People who discuss spirituality and science in the same breath, are vehemently accused of the same ignorant tendencies as fundamentalists waiting for Jesus to return tomorrow. So why be skeptical at all? What science has defeated is the great tradition of idealism. This tradition has hundreds of branches, but let’s accept the simple dictionary definition: idealism is “a theory that ultimate reality lies in a realm transcending phenomena.” By nature most people are idealistic. They accept God and have a will to believe. They are open to experiences beyond their five senses, such as love and beauty. They assume that there is an ultimate Truth.
Idealism thus persists in popular culture, but science has felled it on practically every academic front. To be honest, the assault was stunning, and victory was based on the simplest tactic. “Show me what you can prove, not what you believe.” Using experimental proof as its standard, science sent idealism scurrying in baffled confusion. Darwin defeated teleology, the age-old principle that Nature has a goal and purposeful design. Materialism relegated God to an unprovable hypothesis, along with everything associated with the numinous, such as the soul, the afterlife, and religious inspiration. Philosophy scrambled to shed Plato and Hegel and become scientific through the efforts of G. E. Moore and Wittgenstein, later morphing into the work of Austin and the ordinary language school of British philosophy.
Idealism failed to strike back. True, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who theorized about an invisible life force or “elan vital,” won the Nobel Prize in 1926, but that was for literature, a stark acknowledgment that any theory about invisible realities deserved to be considered imaginary, or at best a matter of faith.
To say that the victory of science was the victory of skepticism is misleading, however. If science had been merely skeptical, it would have merely replaced belief with disbelief. This it didn’t do; science gave new grounds for knowledge that belief couldn’t match. To disdainfully dismiss any immaterial phenomenon, as skeptics do, actually betrays the scientific method, which allows any hypothesis into argument in an open-minded tolerance for the next ridiculous speculation that may turn out to be true.
Skeptics defend the necessity to keep science and religion in their own proper place. Imagine a man walking into a room, and the skeptic who is there to vet his credentials says, “Well, I see you believe in God, but you also do good science, so come on in. Just don’t mix the two.” It disturbs me that the man being vetted could be Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, or Erwin Schrodinger. Asking a great mind to separate faith and science asks too much, and I think it asks too much of lesser minds, too. Why not try to see if the schism can be repaired?
