape the young toward the future which is being planned. In trying to sketch thus the broad outlines of the movement of thought which marked the birth of our modern Western culture, I have spoken
as if it all began in the realm of pure ideas. And that, of course, would be foolish. Ideas develop in a context of actual life -- political and private. Without opting either for the view that ideas are primary and their political and social consequences secondary, or for the view that ideas are merely a by-product of social change, one can surely and must accept the fact that there is a reciprocal relation
between them and that one does not truly account for one without attending to both. I have briefly referred to the rise of the nation-state as one of the key factors of the emergence of the post-Enlightenment world, and also to the new conception of education as a responsibility of the state. Plainly what we call modern Western culture is much more than a body of ideas. It is a
whole way of organizing human life which both rests upon and in turn supports and validates the ideas that I have been describing. For example, the analytical and mathematical reason is not content to deal with physics and astronomy; it must extend its operations to human behavior, work, and society. The work of the traditional craftsman which spanned the whole process from raw
material to finished product is analyzed into its smallest parts and then broken up into separate operations, each given to a different workman. By this division of labor, it is possible enormously to increase the quantity of the finished products, but the individual worker no longer shares directly in the vision of the final product which governs the whole process. His work is assimilated more and
more into the repetitive action of a machine rather than to the purposeful work of the craftsman, whose operations are governed by a vision of the end. Craftsmanship is replaced by labor, and human work is assimilated to the patterns of the Newtonian universe, from which teleology has been banished. The division of labor has as a further consequence,
the growth of a market economy. In an earlier age, as in contemporary pre-modern societies, farming and the various skilled crafts were mainly for the use of the family and the local community. The market in which money operated as a means of exchange was a very minor and marginal part of the economy. But as the principle of the division of labor gained ascendancy, the market moved into the central
place as the mechanism which linked all the separate producers with each other and with the consumer. The modern science of economics was born. Once again teleology is eliminated. Economics is no longer part of ethics. It is not concerned with the purpose of human life. It is no longer concerned with questions about justice or the dangers of covetousness.
It becomes the science of the working of the market as a self-operating mechanism modeled on the Newtonian universe. The difference being that the fundamental laws governing its movement, corresponding to the laws of gravitation and inertia in Newtonian physics, is the law of covetousness assumed to be the basic drive of human nature. What does not enter the market is ignored.
Gross National Product refers only to what enters the market. It excludes the work of the housewife, of the gardener growing his own food. It includes the operations of the gambling syndicate and the arms salesman. Two further consequences follow. One is the removal of work from the family to the factory, with immense consequences for the nature of society.
The home is no longer the place of work, and the family is no longer the working unit. The way is opened for a deep divide between the public world of work, of exchange, of economics, and the private world which is withdrawn from the world of work and which remains under another vision of how things are. In the public world the workers in the factory are related to each other anonymously
as units in a mechanical process. They are replaceable parts. They may not know each other's names. In the home people are known to one another as irreplaceable persons, and their mutual understanding as persons is what constitutes the home. Moreover, at least in the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, it was the men who operated the public world of the factory and the market,
and the women who were relegated to the private sector. The fissure in our society divides the sexes: the man dealt with public facts, the woman with personal values. The man was the producer, the woman was the consumer even though, in fact, she worked as long and as hard in the home as her man worked in the office or the field. And today's feminism, a characteristic of the
modern -- as distinct from the traditional -- societies, represents the revolt of women against these distortions. A second consequence of the mechanization of work is the growth of huge cities. Urbanization is one of the most obvious visible symptoms of what we call modernization. Before the harnessing of electric power and the recent developments in electronics, division and mechanization of labor
