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Much has been written in recent years to the effect that science, in its upper reaches,
merges into mysticism. It is often said, by certain New Age physicists and astronomers,
that Atraditional"
premises about order in nature, and the goal of objectivity in knowledge, are no longer
justified. Proponents of this view argue that twentieth century advances in physics have
demonstrated a reality chaotic in its ultimate "essence". They claim this
supports the conclusion of an arbitrariness at the very core of existence: a
scientifically unpredictable interference by some transcendental "holistic"
force or Mind. And they would have us believe that the principle of indeterminacy -- as
articulated by Heisenberg -- necessarily implies a human species reflecting just such an
irrationality in its substantive being. Moreover, they now add, the new "chaos" theory confirms what the mystics
have been saying all along. Nature, at all levels, is without internal order. All -- all
is mystery, it seems, and we must seek new, more appropriate ways of tapping into the
Creative Oneness above and beyond the chaos of "knowable" experience. We are
told that we must learn to believe in the "unknowable", even though we
can never know it in any scientifically predictable sense. And we must accept the
"fact" that observation and analysis
are but crude and limited tools in the search for that mystical Truth of transcendent "chaos" -- of which the uniquely
sophisticated physicist, at the outer edge of human knowledge, has only recently become
dimly aware.
This comes across to the layman as powerful and convincing stuff. If even leading physicists
are intimating that mystical explanations are, in fact, scientific -- and that the
particular form of scientific explanation which we have known in the past is inherently
limiting to human understanding -- then, surely, this has profound implications for the
way we think about reality and about our existence within it. Perhaps, say many ordinary
people, we should be listening to the mystics in our midst, if we wish to understand
ourselves and our surroundings, rather than to those who profess to rely on reason and
evidence. At the very least, according to this argument, we should be prepared to grant
equal status to both the mystical and the scientific -- especially in the life
sciences. To do less (we are told) is to reveal an arrogance and intolerance totally out
of keeping with democratic ideals of freedom and pluralism in the arena of ideas.
I intend to argue that the surface plausibility of the position outlined above is both
misleading and dangerous to human progress. It is misleading for two reasons. It relies on
an unwarranted leap of logic, as well as a misinterpretation of the principle of
indeterminacy and of the chaos theory of modern particle physics. The illogicality of the
mystics' conclusion results from their strange leap from a human perception of randomness
in nature to a conclusion concerning arbitrary guidance and superhuman purpose housed in
some sort of collective Intelligence or transcendental Mind. The second fallacy is due to
a common misunderstanding concerning the nature of the randomness discussed by physicists:
a misunderstanding stemming chiefly from a confusion of the various meanings of determined.
Heisenberg was referring to our efforts at measurement -- not to the
"essential" nature of the reality we seek to measure. The velocity and position
of a particle are "indeterminate" in that (given our present conceptual and
technical instruments) both cannot be accurately measured at one and the same time. This
does not mean that these aspects of nature are "undetermined" in the sense of
being uncaused; nor does it mean that physicists have "determined" that the
"essence" of reality is chaos. Recently, particle physicists have (rather
misleadingly) used the term, ">chaos", to describe a surprising anomaly
appearing when calculus is pursued over infinite time. They have discovered a previously
unexpected condition: one which is not explainable in terms of linear causality. It now
appears that they may be referring to nothing more mysterious than the type of complex
dynamic system-emergence with which biologists have been dealing since Darwin. Their
finding is an indication of the possible limitations of the current paradigm of physics --
of the conceptual and technical tools that, until now, have proven so successful in
measuring relations in inorganic nature. It is not an indication of the limitations of
science itself!
Credible scientists make no claims whatsoever about the "essential" nature of
reality -- or about any purely logical grounding for an ultimate or First Cause (or lack
thereof). They are happy to leave such scholastic disputations to theologians. Whenever
practicing physicists and astronomers do express their findings in terms of some form of
the anthropic principle -- which views all reality as operating for the express purpose of
producing humankind -- they are overstepping the bounds of their expertise. They are
mistakenly attempting to explain a higher-level and incredibly complex dynamic system
(such as that of organic or psycho-social relations) in terms of concepts appropriate to
the much simpler (inorganic) level. They are also departing radically from the role of
scientist. In their everyday role of citizen, they are merely reflecting the premises of
the particular world view which energizes their being, and unwarrantedly clothing these
premises in the authority of science. In the case of those with mystical inclinations, the
world view is one which creates a desire for answers more all-encompassing and certain
than those of science can ever be. It is the age-old yearning for explanations both magical
and absolute.
What it all comes down to, then, is the type of explanation which human beings
find satisfying and fruitful -- and this is very much a culturally determined matter.
Throughout history, mystically inclined cultures have produced people who feel comfortable
with mystery and contradiction, and in those cultures science has not prospered. For there
is indeed a difference between the type of explanation favored by mystics and that which
has evolved throughout the centuries as the scientific one. Those (relatively few)
physicists and astronomers who explain their findings in terms of mysticism are people who
operate -- outside the laboratory -- within a magical world view. That is, they rely on
sources of truth which are beyond sense experience and therefore cannot be verified. They
imagine various unfathomable entities or forces which are mysteriously housed in the
natural world, and then bequeath to their creations an absolute and arbitrary power to
interfere in the course of nature. They are people who just happen to be working, in a
technical sense, in the field of physics or astronomy; but they have never assimilated the
scientific way of bringing order to experience. They are not living, in any meaningful
way, within the paradigm of science. On the other hand, numerous people -- utterly lacking
in formal training in any of these specialized studies -- operate in all aspects of their
daily lives from a scientific frame of reference.
