SCIENCE AND UNIVERSALISTIC RELIGION
What is most obviously missing from the new refined religion of the religious scientific avant-garde whom I have ventured to describe, and who follow, I think, Duhem, Buber, and Polanyi, is very odd indeed: What is missing from their religion is the religious aspect of science, the scientific quest.
Their religion incorporates beautifully some religious aspects of the arts, of Fra Angelico, of or Bach. They admit the aesthetic value of science - indeed they stress it. But the religious value of science, or the intellectual love of God, short circuits their philosophy. The separation of religion from science is essential to them. It is essential to them in order to prevent science from ousting religion, for (like Pascal) they have found science without religion intolerable.What I recommend here, then, is exactly such a short circuit, an intensification of all that is good in this avant-garde philosophy. The result will be “A Free Man’s Worship,” much as Russell envisaged it half a century ago.
A. The religious scientific avant-garde I have discussed here are not professional philosophers or theologians. Also, they have high standards of professional ethics. Hence, they can seldom express their views on religion, whether in writing of in public speaking. Even in private, when conversation turns really intellectual, they prefer to talk on subjects they know: mathematics, pure and applied; science, natural and social, pure and applied-real hardware by the most severe positivist standards. They are also inhibited from discussing religion due to loyalty - both to their religious denominations and to science. They are hardly heard. But they have clear and strong opinions, and these often show in action, usually in committee or in private consultation.
The picture of the behavior of the religious scientific avant-garde then - quite unintentionally - is that of a conspiracy of silence about religious doubts; of a grimness on the part of desperate intellectuals who try sheer tenacity as their last effort at adjustment - a seeming conspiracy very much akin to the traditional seeming conspiracy of silence on the same topic though from the rationalistic side of the barricade.
The disappointment in science was too painful; the new positivist view is precarious and really depends on keeping life as gracious as possible and on not tearing one’s hair and shouting at each other.The cool, suave attitude of the religious scientific avant-garde to science is the not really cool and rather stiff expression of past disappointment, of the once burnt twice shy. Also, their mood fits Duhem’s despair of ever attaining informative theoretical science very well. Dedicated they are; enthusiastic they fear to be. Buber has done a lot to bring religion to life for them (for they often lack religious upbringing), at least to the Protestants and Jews among them, but in a significantly mutilated form - at least one can show this with respect to Judaism. For Buber, Judaism is a faith, not a scholarly way of life; the love of learning, the respect for scholarship, and all that, so characteristically Jweish, do not appear in Buber’s picture of Judaism. The most important Jewish ritual - study - is totally bypassed by Buber.
This is no oversight: Pragmatism is a shift away from intellectualism. Duhem has debunked the intellectual values which rationalism preaches, and rendered science a part of technology; likewise Buber has ignored the intellectual values which religion preaches, and rendered religion a part of a way of life. What members of the new religious scientific avant- garde desire most is intellectual, and what they want reinforced is the moral and religious value of intellectual activity. Exactly this they lost to commitment. In a grim determination to hold to the commitment, they have lost sight of their own quest.
Much as I do not like this grim determination, I do not think I can show that it is redundant. For all I know, the grim determination may work; perhaps because it is a mode of convincing the divine authority of our goodwill and sincerity (the new Kierkegaardians!) so as to induce the authority to spare us. The grim determination may not suit my character, or yours, or yet the suave mode of gracious living as cultivated by the new religious scientific avant-garde.
Psychology may be against it. Yet, philosophically, grim determination has the upper hand. Religion, in the late Middle Ages, preached pessimism, even in the high Renaissance (R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns). Science competed hard, and offered certainty and optimism. Now that science has disappointed us, it should no longer offer mock certainty and shallow technological optimism. The members of the religious scientific avant-garde refuse to let go of the last shred of the promise of science, and in desperation they try then to complement it with religious promises. The desperate mood of such a move is not canceled by the outcome. Moreover, contrary to all their intentions, their philosophy remains irrationalist both in that it disallows scientific examination of their pragmatist tenets and in their loss of their own main objective: the intellectual love of God.B. My own view of the matter is this. Science is better off not competing with religion concerning promises, but competing with old sectarian religions frankly as a new universalistic religion. The pretense that science was no competitor to established religion has led science to engage in fierce hostilities of a positivist and radical nature. As Comte has already noticed, positivism is a religion; yet he was not boldly positivist enough, to reject this religion. Competing as a religion, science may, however, appear as what the avant-garde religious thinkers do wish religion itself to appear: Not anti-religious, but rather religion properly modernized, a way of life with as little dogma and taboo as possible, and with as much possible enrichment by varied traditions as desired.
The idea sketched here is not different, I hope, from what Einstein, in his “Religion and Science,” referred to as: “the cosmic religious feelings” that he felt. For more details on the religious aspect of this philosophy, I would recommend consulting R. Robinson’s woefully neglected An Atheist's Value of 1964 (though I definitely intend not to advocate atheism).
But in order to integrate this into a more coherent philosophy, one must devise a philosophy of science and of rationality to compete with Duhem’s philosophy of science. Here, I think, a modification of the views of Popper and of his former students - especially Bartley - seems to come in rather handy, though as yet their views are far from having the finish a serviceable doctrine may need.C. Let me conclude with two quotations from Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography, volume 1. Anticlerical as he always was, in his deeper moments he expressed his quest in thoroughly religious terms. The first and brief quotation is from a letter written on April 22, 1906, exhibiting Russell’s views of the religious aspect of intellectual activity. The other, from a letter written on July 16, 1908, exhibits his view of religion which, though half a century old, seems to me to remain the real avant-garde attitude in these matters.
And another thing I greatly value is the kind of communion with past and future discoverers. I often have imaginary conversations with Leibniz, in which I tell him how fruitful his ideas have proved, and how much more beautiful the result is than he could have foreseen; and in moments of self-confidence, I imagine students hereafter having similar thoughts about me. There is a “communion of philosophers” as well as a “communion of saints,” and it is largely that that keeps me from feeling lonely [p. 280].
I am glad you are writing on Religion. It is quite time to have things said that all of us know, but that are not generally known. It seems to me that our attitude on religious subjects is one which we ought as far as possible to preach, and which is not the same as that of any of the Voltaire tradition, which makes fun of the whole thing from a common-sense, semi-historical, semi-literary point of view; this, of course, is hopelessly inadequate, because it only gets hold of the accidents and excrescences of historical systems. Then there is the scientific, Darwin-Huxley attitude, which seems to me perfectly true, and quite fatal, if rightly carried out, to all the usual arguments for religion.
But it is too external, too coldly critical, too remote from the emotions; moreover, it cannot get to the root of the matter without the help of philosophy. Then there are the philosophers, like Bradley, who keep a shadow of religion, too little for comfort, but quite enough to ruin their systems intellectually. But what we have to do, and what privately we do do, is to treat the religious instinct with profound respect, but to insist that there is no shred or particle of truth in any of the metaphysics it has suggested; to palliate this by trying to bring out the beauty of the world and of life, so far as it exists, and above all to insist upon preserving the seriousness of the religious attitude and its habit of asking ultimate questions. And if good lives are the best thing we know, the loss of religion gives new scope for courage and fortitude, and so may make good lives better than any that there was room for while religion afforded a drug in misfortune.And often I feel that religion, like the sun, has extinguished the stars of less brilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness of a godless universe. The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seems to grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exiles on an inhospitable shore [pp. 285-86].