required the concentration of workers in factories, and of factories in cities within which goods could easily be moved from one stage of production to the next. Urbanization breaks up traditional family communities and introduces people into a world where there is a multiplicity of human networks, each controlled by different purposes. In traditional rural societies, each person is securely fixed in a single
human milieu that embraces work, leisure, family relationships, and religion. These all form part of a given world which is accepted as real and within which the individual person has a clear and well-definite identity. In a city the individual is in the presence of multiple possibilities. His neighbors -- perhaps in a multistory
apartment -- may all have their work in different parts of the city, and he has no necessary relation with them. Each individual has a variety of possible networks with which he may decide to connect or not to connect; he is therefore in the midst of a plurality of worlds among which he must choose. And to that extent his identity is a matter for his own choice, and so for anxiety and doubt. In the milling
crowds of the city, composed of individuals each pursuing goals of his own choice, his sense of being in a world without landmarks is heightened -- sometimes to the point of despair. The division and mechanization of labor and the development of a market economy, the dichotomy of private and public worlds, and the growth of big cities -- all these are key characteristics of modern culture
which are not found in the pre-modern cultures of Asia and Africa, except insofar as they have succumbed to "modernization." They rest upon and in turn reinforce the new vision of the human individual which marked the birth of the modern world at the Enlightenment. And I think one further stroke must be added to this rough sketch of the public aspects of our
culture. Many observers have noted that bureaucratization plays a central role in modern societies. The division of labor and the consequent pluralization and complexification of society requires the development of techniques for large-scale control. Bureaucracy applies the mechanical model to this task. It provides machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor,
of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity. It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit. The introduction into bureaucratic procedures of personal relationships which govern the private life of the home is -- in bureaucratic terms -- corruption and nepotism.
Bureaucracy applies to human life in the public sphere the principles of reason as understood at the Enlightenment. Analysis of the situation into the smallest possible components and the recombination of these elements in terms of logical relationships which, ideally, can be expressed in mathematical terms and so handled by a computer. While the growth of huge cities
in the early decades of the modern age was mainly due to the growth of the factories and their power-based mechanization, the contemporary growth of the cities is more largely attributable to bureaucratization. The typical new building in a modern city is a block of offices. I have tried in a few strokes to sketch what seems to me to be the essential features of our culture, first by looking at the way in which the
thinkers of the Enlightenment expressed their new way of understanding the world, and then at the ways in which these have been embodied in the life of modern Western societies. I must repeat, of course, by this arrangement of material I am not implying a one-way, cause-and-effect relationship. It can be argued that one of the most powerful sources of the new thinking at the Enlightenment was the opening up of new horizons and the discovery of new cultures
through the long voyages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were in turn made possible by the invention of new instruments for navigation. And certainly there is a reciprocal influence, as I have argued, of the growth of factories and cities and the market economy on the way that people understand human life. But we shall not be wrong, I think, if we take as our primary clue
for understanding the whole of these vast changes in the human situation which have created our modern Western culture. If we take as the clue the abandonment of teleology as the key to the understanding of nature. I shall argue that it is this which underlies that decisive feature of our culture which can be described both as the
division of human life into public and private, and as the dichotomy of fact and value. Let us then look at this central fact, the elimination of teleology. It is of course difficult to describe human behavior without using the category of purpose. It would of course be possible to describe what I am now doing in terms of the cause-and-effect nexus between electronic impulses in my brain, chemical changes in my muscles, sound waves in the air of this room, and while this description would be in principle exhaustive, I doubt whether it would be accepted by any intelligent person as the explanation of what I am doing. An explanation would have to be in terms of my purpose however confused, to convince you of the truth of what I'm trying to say.
