Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I have an initial proposal to make, a simple logistic one. If some of you who are sitting over here would move over here now, the people who come late over there won't have to sit on the floor or stand up. I leave it to your grace to move if you will.
I didn't mean to -- I didn't mean to move the president. Thank you. I don't know whether you all realize it or not, but this is a rather unusual event. This is the fourth of six Warfield lectures
and the company gathered here tonight is, to put it mildly, considerably larger than the normal fourth Warfield Lecture. Why is that? I think... I want to suggest at least, a theory about it, a theory which comes from my own feelings and having followed these lectures so far, it may also be
yours, that the speaker, that the speaker is talking about our world and our concerns and that he's putting into words things which we have thought but not put together in quite that way before. One of my colleagues -- I won't tell you who he was -- said to me after one of the lectures, "Isn't it wonderful not to have to worry about
your tenure or your academic reputation in your field, and therefore to be able to range like this over, over the whole problems of the world?" Yes, and that's precisely what a missionary does. That's his business. Let me put it a little differently. The lectures we're hearing tonight differ from many
that are produced by the hard work of academics in that they grow out of a more hidden life that's going on all the time. Our speaker is not saying things which he has thought up for this occasion only, but things which come out of reflections on the daily business of trying to be a Christian minister and missionary in the world. That's not a new experience
for Lesslie Newbigin. He's had at least three hidden careers that I know of. I don't know what happened to the Church of Scotland way back in the beginning but I do know that when he went to India as a missionary, he was simply a missionary of the church in India and as such became a part of the process which created the Church of South India
and became then its spokesman, not only in the books which he has written, "Reunion of the Church," "The Household of God," and others, but in the many documents and the many expressions of that church which came out of committee work, out of the group process, but which Lesslie Newbigin put quietly into words and let them be the words of the church.
If you want to get an idea of what that kind of life as a missionary in India is, I want to recommend one book especially. There are two copies of it in the library, and if each of you take turns, you'll get it read by around sometime next October, "A South India Diary." It's simply a reflection, reflections on the life of the church and on Bishop Newbigin's part in
that life day-by-day, week-by-week. You get a sense of what it means to be a church in that, in that little book, in a very special way. I mention it because that was the first thing I ever read of Newbigin's works. A second hidden career was ecumenical. First time I met our present speaker, he was there as part of a committee of 25 which was preparing a statement
on "Jesus Christ, the Hope of the World," which was adopted by the Evanston Assembly in 1954. Now, I haven't checked this with him, but I daresay that a large part of that was, in fact, quietly written by him for the committee and came out as an expression then, an authoritative expression at that time of Christian eschatology. Since that time there has been, there have been, there have been many further contributions
out of his life as General Secretary of the International Missionary Council, which he brought into the World Council of Churches, and then graciously left in those hands, going back then to India and being one at the same time a, a hidden servant in the Church of South India and in the ecumenical movement, lobbing letters and books out of that situation
into our world situation every so often. I still have a few of them, which I treasure, and in books such as A Faith for This One World, Honest Religion for Secular Man, and other such. Retiring from that, he then came back to England and since then has become, if I may so put it, a Western man once again, and is trying no to
put together the question, "What is the mission of the church? What is the meaning of the gospel for and in this Western secular society?" It's all part of the same process and we're extremely grateful, Lesslie, that we're able to be a part of your reflections and to share the benefit of them, and to participate with you in the process. Tonight's lecture, following which we will have an opportunity for open discussion for those of you who wish
to stay, is on the question, "How Can we Know? The Scientific Frontier."
NEWBIGIN: Thank you very much, Charles, for -- I'm glad you spoke the truth, but not the whole truth. The most obvious fact, which distinguishes our culture from all that have preceded it, is that it is, in its public philosophy, atheist. The famous reply of Laplace to the complaint that he had omitted God from his system,
"I had no need of that hypothesis," might stand as a motto for our culture as a whole. We do not find God necessary. The vision of reality which comes to expression in Laplace's system is one which still, I think, in spite of all the vast changes in science in the past hundred years, still largely dominates
the popular understanding about how things are. It assumes that reality consists of an immense number of atomic particles, moving in accordance with Newton's laws of motion, and consequently, to quote the words of Laplace, "An intelligence which knew at one moment of time all the forces by which Nature is animated and the respective positions of the
entities which compose it, would embrace in the same formula the movement of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for it; and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes." As Michael Polanyi has pointed out with reference to that passage, "The person who had this knowledge would in fact know precisely nothing, since
the knowledge of the atomic particles of which a thing is composed is not knowledge of the thing." The deceptive power of this formula is that it suppresses what Polanyi calls the tacit dimension of knowledge without which knowing is an impossible undertaking. We are interested in atoms and molecules only because of the part they play in shaping a world which we know
as human beings long before we know anything about physics. Nevertheless, it is this Laplacian vision of reality, which still, if I am not mistaken, dominates a great deal of popular thinking. It sustains a universal tendency, and again I quote Polanyi, "a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science
at the expense of its bearing on the subject matter." End of the quote. It leads, therefore, to the delusion that when we have dissolved the smallest units of which a thing is composed, when we have discovered the smallest units of which a thing is composed, and the forces by which they are moved, we have understood the thing. And this delusion is enormously enforced by the fact
that society's shaped by our culture, that in the society shaped by our culture the processes of manufacture, exchange, and government are conducted on these principles. A mechanical view of Nature, as ultimate reality, is made more credible by the fact that we live in a mechanically-organized society. We're familiar with the long story of the rear guard
action fought by theologians against the relentless advance of this way of understanding the world. At point after point, attempts have been made to identify places where the mechanical explanation breaks down and some kind of divine intervention has to be posited as the only explanation. But, as we know, time after time, the gap has been closed and the God of the gaps has had to
