Science and the Sea of Doubt by Lorna Marsden “What is it that charges with meaning this incredible and terrible existence, that awakens within the consciousness of humanity a recognition within the visible of the Invisible - an echoing dichotomy of celebration and sorrow that is the very beat of our life?” RECENTLY A RADIO PROGRAMME was broadcast purporting to examine religious conviction today. It offered discussion by various scientists, . theologians, and one or two others, who presented informally their own attitudes to religious ideas, including their responses to such things as “miracles” as these are presented in the Bible. In this discussion there seemed to be a kind of generalised avoidance of searching thought, and a goodnatured tolerance wherein two thousand years of Christianity was left, apparently, to dissipate itself into a kind of inconsequence.
At this perhaps historically critical moment it may be questioned whether it is appropriate to conduct such a public discussion without reference to anything more searching. The impression was given that to these people the spiritual and imaginative responses on which the vitality of any civilisation is based had drained out of the contemporary community. A residue of interest was there, but no sense of deprivation.
There did appear, perhaps a slight, a very slight, undercurrent of nostalgia.
There was certainly no conviction towards the future.
Yet, one may ask, is there an unacknowledged significance in the fact that at this moment the broadcast occurred at all?
Is its appearance an indication of change at work below the surface? Is there at work, below the openly acknowledged level, a rising questioning as to the provenance of what may be called spiritual experience? Or of intellectual experience in its full and not castrated sense — that is, where its workings find their origins in the imagination? In fact, such hidden activity may well be of great importance for the future even in relation to science, or even especially in relation to science. One might go so far as to postulate the possibility that in religious matters the emptiness into which we are in danger of falling itself evokes a reawakening which could rescue our civilisation from its dangerous misdirection; much as a swinging pendulum demands a return.
Also, if the ideas discussed were shadowy and inexact compared with what they would have been a generation. ago, it could be argued that the attainment of exactitude is not the point in an intellectual climate where the embracing of relative values is rife; where, also, the uncertainty principle in contemporary physics has opened the door of the allegedly rational mind on to regions of thought which are inching their way towards a new borderline. This borderline has for a very long time separated science and spirituality. Is it now moving dizzyingly under our feet?
When the self-designated scientist speaks of God as though he, she, or it is seen in personal terms — an assumption generally declining — we are left as though cliff-hanging on to a past that is presented as though still possibly of account. This inconclusive wavering was evident in most speakers on that radio programme. Yet no one appeared to see this as a challenge. In terms of thought the impression given was one of muddle.
No one appeared moved to acknowledge that “the mind has mountains; cliffs of fall... sheer, no-man-fathomed” (Hopkins) or that the shape we give to the world is arguably the creation of our own responses (or lack of them). This is a postulate not only implied in phenomenology but already approaching the mental horizon of some contemporary pioneering scientists. Nor is it alien to the assumptions of many visionaries over many centuries.
Moreover, in connection with the question of legendary miracles, Biblical or otherwise, quantum theory itself has now brought us not only to an acceptance of the uncertainty principle but also to the acceptance of communication over separating distance, which may well relate to various forms of human extrasensory perception.
To accept that the reality or otherwise of the alleged experience of divinity (or of the “spirit”) is not open to proof, that the form given to any such experience is of necessity provisional, is no denial of its probable profound meaning for the human psyche. It is not a precautionary “extra”, as it were — as it appeared in the discussion, where it was so equivocally dealt with. The idea of the spiritual has been for humanity a perennial haunting.
Also, the arising within the human imagination of such ideas as incarnation, resurrection, grace, etc., is not an arbitrary imposition from without but the fruit of the impact of an inward experience that prints its identity, its self-discovery, on the receptive world. Symbolism, imagery, rise from the depths of the human response to life. They have been shaped and re-shaped throughout human experience in every quarter of the world, and always in related forms. Whatever distortions or enervations they are subject to, their creative power is our inheritance. They are a lan- Kirsty, a two-year old with impaired sight, using a plasma sphere photo: Carl Rutherford “Already we are seeing a physicist...stating that science is closer to art than to philosophy.” guage — a language as authentic as the signs of mathematics. from this territory, despite what, in terms of centuries, are the now crippling aspects of the Enlightenment — and its consequences. In the as yet unfilled space between classical physics and quantum theory, are we about to see illumined before us a horizon where the active imagination of mankind can newly fill the caverns of the mind which are and always have been the source of wisdom — of whose echoes the ancient religions of the world are the enigmatic proclaimers?
Today, some scientists are bringing Plato’s name into the margins of that waiting space where the future gathers. Behind Plato, for the West, stand the pre-Socratic Greeks for whom the mind as the mirror of all things was an undivided unity.
Have we now to acknowledge that homo faber is himself but one aspect of a greater whole? For the achievements of technological man are double-edged unless they are cleansed by the breath of E its earlier days science was never far the Word. In changing form is this Word once more becoming audible on the shifting air that surrounds the struggling of the dangerous contemporary world? If so, it may well be the herald of more than we can yet conceive. Out of our lost direction can we already hear the rise of the wind of the spirit exposing new land as the sea of doubt withdraws?
What is it that charges with meaning this incredible and terrible existence, that awakens within the consciousness of humanity a recognition within the visible of the Invisible — an echoing dichotomy of celebration and sorrow that is the very beat of our life? Every race of mankind has named this the presence of divinity, of God, of the gods. If our artefacts are to be emptied of any relevance to the sanctions of that creative power we have called the spirit they will destroy both ourselves and our world.