When we pass from human behavior to biology in general, while it seems natural to explain much animal behavior in terms of purpose, a plausible case can be made out for explaining at least most of it without that category. But when we move to chemistry, physics, and astronomy, it seems obvious, at least to the modern Western mind, that explanation must be in terms
of cause and effect, without recourse to teleology as a category of explanation. Greek science, as we well know, did take purpose as a category of explanation in physics. Motion was seen as inexplicable unless it was purposive -- a movement from the less good to the more good. From the point of view of modern science, that was a blind alley. The breakthrough in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
which gave birth to modern science would have been impossible without the methodological elimination of the idea of purpose from the study of physics and astronomy. The enormous achievements that have followed have had the effect of converting, in the minds of very many people, this methodological elimination into a disposition to believe that purpose has no place as a category
of explanation in any exercise that claims to be "scientific," and to look for the explanation of everything, including both animal and human behavior, without reference to purpose. The result has been the creation of that mental world with which we are so familiar -- a world in which everything will ultimately be explained as the effect of antecedent causes which operate
with the precision and predictability of the Newtonian atoms, and in which no alleged knowledge is regarded as secure against doubt unless it conforms to this pattern. And yet purpose remains an inescapable element in human life. Human beings do entertain purposes and set out to achieve them. The immense achievements of modern science are, very
obviously, the outcome of purposeful efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women dedicated to the achievement of something which is valuable -- a true understanding of how things are. And so a strange split, fissure, runs right through the consciousness of modern Western man. The ideal which he seeks would eliminate all ideals.
With dedicated zeal and purpose, he purposes to explain the world as something which is without purpose. And, as I suggested, this fissure becomes visible in two ways: in the dichotomy, one of the outstanding marks of a "modern" society, between the public and the private worlds, and in the dichotomy in thought between what are commonly called "facts" and what are called "values." The public world is a world of facts
which are the same for everyone, whatever his values may be; the private world is a world of values where each person is free to choose his or her own values and therefore to pursue such courses of action as will correspond with them. At the intellectual level, the fissure expresses itself in the search for what are called "value-free" facts, and for a science of human behavior which shall be
"objective" in the sense that no value judgments are allowed to have a place in its operations. Language has to be "purified" of all that suggests purpose. In order to achieve a "scientific" theory of how societies function, we must be able to depend upon value-free facts. This kind of allegedly scientific sociology is so far from the experience
of human life as it is actually lived that is is perhaps destined to remain marginal in any society which could survive. But the ideal which it embodies -- an ideal which we might define paradoxically by saying that the only really valuable things are value-free facts -- has enormous power in the public life of modern societies. I read, two or three days
ago, a delightful story of a dinner party in Oxford College which was attended by Lord Nuffield and his Lordship was surprised and delighted when, as he left, the porter in the college gate, out of a large selection of hats, handed to him his own hat. And Lord Nuffield said, "How did you know that it was my hat?" The porter replied, "I didn't know it was your hat, sir. I only knew it was the one you were wearing when you came in."
The story was told as an example of the importance of a strictly scientific spirit which sticks to the facts, and does not endeavor interpretations which go beyond them. I cannot, however, help feeling that Lord [Nuffield?] must have felt that there was a value judgment involved, in spite of the determination of the porter to avoid it. In other words, even a decision to eliminate
values involves one in a value judgment. Thinkers of the Enlightenment asked how it could be possible to move logically from a statement of fact "this is so" to a judgement of value "this ought to be approved or done". Because -- in the terms of post-Enlightenment thought -- there could be no logically viable move from "is" to "ought," the past
250 years have seen numerous attempts to find a basis for moral judgments somewhere else. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book, "After Virtue," has beautifully described these attempts and has shown, I think convincingly how, in every case, the moral judgments for which a basis was sought were in fact survivals from the pre-Enlightenment
thought-world. It was not surprising that the attempt failed. It was the attempt to base a traditional morality upon a new and different view of what is the case. No world view... no moral law of universal validity can be founded upon on the view of what-is-the-case which post-Enlightenment science taught people
to hold. If the world is as post-Enlightenment understood it to be, then it is indeed not logically possible to move from a statement in the form "this is the case" to a statement in the form "this ought to be done." And yet, as MacIntyre points out, in the same book, the view that no sentence with the verb "ought" can logically follow from a sentence with the verb "is" rests
upon the assumption that the statements of fact do not include statements of purpose. From the factual statement "this watch has only lost five seconds in two years," it is proper to move to the judgment of value: "this is a good watch"; provided -- and only provided -- that the word "watch" defines an object whose purpose is to keep time and not
to be used as for whatever purpose its owner may chance to entertain at the moment whether to decorate the room or to throw at the cat. Thus, if it is true that the whole world of observable phenomena, including not only the inanimate world and the worlds of subhuman life but also the life of human societies, is to be truly understood only in terms of networks of cause and effect
and that the idea of purpose is excluded from any truly scientific account of the facts, then it is quite certain that there is no way by which any system of values can be founded upon the facts so understood. The fissure cannot be healed. If purpose is not a feature of the world of "facts," if human beings, and if, nevertheless, human beings entertain purposes, that
can only be their personal choice and they will have to create their purposes for themselves. These purposes will have no authority beyond the strength of conviction with which they are held. They cannot claim the authority of facts: they are personal opinions, and those who hold them can do so, provided they do not interfere with the freedom of others to hold different opinions.