retreat to another temporary refuge. Today the futility of this strategy is generally recognized in spite of the occasional efforts that one discerns among some theologians to find a place for divine intervention in the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy. Theologians and believing scientists have in recent times sought rather a modus vivendi between science
and religion by representing them as two different ways of seeing the same reality. The insights of gestalt psychology have been utilized to show that as the same object can be seen in different ways, so the same phenomena can be understood in terms of different, but complementary, ways of knowledge, so that there is no need
to quarrel between the two. The same person can be a scientist and a believer and he can look at the same things in two different ways, depending upon whether he is in his laboratory or in the church. It is difficult to remain content with this kind of peaceful co-existence. It is of course true that we sometimes see, to use the famous illustration, the picture of two human profiles as if it was a picture
of a vase. It is true in the much more famous Indian parable, that one can see a piece of rope as if it was a snake, but no sane person is content to leave matters there. Unless we are to live in a world of make-believe, we will not be content until we have decided which it is -- a rope or a snake. Having discovered what it is, we shall then be able to understand the different ways of seeing it;
seeing as a snake, seeing as a rope. But we shall not be content, surely, until we have reached that point. To be specific: the currently popular way of coping with the science-religion debate by regarding it as an example of two different ways of seeing as, is I fear, once again only a particular manifestation of that dichotomy between the public world of facts
and the private world of values, about which I have been speaking so often. Of course, if religion is construed in essentially mystical terms, that is to say, in terms for which the idea of purpose is not central, then there is no clash. The modern scientific worldview can co-exist peacefully and naturally with that kind of religion, but if, taking the Bible as our basis,
we believe in a God who is Creator and Governor of all things and whose purpose is the criterion therefore for every human event, whether in the public or the private sectors, then there is an inevitable conflict, and we must face that fact squarely. Is it or is it not the case that every human being exists for the joy of eternal fellowship with God
and must face the possibility of missing that mark and forfeiting that prize? If it is the case, surely it ought to be part of the core curriculum of every school. It will not do to say that the determination of character by the structure of the DNA molecule is a fact which every child must learn to understand, but the determination of all proper human purposes by the glory of God
is an opinion which anyone is free to accept or reject. The question, "Which is the real world?" is one which simply cannot be permanently evaded. There can be no genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture unless these questions are faced, for there can be no question that for the ordinary, educated person in our society, the "real" world is not the world of the Bible,
but a world which can be explained, and is being more and more fully explained without reference to the hypothesis of God. In spite of all the vast changes in physics in the present century, the vision of the real world in the mind of ordinary inhabitants of our culture is, I think, that which has derived from Newtonian science. Its essential features are something like the following: There is
an infinite world of space, which is at rest, which has existed and will exist without beginning or end. In this space there are moving bodies which continually interact at a distance in ways governed by the laws of inertia and gravity. All things that exist consist of such bodies, which are exceedingly small, but are nevertheless real and finite things, be they molecules, atoms, electrons,
or whatever. This is the real world. Clearly, it has many of the qualities traditionally ascribed to God; infinity, eternity, and absolute rest. In any case, it is the real world. It is that of which alone we have reliable knowledge, and it is that with which we have to do, with which we have to take account. We are, of course, familiar with the fact
that this picture of reality has been drastically changed by a whole series of new developments in the past 100 years. Clark Maxwell's magnetic field theory; Einstein's special and general relativity; quantum physics; and the recent discoveries about the fundamental structure of the nucleus. The new physics is so different from the old that those whose minds have been shaped by the old are
almost unable to grasp the new, except through long and thorough training. A non-scientist can only tread here with great caution. But some things even a scientifically illiterate theologian can grasp. The universe, as modern physics understands it, is neither infinite nor eternal. It has a calculable age, and according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is moving inexorably
towards total entropy in which nothing which could be called matter will exist. Space and time are no longer two different forms of infinity, but space-time is a single finite entity, liable to warping; having a beginning at a calculable time-distance from the present, and having also a limit at which it will cease to exist. At this limit, the so-called "singularity," space-time
no longer exists, and the laws of physics no longer operate. Moreover, there is no point of absolute rest from which the universe could be surveyed. All parts are relative to all others, and the only absolute is the speed of light. Furthermore, the work done on the fundamental structure of matter has led into a world where entities which can hardly be called things in any ordinary sense
operate according to principles which cannot be described in mechanical or organismic terms. There is no way in which the most fundamental elements in the structure of the atom, as modern physics understands it, can be visualized. Leptons and quarks; muons and photons are not pieces of matter in any imaginable sense, nor is it possible to form
any visual image of anti-matter. Neither the organic images of ancient Greek science nor the mechanical images of Newtonian science have any further validity. The only language which can be used is that of mathematics, and that in a more and more abstruse form. And even mathematics no longer provides us with an absolutely secure mental framework,
for according to the famous Gödelian theorems which have never been disproved, within any logically mathematical, any rigidly logical mathematical system, there are propositions or questions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system and consequently it is uncertain that the basic axioms of arithmetic will not give rise to contradictions. We are a very long way
from the Newtonian world and yet, I repeat, it is this Newtonian worldview which still largely shapes our culture, both in its ways of thinking and in its ways of organizing its public life. At this point it is helpful to draw attention to two elements in the history of thought since the rise of modern science. The first is this: science and theology have both been reluctant
in recent decades to enter into discussions of cosmology. Theology has been reluctant, because it has shared in the general withdrawal of religion to the private sector. It was willing to discuss time and history because personal being is so intimately involved in time, but it was not interested in space, and as we have seen, even its discussion of history
was drawn towards a special Heilsgeschichte, separate from the so-called scientific history which deals with events in space. Theology has tended to become anthropology or rather, psychology. On the other hand, science has, until recently, avoided cosmology for fear of becoming involved in metaphysical questions for which traditional physics had no answer.
But today, the advances of astrophysics have carried science to the limits of the universe and forced it to face cosmological questions which are ultimately metaphysical. Physics thus challenges theology in a new way to come out of its privatized enclave and to say what it has to say about the world, about this single finite entity which the physicist calls
space-time, within which it is impossible to isolate a spiritual world of time from a material world of space. The other part is this: studies in the origin and development of modern science have led historians to ask why the brilliant intellectual powers of the ancient Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, and Greeks, in spite of their achievements, both in observation
and in pure speculation, never brought forth the dynamic self-developing science of modern man. It has been very plausibly argued that the decisive factor is to be found in the biblical vision of a world which is both rational and contingent. To put the point briefly, if the world is not rational, science is not possible. If the world is not contingent,
science is not necessary. Or, to put it more fully; on the one hand, the enterprise of science would be impossible if there were no principle of rationality in the universe. If every instrument reading in a laboratory was simply an isolated happening which could not be co-related in an intelligible way with other readings, the whole enterprise would collapse. But, in fact,
a scientist faced with an apparent irrationality does not accept it as final, nor does he take refuge in the idea of arbitrary divine intervention. He goes on struggling to find some rational way in which the facts can be related to each other; some formula or mathematical equation that will tie them logically together. This struggle is a deeply passionate struggle,
sustained by the faith that there must be a solution even though no one can yet say what it is. Without that passionate faith, in the ultimate rationality of the world, science would falter, stagnate, and die, as has happened before. Thus, science is sustained in its search for an understanding of what is seen by faith in what is not seen. The formula
credo ut intelligam, I believe in order to understand, is fundamental for science. But, and if this is the other equally important point; faith in the rationality of the universe would not sustain science without the concurrent belief that the universe is not necessary being, but contingent being. Indian metaphysics has generally been totally committed to the rationality
of the universe, but has understood it as necessary being part of the eternal cycle of evolution and involution. The universe is an emanation of Brahma, not the creation of a personal God. Its ultimate secrets are therefore to be discovered through the exercise within the recesses of the human soul at the point where it makes direct contact with the cosmic soul.
The discovery does not depend upon meticulous observation of empirical phenomena and painstaking experiments to test theory against the findings of observation. Science, in the sense in which it has developed in our culture, is not impossible, but it is unnecessary. Consequently, in the great cultures of China and India and Egypt, in spite of the intellectual, brilliant intellectual powers which they manifested,
science in the modern sense did not develop. And even Greece, which came closer than any other culture to developing a viable science, failed to do so, and relapsed in to the ancient idea of a cyclical universe, the most pervasive form of belief in a world which is rational, but not contingent. A developed science can, as we have seen in modern examples, peacefully
exist within that kind of monistic worldview, where the universe is seen as the necessary form of an immanent rationality. But such a worldview cannot, it seems, give birth to a spontaneously developing science. It can co-exist with it, but it cannot create it. For that it is necessary that there should be diffused throughout society the belief that the universe is both
rational and contingent. Such a belief is the pre-supposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask upon what is that belief founded? I hope that the relevance of this two-fold excursion into the history of science will become clear as we proceed. The first point to be made now is this: it is clear
that what one may call the methodological atheism of modern science has been part of the clue to its dazzling success. It was, and is, part of the recognition of contingency in the nature of things. As long as scientific thought was controlled by the idea of perfect numbers or perfect circles, or by the concept of the purposeful organism, and both of these are legacies of Greek science,
in other words, as long as it was controlled by the idea of a completely immanent rationality, the breakthrough to modern science could not occur. It could only do so, by virtue of a firm determination to study the phenomena and, so to speak, allow them to speak for themselves. But by the same token, it is easy to see that a purely mechanistic vision of the ultimate nature of things
is equally certain to become a fetter upon the development of genuine science, and we have seen how the advances in physics during the present century have rendered implausible this mechanistic vision, and indeed any form of purely immanent rationality, Contemporary physics recognizes a finite, and therefore contingent universe. It acknowledges limits beyond which its own
axioms do not operate and this again is a recognition of contingency, and in the Gödelian theorems, it's recognized as that mathematics itself does not consist of absolute and eternally necessary truths, but has in it an element of contingency. Moreover, it has become clear that even, even an infinitesimally small difference in the original explosion which
cosmologists see as the starting point of our universe would have resulted in a world in which conscious life could not occur. In other words, our is only one among billions of possible worlds, all of them equally rational. This has given rise among scientists to the so-called anthropic principle, which, in its weak form, states that our location in the universe is necessarily
privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers; and in its strong form, states that the universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it. In both formulations, this looks like an attempt to impose an immanent and necessary rationality upon facts which suggest, rather, radical contingency. As far as physics can tell us, there could have been
billions of other universes. There is, at least for us, only this one. We possess no power of reasoning which can show that it had to be this one unless we start by assuming that our consciousness is the measure of all things. These new developments in physics and cosmology open the way for a real dialogue between believers and scientists, such as was impossible
as long as the mechanistic model dominated physics. Our missionary task is, however, rendered much more difficult by the fact that other branches of science are still so largely controlled by mechanistic models. Thus the odd fact has been noticed by writers on science that during precisely this period when the mechanistic models in physics were being
abandoned, biologists were abandoning earlier vitalist theories and trying to describe the phenomena of plant and animal life in mechanistic terms, and this in spite of the recent extensive demonstrations of the capacity of even very lowly animals to recognize and solve problems; in other words, to engage in purposeful activity. Francis Crick, whose discovery of the DNA