As I have already said, one of the most influential statements of what this implies, is the statement, affirmed as an axion which is self-evident, that every human being has an equal right to the pursuit of happiness. What is affirms is the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to the pursuit of the end for which, as a matter of fact, human beings exist. Happiness is to be defined by each individual in his or her own way.
There is no given, factual, objective standard by which different ideas of happiness might be tested to see whether they conform to the reality or spring from illusion. The hard question -- true or false -- applies to the world of fact, and on then all sane people are expected to agree. On the question of good or bad, there is no such objective
standard. A scientific understanding of the world of phenomena must exclude the idea that there is a given purpose running through all things, about which one may be in the truth or in error. One area in which this fissure becomes very perceptible is, of course, in the field of education. Modern post-Enlightenment societies
have, as an essential part of their development, set up public educational systems by which children are taken away from their parents and introduced to those areas of knowledge and skill which enable them to function effectively in the public world of facts. Science is taught as a true account of how things really are. But what is to be done about values? On what basis are they to be taught? Values
in any culture, insofar as they are consciously and reflectively affirmed and not merely embodied in unquestioned, customary behavior, values are based upon some vision of how things are. In effect, they have traditionally been rested on some religious belief. The modern scientific worldview does not provide a basis, for it excludes purpose as a factor in the ultimate constitution
of things. Should then religion be excluded from the public schools, as in the United States, or laid down as the one compulsory subject in the public schools, as in the United Kingdom? In order words, should the fissure, the division appear within the school curriculum or between the school and the home? I do not venture to speak of the United States' experience,
and I did not know that I would be delivering this lecture at this particular moment in one particular political controversy in this country, but recent British experience is instructive. Up to about 1960, "religious education," RE as we always call it, in British schools was based upon the Bible. But, if one may speak in general terms, the contradiction between what was taught in RE and what was communicated
in the rest of the curriculum was such that for the vast majority of the products of the schools, Christianity remained a rejected option for the rest of their lives. It is often said that if you ask a typical Englishman why he is an atheist, he will reply, "Because I had religious education when I was at school." Since 1960, our schools have to accommodate large numbers -- sometimes a majority -- of children from
Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist homes. Increasingly, therefore, since that date, and predominantly now, RE, "religious education" in British schools is an introduction to some or all of these religions with the invitation to the student to take his choice from among the well-furnished shelves of this ideological supermarket. In the physics classroom the student learns what are the "facts" and is expected
at the end to believe the truth of what he has been told. In the RE class he is invited to choose what he prefers. It is not surprising that the goods which are most often picked off the shelves are those with an Eastern provenance. Indian, Chinese, and Japanese religions are not only exciting because of their newness to the Western student, they are also compatible with the modern scientific worldview
in a way that Christianity is not. It is common knowledge that distinguished scientists, distinguished exponents of the new physics that has developed from the work of Einstein and Bohr and Planck and Heisenberg are impressed by the similarities between this view of reality and that which is found in Eastern religions. Fritjof Capra's much-praised book, The Tao of Physics, sees the cosmic dance
as the clue to the nature of the physical world, and the cover of his book is adorned with the well-known image of Nataraja, the dancing Siva. I have often been struck by the fact that, among the Hindus who are leaders in theoretical and practical scientific work today, I have never detected any such conflict between science and religion as one finds in Europe. The reason is clear. The Eastern religions do not understand the world in terms of purpose. The symbol of the dance is an interpretation of movement and change without invoking the concept of purpose. The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated by the idea of a divine purpose, and this means that in regard to value judgments, one has to say that they are either right or wrong, in that they either are or are not directed to that