molecule has had such a profound effect on popular thinking about the nature of life, is quoted as saying that "the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry." Unquote. In fact, there is no doubt that this reductionist way of thinking is very widespread. Yet, its absurdity
is obvious. For not even a machine can be explained by the chemical and physical analysis of its component wheels and shafts and pulleys. It can only be explained by understanding the purpose for which it was constructed and biologists have shown that the discovery of the physical basis of the genetic code in the DNA molecule, so far from explaining the origin of life, has made it
even more mysterious. If I may quote the words of another biologist, Thorpe, "Even if we assume that the genetic code is the result of natural selection, the extraordinary problem remains that the genetic code is without any biological function unless, and until, it is translated, and the machinery by which the cell translates the codes consists of at
least fifty macro-molecular components which are themselves coded in DNA. Thus the code cannot be translated, except by using certain products of its translation, the occurrence of which at the right place and time, seems overwhelmingly improbable." So much so that the same Francis Crick has seriously suggested that life may have originated in this planet by transmission
from some other part of space. To say these things is in no way to call in question the enormous importance of these discoveries of the physical and chemical conditions for the existence of life. It is to deny that the knowledge of these conditions constitutes an explanation. In a similar way, the enormous advances in our knowledge of the structure and the functioning of the brain has been used to disseminate the idea
that what we call our minds are nothing but ghost-like entities ineffectively hovering around the real functioning mechanism, which is the cerebral cortex. What we call our mental life is on this view, only the operation of approximately 10 million minute electric circ -- 10 billion minute electric circuits and it is therefore, in principle, possible
to create an electronic computer which will be equivalent to a human being in its mental operations. Again, to attack this is not to call in question the great fruitfulness of our increased knowledge of the physical conditions of mental life. It is to point out that to regard knowledge of these conditions as an explanation leads to absurdity. One way of stating this absurdity couperhaps be as follows:
however we may explain our mental states, we know that we have them. I think that I exist. If this idea of mine is really, in fact, only a series of electrical pulses in my brain, the capacity of the brain to produce these pulses must be the result of evolution by natural selection. But since the idea that I can by my will affect the
operation of these pulses is an illusion, the existence of this idea can have no effect on what happens in the world of physical and chemical change. Therefore, it can have no bearing on natural selection. Therefore, the existence of this illusion is an unexplained mystery since it cannot have arisen out of natural selection. Everyone is aware of the difference between a movement of the hand which is consciously
performed for a purpose, and a movement brought about by applying an electric current from a battery to the appropriate muscle. We know perfectly well the difference between a responsible action and an involuntary jerk. It may seem a waste of time to point out that these are not the same, and yet, the power of the mechanistic image is so great that it permeates the mind of our culture with the idea that
explanation must be in its terms and that to explain behavior in terms of the responsible action of a person who is capable of understanding and accepting a purpose is unscientific. The sciences which deal with human behavior have likewise been enormously influenced by the mechanical model. The Newtonian paradigm has drawn economists and sociologists into the attempt to formulate laws
analogous to the laws of classical physics, on the basis of which prediction could be made for the future. Armies of experts are employed by governments and business corporations in the belief that the future performance of human beings in their roles as consumers, producers, or voters, can be predicted and therefore, by altering their circumstances, controlled. The recent advances in computer technology have stimulated
further development with even more ambitious projects of futurology. It is not difficult to show, both that this kind of prediction is, except to a very limited extent, theoretically impossible and also, that in practice, its failures are much more evident than its successes. If one takes the single most far-reaching change in the world of thought in this century, namely, that associated with the name of Albert Einstein,
it is not only impossible to imagine that it could have been predicted in 1850; it is also absurd, for to have predicted it would have been already to have achieved it. Once again, we have to say that whatever may be the usefulness of mechanical models in economics or sociology, they can in no way provide an explanation for human behavior, much less a way of predicting or controlling it.
In my first lecture, I spoke of the dichotomy which is characteristic of our culture between a public world of so-called facts, and a private world of values. Plainly what I have been sketching in these last few minutes is what is called, "the world of facts," broadly conceived as a world of material entities operating according to laws which are mechanical in character. Corresponding to this world of fact, there is
a kind of knowledge which is understood to be objective, impersonal; knowledge which does not involve the knower in a personal risk. One may make the point simply by reference to the ways in which this knowledge is communicated in the course of the school curriculum. The statements of a textbook on physics, biology, or economics, are not usually introduced by the phrase, "I believe," or "we believe,"
as are the creedal statements of the church. The latter statement explicitly involves a personal commitment; by implication, it is possible to disbelieve. The statements in a scientific textbook, and I am not speaking here of scientific papers written at the frontiers of new discovery where the real nature of science becomes explicit. The school textbook statements are made in the
third person, and there is no suggestion that the writer is at risk. Here we are dealing not with opinions, but with facts. It is at this point that we touch the central core of our culture, which is an ideal of knowledge of what are called facts; a knowledge which is supposed to be independent of a personal commitment of the knower. "Fact," says Alasdair MacIntyre, "fact is a modern,
in modern Western culture, is a folk concept which an aristocratic ancestry." The aristocrat in person was Lord Bacon, who advised his contemporaries to "abjure speculation and collect facts." By speculation, he referred to the Aristotelian belief that things are to be understood in terms of their purpose. This he rejected. But what resulted from his
call was, of course, not the activity of a lot of magpies collecting odds and ends that were lying about with no rhyme or reason. It was shaped as every rational activity has to be shaped, by another speculative framework, namely the belief that things are to be understood in terms of their causes. Facts, thus, became value-free, because value is a meaningless concept,
except in relation to an end or purpose which the thing is either well- or not well-fitted. Here is the origin of what MacIntyre calls the "folk concept" of facts, which dominates the consciousness of modern Western man. There is, in this view, a world of facts, which is the real world, an austere world, in which human hopes, purposes, desires have no place. The facts are facts
and they are value-free. There is no need for the writer of the science textbook to use the formula, "I believe," because the facts are simply there whether you believe them or not. Science thus relieves me from the responsibility of deciding whether or not to commit myself to the truth of these statements. They are just facts. And yet, this folk concept of a world of facts is denied
by the actual practice of science. At the frontiers of research, scientists do have to make difficult decisions whether or not to commit themselves to a new line of inquiry. They have to decide which facts are worth investigating, and which are not. They have to make value judgments in the light of a vision of a purpose of the whole scientific enterprise. The decision may make or break a scientist's career
and the scientist is sustained in his intense mental struggle by a passionate concern to solve the problem that he has decided to tackle. His enterprise is not value-free; it is impregnated through and through by commitment to a purpose. And, to return to the school textbook, even the humblest schoolboy beginning the study of physics engages in a purposeful activity. The facts described
in the textbook do not imprint themselves on his mind like light on a photographic plate. They have to be understood through an arduous enterprise of learning the appropriate skills in the use of words, of ideas, and of apparatus. So, we have already the evidence of this dichotomy that runs through our culture. We all engage in purposeful activity and we judge
ourselves and others in terms of success in achieving the purposes which we set before ourselves, yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated. Purpose is a meaningful concept in relation to our consciousness of ourselves, but it is allowed no place in our understanding of the world of facts. Perhaps the point at which this self-contradiction
becomes most obvious is in the application of the social sciences, the so-called behavioral sciences to public administration. A social scientist who believes that he can understand and therefore predict and control human behavior on the basis of value-free scientific laws is called upon to apply his skills as an administrator or a civil servant. He cannot do so without acknowledging his own capacity
to pursue self-chosen purposes with a freedom which his science denies to those upon whom he is operating. The manipulator credits himself with a capacity for purposeful action which he denies to the manipulated. And if his purposes are questioned, there is no agreed framework of facts by which they can be evaluated, for facts are value-free. It becomes simply a matter of the comparative skill
and vigor of the different manipulators. We have again come, from another angle, to that cleavage running through our culture between the private and the public worlds. A public world interpreted in terms of efficient cause, and a private world in which purpose and therefore value judgments, have a place. I have affirmed that we cannot accept this situation in which Christian faith is admitted as no more
than a possible option for the private world. We cannot settle for a peaceful co-existence between science snd religion on the basis of an allocation of their spheres of influence for the public and the private sectors, respectively. We cannot forever live our lives in two different worlds. We cannot forever postpone the question, what is the real truth about the world?
A missionary encounter with our culture must bring us face-to-face with this central citadel of our culture, which is the belief based upon the immense achievements of the scientific method and embodied in our political, social, and economic practice, the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world which is to be understood in terms of efficient cause and not of final causes, a world
which is not governed by an intelligible purpose; a world therefore in which the answer to the question, "What is good," has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in a body of accepted facts which control public life. We have to go back to the point where Lord Bacon advised his followers to collect facts and abjure speculation and we have to ask what exactly is meant
by knowing facts. Knowing is the exercise of a skill which has to be learned; it has to be learned by submitting to the authority of parents and teachers and learned men and women, giving our attention often with some strain to what they say. It is a purposeful activity in which we sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. It is not
a mechanical process. Facts do not imprint themselves upon our brains as the images of objects are imprinted on a photographic plate. As learning proceeds, more and more of what we know, passes from a conscious awareness to a kind of knowledge of which we are not directly aware. In learning to read, we have to begin by attending to the exact shapes of the letters. Soon we can stop worrying about
them and learn to recognize words. Later we are no longer aware of the individual words, but take in the meaning of whole sentences and even paragraphs. If we habitually use different languages, we may remember what the paragraph said, but forget what language it was in. Our knowledge of the whole depends upon the fact that we know the letters and the words, and yet as we read, we are not aware of that
knowledge. Michael Polanyi takes this as an example of what he calls "the tacit component in knowing." We can attend focally to the meaning of the paragraph because we are tacitly aware of the marks on the paper and the separate words. If, on the other hand, we were correcting the proofs of a book, we would have to attend focally to the words while we tacitly are aware of the meaning of the whole.
A very large part of our knowledge is tacit and cannot be communicated by specifying precise details. I can immediately recognize my wife in a crowd of a thousand people, but I could not give a description of her which would enable you to do the same. In this sense, I know a great deal more than I can put into words. There are millions of human beings whose faces are basically
formed in the same way with the same color, but I would never confuse one of them with my wife. Yet, I could not account for the fact, by the most detailed measurements of her nose and her chin and her forehead. This is the most vivid and familiar example of our capacity to recognize a configuration which is made up of many details while we attend to the pattern we are only subsidiarily aware
of the details. But a complete account of the details by itself would not enable us to recognize the pattern. This is why I said earlier that a person who knew everything specified in Laplace's formula for perfect knowledge would in fact know nothing, for to know the smallest components of an entity is not to know the entity unless we know the pattern, and our knowledge of patterns is much more than can ever be specified in words.