end for which, in fact, human beings exist. This excursion into the recent experience of British schools has led me to one important point: The Indian atomic scientists, most of them, as it happens, trained by Western missionaries, and their counterparts in the rest of Asia are a reminder of the fact that the culture which I have called modern Western culture is at present a world culture
and exercises the dominant role everywhere. In almost every country of the world, to modernize is to accept this way of viewing things and this way of doing things. And, as I have said, the Eastern religions find it easy to be at home in this modern scientific worldview. And this in turn strengthens these elements in Western Christendom which have tried to find a place for Christianity within the worldview
of post-Enlightenment Europe. Within this worldview, it is possible to keep a place for religion as a deeply inward and private experience. Whether understood in terms of pure mysticism or in terms of some sort of loving dependence on the ultimate Source of being. In this experience, people of all religions can find kinship.
It does not challenge the dominant scientific worldview, which keeps, so to speak, a private place for religion within the public world of scientifically established fact. Many writers have celebrated this shared experience and seen in it the center around which the great world religions could move into unity. And there is something surely very attractive about this view. It promises peace, not only between the religions, but also
between faith and science. It avoids a head-on collision between the two, because it does not challenge the scientific account of how things are, but withdraws into an inner world where the scientist cannot reach, and in which even if it does enter, it is possible to show that there are different kinds
of language that can be used; different language games that can be played. And yet, the one whose worldview is shaped by the Bible finds it hard to accept this. It has often been remarked that Protestant theology since Schleiermacher has had a continual tendency to become a kind of anthropology. It has become the study of an aspect of human experience. The Bible, on the other hand, is dominated
by the figure of the Living God who acts, speaks, calls, and expects an answer. The Bible language is about God, about the created cosmos, and about the world of public events, as much as it is about what one may call religious experience. All of this biblical language can of course be translated into the language of religious experience and then set alongside other transcripts
of religious experience in other cultures. And this is what happens in our culture and yet one cannot help at least asking the question, "Might it not be otherwise?" What if it was simply a fact that the One by whose will and purpose all things exist from the galactic systems to the electrons and neutrons has acted and spoken in certain specific events and words
in order to reveal and effect a purpose which is, in fact, the purpose for which all things exist, and therefore, to call us to respond in love and obedience? If this were the fact, we could of course still sit down coolly to consider it in relation to other facts. But by doing so we would be asserting our right to make the final decisions and we have no way of proving that we have that right.
It might in fact be that we do not and that the history of western Europe in the past 200 years has been shaped by an illusion. And it might be that the signs, manifest all around us, of the disintegration of this culture of ours are ultimately attributable to that illusion. All that I am doing at this stage is to say that it might be so. To carry the argument
farther, it is now necessary to do two things. The first is to look again at that strange book which we call the Bible, and ask what it is and how we can understand its authority, we who are part of this Western culture. And the next is to inquire what would be involved both in theory and practice in such a direct challenge to the very foundations of our culture,
namely, the world of modern science. What would it mean, if instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern scientific worldview, we tried to explain our modern scientific worldview in terms of the gospel. That is the question that we must discuss in the two lectures tomorrow.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Bishop Newbigin. It is an enlightening, but not always a comfortable feeling, to have our world dissected about us. Should you like to know how Bishop Newbigin will put it back together, may I suggest you attend the rest of the lectures tomorrow at 1:15 in this room, tomorrow at 7:00 in the room, the next day, Thursday, at 1:30 and at 5:00. All of them (inaudible). An open discussion tomorrow evening following the lecture. Thank you. You're dismissed.