Therefore, the Laplacian ideal, which still exercises such a determinative influence upon our popular understanding of science is one that can only lead us into a blind alley. All science depends upon the recognition of significant patterns and the power to recognize these is a skill which is only developed by practice. There are no methodical rules for deciding whether any
configuration is significant or simply an accident. The statistical probability of a collection of pebbles falling into a significant pattern is precisely the same as the probability of their falling into any one particular random grouping. Our recognition of significant patterns is an act of personal judgment for which there are no value-free rules. It is a judgment of value;
the pattern represents something which a human being finds meaningful in terms of intrinsic beauty or of purpose, and although rules have been devised for quantifying the regularity in a series which may or may not be random, the application of these rules by the scientist to a particular case is a matter of personal judgment which depends upon skills acquired by practice and is not capable
of quantification or of verbal definition. One particularly clear example will enable us to move to the next stage of the argument. A machine is a collection of components which can be analyzed chemically into their elements, and physically into the molecular and atomic particles which constitute them. Yet, the most exhaustive chemical and physical analysis would not enable us to understand the machine unless
we understood the purpose for which it was designed. In the understanding of the machine, I would have to employ both the concept of efficient cause and the concept of final cause if the machine breaks down because one of its components has been eroded by wear and tear. I could properly say that the cause of the breakdown was fully explained by referring to the physical and chemical processes which caused the erosion
and therefore the breakdown. But when the machine is in proper working order, it would be absurd to say that the chemical and physical laws governing the structure and the movement of its parts are the cause, are the sufficient explanation, rather, of the machine. It can only be explained in terms of the purpose for which it was constructed. Thus, the physical and chemical laws can furnish a full explanation for the causes of failure
but a full explanation of the successful working of the machine can be given, cannot be given only in terms of physics and chemistry, but must be given in terms of mechanics and must include an understanding of the purpose for which the machine is designed. From this example, we can move on to that of animals, which are in some respects machine-like entities in that their bodies are composed of moving parts
which can only be understood in terms of the purpose which they serve. The difference here is that the purpose is internalized. A machine has no purpose of its own. It embodies the purpose of its designer. An animal, as innumerable experiments have demonstrated beyond the possibility of doubt, has purposes of its own. It has been shown that even earthworms are capable of learning from experience how to solve a problem
and the animals nearest to ourselves, such as chimpanzees are capable of identifying problems and developing very sophisticated and complex strategies for solving them. Once again, as in the case of the machine, the physical and the chemical constitution of the animal's limbs and organs provide the necessary conditions for the animal's functioning and if these deviate from the normal, the animal will fail, and we
shall rightly say that these physical and chemical events were the sufficient cause of the failure. But it would be absurd either to say that a complete knowledge of the molecular activity in its organs constituted an understanding of the animal's behavior apart from an understanding of the purposes that it sets before itself or that this molecular activity was the cause of the behavior
as though there were no difference between a purposeful action and a jerk caused by the application of an electric shock to the nerves which activate the muscles. At each level which we have been considering, we have seen that understanding requires both the recognition, both of detail and of overall pattern. All chemical reactions are conditioned by the molecular changes which are the subject of physics,
but chemistry as a distinct discipline cannot simply be replaced by physics. All mechanical operations are conditioned by the physical and chemical properties of the component parts of the machine, but mechanics still is a necessary part of the machine and cannot be replaced by physics and chemistry. All animal life is conditioned by the successful working of the limbs and organs, which is is in turn conditioned
by the laws of chemistry and physics, but biology is still a proper study in its own right. The Laplacian ideal which pretends that by a complete knowledge of the smallest elements we would know everything is absurd. At each of these levels, we are able to understand only because while we focus attention on one level, our minds are operating with a vast amount of tacit awareness,
which has been gained by attending to the other levels. When observing the behavior of an animal, we judge its success or failure relative to the purpose which it is trying to achieve; to catch its prey, to build a nest, or to protect its young. Detailed knowledge of the mechanical, chemical, and ultimately atomic factors which conditioned success or failure is relevant to our understanding, but is in no sense a substitute for it.
It would be absurd to say that we understand the behavior of the bird engaged in building its nest by possessing a complete knowledge of the atomic and molecular changes in its tissues. We may, for certain purposes, attend focally to these, precisely because we are aware of and interested in the whole purposeful activity of building a nest. I have sketched a series of levels of explanation, stretching through physics,
chemistry, and mechanics, to biology. At each level, the principle established at the lower level provides the conditions for the higher level but does not explain it. At every level, the reductionist attempt to substitute a precise description of the components for an understanding of the whole pattern fails. Physics cannot replace chemistry, nor chemistry
mechanics, nor mechanics biology. We now have to move to the next level, namely our understanding of other human beings. Here the new factor which enters in is the possibility of complete reciprocity. I use the word complete to underline the point that there can be a partial reciprocity at lower levels. A biologist observing the behavior of an earthworm
is in a one-directional relation, so far as our present knowledge goes; the earthworm does not observe the biologist. There is thus no reciprocity. But a shepherd with his sheep dog is in a real relation of reciprocity. No one can watch a Northumberland shepherd with his dog, working together, without acknowledging that there is a mutual understanding. And so, as we
go up the scale, there are no absolute breaks, and I use the word possibility of complete reciprocity because it is, alas, possible for a practitioner of what are sometimes called the human sciences to regard his fellow human beings in the way in which the biologist regards the earthworm. In the development of our scientific culture, there have been essays in this direction.
I shall not discuss them, except just to draw attention to the point that they represent the ultimate; the carrying to its logical conclusion of one of the fundamental assumptions of our culture. The possibility forms the basis of CS Lewis' novel, "That Hideous Strength." But leaving that point aside, I come to the principles involved in the full mutual understanding which can exist between two human beings. Each is aware of the other
through the medium of a whole range of audio-visual impressions, as in the case of learning to read a text, so in learning to communicate with others from our easiest infancy, we have to learn to recognize gestures and expressions, words, intonations; yet, in a mature relationship, we do not directly attend to any of these things. The audio-visual experiences
condition our knowledge of the other person, but it would be absurd to say that they cause it, or that they explain it, or that we infer the existence of the other person from these audio-visual data. They form part of the tacit knowledge which makes it possible for us to attend focally to the other person; not as a physical or chemical or biological entity, but as the subject of beliefs,
experiences, and purposes similar to our own. Once again, there is nothing automatic about this. It is the fruit of a purposeful effort to understand, and it is evoked by the purposeful effort of the other party to communicate. The infant of a few weeks does not yet have the power of understanding fully developed. The power is evoked by the eager, loving
actions and gestures and words of mother and father, sisters and brothers, until, in mature life, the point is reached where the relation is fully reciprocal. If we ask precisely what is new in this reciprocal understanding between mature adults and compare it, with, for example, with the understanding between a shepherd and his dog,
the answer must be somewhat as follows: as a clever sheepdog quickly understands his master's purpose -- it is to get that particular sheep separated from the flock and brought into this pen -- the shepherd knows that the dog is tempted by other conflicting purposes; for example, to chase that rabbit. But the shepherd simply overrules that other purpose and even in this relation, the shepherd
acts not by coercion, but by the exercise of an authority that the dog has learned to acknowledge. If anyone other than his own master was there, the dog will forget the sheep and go after the rabbit. Mature human beings ... mature human beings have contrasting and sometimes conflicting purposes. But in a mature relationship,
one does not simply overrule the other. Of course, if A is a practitioner of social engineering or psychiatric manipulation, he may treat B's commitment to pacifism or religious belief as simply a deviation which has to be corrected by the necessary techniques. We know that such a concept of human relations exists, but we recognize that it is different from a mature relation
in which A and B mutually acknowledge one another as responsible persons. In such a mature relation, there is no way of dealing with conflicts between difference purposes, except by a process of mutual exchange in which each tries to communicate to the other his own perception of what is the proper objective of purposeful action; in other words, of what is good. And in this context, the word good
is obviously irrelevant if it only means what I want for myself. It can only mean good, absolutely good, in the sense of good for all. If it does not mean that, the whole exercise in mutual communication is meaningless. If there is nothing which is good in this universal sense, then in every conflict of interest, the only argument which is not meaningless
is "this is what I want." And, in that case, the only possible way in which conflicting purposes can be related to each other is that the strong manipulates, or coerces, the weak, and we hardly need to be reminded that modern technology provides us with many sophisticated ways of doing it. Have we, in discussing the mutual relation between mature human beings,
reached the top of the hierarchy of ways of knowing? Obviously not, for in describing this relationship we have had to invoke the concept of the good as something which both parties have to acknowledge as having authority over them, something by which conflicting purposes can be assessed. But what kind of knowledge is it which gives knowledge of the good? Will it be
by observing Bacon's admonition, and "observing the facts?" That would be to fall again into the reductionist trap. We do not understand the mind of another person. By the most painstaking examination of all the facts -- physiological, psychological, biographical about him or her; this kind of knowledge of the facts about a person can only be subsidiary and normally tacit element in knowing
the person as a person. Our ordinary language conveys very simply the sharp distinction which we draw between the most expert knowledge of the facts about a person, and the experience of knowing and being known by that person. The sharpness of the distinction becomes clear when, as sometimes happens, a discussion about a person is interrupted by the sudden arrival
of the person himself. The discussion has to be broken off altogether or else has converted into a different kind of discussion in which we listen for the person himself or herself speaking. It has to switch from language in the third person to language in the first and second persons. In our usual speech, we say that the carry on the former discussion about the person would be to simply ignore the person.
The same kind of break has to occur at this point in our discussion. It is the break which marks the limit of what is usually called natural theology. It is also the same break as we met in this morning's lecture when I said that the model of the hermeneutical circle was not adequate for the interpretation of the Bible from outside the commitment of the believing
community. I have suggested ways in which the concept of purpose becomes more and more necessary as we ascend, without a break, through the realms of physics, chemistry, mechanics, and biology to the human person. I have reached the point when one could say that there are pointers to the fact that we cannot stop with the human level and that human conversation itself becomes
inexplicable, without reference to something beyond itself, and obviously all of this argument is possible because I who argue and you who listen have already the experience of purposeful action. But no analysis of nature, from the lowest proton to the highest form of being, obviously the theological professor, could enable us to have direct knowledge of any purpose
beyond our own. We do not infer the existence of another person from our analysis and classification of the audio-visual sensations which we receive. But rather, we attend directly to the person as a living center of meaning and purpose, and for this direct awareness, our awareness of the sounds and gestures made by the other person is subsidiary and tacit.
So, also, it would be idle to suppose that we could come to the knowledge of a supranatural personality by induction from all the data of our natural experience. At this point, the only relevant question is "is there anyone present? has He spoken?" Natural theology ends here, and another kind of enterprise begins,
the language of testimony. The Christian church testifies that in the events of this finite, contingent, and yet rational world of warped space-time, there are words and gestures through which the Creator and Sustainer of the world has spoken and acted. It is not that we infer His existence from these events, and it is not that these events are anything
other than part of the unbroken nexus of happenings within space-time which can be analyzed along with all the rest, and it is not that they are interventions by someone who is otherwise absent; and, even more important, it is not that we are talking about something called religious experience as a separate form of cognition; that the word religion points to a type of experience which is widely diffused
throughout human history is an obvious fact, but that what is called religion is the only or the primary form of contact between the human race and its Creator is a mere assertion and has no logical foundation. It is simply one of the unexamined assumptions of our culture. As a member of the church of Jesus Christ, and from within its fellowship, I believe and testify
and the shift to the first-person pronoun is of course deliberate and necessary at this point. I believe that in the body of literature which we call the Bible, continuously reinterpreted in the actual missionary experience of the church through the centuries and among the nations, there is a true revelation of the character and purpose of the Creator and Sustainer of all nature,
and that it is this character and purpose which determine what is good. Because I so believe and testify, I reject the division of human experience into a private world, where the good is a matter of personal taste, and the public world where so-called "facts" are regarded as operative apart from any reference to the good. I believe that the whole of experience in the natural world,
in the world of public affairs, of politics, economics, of culture, and the world of inward spiritual experience, is to be seen as one whole in the light of this disclosure of the character and will of its Creator. It is from this point of view that I can begin to understand and cope with a world which is both rational and contingent. For at the center of this disclosure
providing the clue to the whole, there stands the cross on which the One whose purpose is the source and goal of all was slain in shame and dereliction, and the resurrection in which that very death became the source of life. This precludes any shortcuts into meaningfulness which would ignore the radical contingency of things; a sort of immanent
rationality which supposes that everything can be explained in mechanic, organismic, or mathematical terms, is excluded; and so is that which after the manner of some kinds of religion, supposes that everything is controlled in the interest of the good as I conceive it. The meaningfulness of things seen in this light is compatible with the recognition of mystery which can only be born in the course
of a resolute following of the way of the cross. On the other hand, one is protected from a sheer irrationalism which can find no meaning in the world, but everything is incomprehensible accident. Here in this responsible acceptance of this communication of a personal purpose of good is the ground upon which it is possible to believe
that the world is both rational and contingent. Having made the break which was marked by my move into the language of testimony, it is now possible to go back, so to speak, down the continuous ladder, that connects human experience through the animal and plant worlds to the world of the molecules, the atoms, the protons and the electrons. Coming up the ladder, we saw that at each stage, the
elements of the lower level, condition but do not explain the higher. Coming down now from the top, with the faith that there is a good purpose which can be known through the data of experience in the space-time world, we can see both why the category of purpose cannot be eliminated from our total understanding of how things are, and also, I suggest, how purpose may be recognized throughout the whole range of nature
and not only at the point where homo sapiens emerges. It is well-known that as the result of the demonstration of the non-inheritability of acquired characteristics, evolutionary theory rejected Lamarkian ideas of purpose and adopted the Darwinian view that natural selection operates only as the result of random mutations. Recent biological writing, however,
seems to suggest that while acquired characteristics are not transmitted genetically, they are translated mimetically, that in other words, that an immense amount of animal behavior is shaped by learning from and copying those who have been successful in coping with the conditions imposed by the environment. This is obviously the case with human development, and according to contemporary biologists, it operates at least at the
higher levels of the animal world as well. It is obvious that the prime example of this is to be seen in the purposeful efforts of a parent animal or bird to initiate its young into the kind of behavior which will enable it to cope with the world. We've already looked at the fact, at the part that this plays in the development of human beings' powers of perception, comprehension, and communication. We develop into mature, human
beings, not by an automatic process, but in response to the cherishing and training of our parents and teachers. The process by which a human fetus eventually becomes a mature person, able to recognize and follow what is good, depends upon the loving, purposeful will of those who have gone before. There is no logical break between this and the way in which a young animal is
reared and prepared for maturity, or even the way in which a dog is trained to understand love and serve its master. It is not unreasonable then, surely, to suggest that since purpose plays this role in development at the point where we have the most intimate knowledge, it may play a part in some way down the line to the lowest levels. If we look at the picture of nature as a whole, which modern science
gives us, one of the puzzling facts is that while biology shows us the continuing evolution of more and more complex organisms, physics shows us in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a picture of relentless descent into entropy, into total randomness. The fundamental laws of biology thus seem to operate in the opposite direction from the fundamental laws of physics. I am aware
of the work on what are called "dissipative structures," which has shown that within a total context of increasing entropy, ordered patterns can spontaneously arise. And I understand, of course, that entropy and evolution are reciprocally related in that it is increasing entropy which supplies the energy for evolution. But it is [difficult to?] see how this removes the perplexity to which I have
referred. It shows that biological evolution is possible in terms of the laws of physics, but it is difficult to see how it can explain the fact that the whole story of biological evolution moves in the direction exactly opposite to the movement of the physical universe taken as a whole. Is it too rash a speculation to suggest that the clue could be found in the fact with which
we are so familiar in human life, and which we now find to be operative at least in the higher levels of animal life; the fact that life moves towards its proper completion not automatically by any purely mechanical or organic process, but in response to a loving purpose which draws out and makes actual powers which were otherwise only latent and potential. That is a piece of pure speculation
which may have no validity whatever. What must, I believe, be affirmed with confidence can be put very briefly in five propositions with which I conclude; one, while the methodological elimination of final causes from the study of nature has been immensely fruitful, the attempt to explain all things, all that exists, solely in terms of efficient cause,
leads both to conceptual absurdity and social tyranny. Secondly, to recognize the place of final causes in the understanding of the world must lead to the question, "Is anyone there? Is there a Word?" since purpose is a personal reality and can only be known if the person whose purpose it is chooses to communicate. Thirdly, the church exists to testify
that there is Someone, and that He has spoken, and that we can begin to know His purpose, and to direct our personal and public life by it. Fourthly, the church therefore, in its missionary encounter with modern Western culture, has to be quite bold and unembarrassed in using the language of testimony since this testimony, so far from being capable of
validation by the methods of modern science itself provides the foundation upon which alone modern science rests; namely, the assurance that the world is both rational and contingent. And, finally, when the ultimate explanation of things is found in the creating, sustaining, judging, and redeeming work of a personal God, then science can be a servant of
humanity and not its master. It is only this testimony which can save our culture from dissolving into the irrational fanaticism which is the child of total skepticism. It may well be the greatest task of the church in the twenty-first century to be the bastion of rationality in a world of un-reason. But, for that, Christians will have to learn that conversion is a matter not only
of the heart and of the will, but also of the mind.