World views matter. They affect behavior in quite observable ways. They determine our
approach to the problems of life, and the way in which we assess our success or failure in
solving these. And whether, in fact, we are concerned with solving problems in the first
place. It does seem, then, that there is a practical difference between people who
are drawn to magical and anthropic explanations, and those who find scientific ones more
satisfying. I believe that this difference is extreme; that the two world views are based
on utterly conflicting premises about the nature of knowledge and the human role in
seeking it.
Where knowledge is concerned the mysticism underlying both the magical and anthropic
explanation departs radically from the perspective of science. For mystics appear to
believe that absolute truth is indeed available to humans; and they maintain that its
source is a subjective and mysteriously derived intuition -- sometimes masquerading
as an autonomous, Kantian reason. Scientifically oriented people, on the other
hand, accept the idea that human knowledge, although necessarily limited and uncertain,
has been made increasingly reliable as a guide to action by means of the empirical
scientific approach. They express grave concern about the dangers to humanity of reliance
upon private intuition, or upon esoteric exercises in an axiomatic logic devoid of
grounding in reliable evidence -- exercises such as those employed in the Cosmological and
Ontological Proofs of God's existence.
It is possible for most liberal religious people to operate comfortably within the
scientific world view because science makes no assumptions about the "essential"
nature of existence; nor does it require that its practitioners actually deny any cosmic ethical
role for the God hypothesis as such. However, science does require a commitment to the
primacy of human reason acting upon the evidence of the senses in the knowledge-building
process. And it demands a corresponding commitment to objectivity as a goal. These
commitments are usually anathema to the mystically oriented. It is, instead, the magical,
anthropic world view that resonates with their romantic subjectivism.
Magic and science, as systems of understanding, are primarily about the nature of
knowledge and of the role of humankind in discovering or constructing that knowledge. Both
comprise ways of explaining experience that provide emotional support to the individual in
question, as well as rendering that experience comprehensible within their frame of
reference. People conditioned to be comforted and satisfied by the certainty of untestable
beliefs feel distressed when confronted by a demand for evidence. Those who have learned
early to expect the world to be a mysterious and confusing place feel no curiosity when
confronted by contradiction. And without curiosity there is no urge to look for better
explanations, or to solve the problems thrown up by experience. This is why we speak of
the magical explanations of mysticism as opposed to scientific explanations, and why I
maintain that the two world views are in direct conflict. We need to be familiar with
these two kinds of explanations, to be able to compare and contrast them precisely, and to
be prepared to assess them in terms of their fruitfulness for humanity.
It is worth emphasizing that mystics are distinguished by their explanations --
not by their feelings. There is a common misunderstanding here. Such people often justify
their world view by appealing to certain so-called mystical feelings which they claim are
everywhere prevalent. These feelings are of three kinds: (1) a sensation of awe or wonder
at the marvels of existence; (2) an awareness of being part of something larger than
oneself: and (3) an overpowering egocentrism which can readily persuade the ego in
question that such perfection as is revealed in one's own complexity and felt purpose
could not have come about by accident. But these are general human sensations --
not merely mystical ones! It is wonder that drives the scientist to ask "How
come?" and to seek an intellectually satisfying answer. The curiosity engendered by
awe and wonder has fueled the scientific process at least since human beings discovered
fire. The experience of being part of some larger entity -- far from being uniquely
mystical -- is a scientifically predictable reflection within human consciousness of the
evolutionary history, religious tradition and socio-cultural context of the individual.
The same is true of the egocentrism that renders us susceptible to the urge to view our
own "selves" as the consciously designed, ultimate products and central concerns
of the universe. How could we not feel thus, given the natural origin of our
species and its integral relationship to all aspects of its physical surroundings and to
the organic web of life? And given our millennia-long legacy of the anthropocentrically
oriented culture reflected in current society which, in turn, has shaped these
"selves" as surely as inherited genes have formed our organic building blocks?
New Age mystics claim to possess an understanding of science superior to that of the
person operating within what they dismiss as the traditional positivist scientific
perspective. They delineate sharply between "cold" rationality (what they see as
a "value-free" process by which scientists observe external facts and measure
and analyze these in terms of cause-and-effect relations) and their own emotionally
motivated, intuitive search for the true "meaning" of that "holistic"
reality beyond the merely phenomenal. They would limit cause-and-effect thinking (all of
which they label mechanistic and reductionist) to readily observable inorganic phenomena.
Meaning, on the other hand, is supposedly derived from the mysterious "essence"
of reality and, for the magical thinker, the principle of cause and effect does not
operate here. Mystics often seem to believe that this "essential" nature of
existence is, at the same time, both chaotic and arbitrary, and therefore
inaccessible to the human instruments of reason and the ordinary senses. Only a subjective
intuition, they say -- itself mysterious in terms of source and nature -- can tap into the
immediacy of the "Oneness" transcending and directing existence. And they claim
that the new "science", respectful of the human search for meaning and
proclaimed by mystically inclined physicists, supports this view.
But there is nothing new about these ideas! They originated in Hellenic Greece,
probably with Parmenides and Pythagoras, and were given powerful impetus and survivability
by Plato. They have been around, in their modern form, since Kant's rear-guard action
against the Enlightenment. Emerson reinvented these mystical notions for American
consumption in the early nineteenth century and they have lived on as a benign type of
subjective romanticism, largely within the Unitarian movement in New England. German
romantic idealists such as Fichte, Schilling and Hegel shaped them into a seductive
ideology, impervious to reason and evidence. (It was an ideology which, in a subsequent
extreme form, prepared the ground for Nazism.) Henri Bergson, writing at the turn of the
century, gave mysticism renewed impetus with his concept of "vital impulse" and
"stream of consciousness". Early twentieth century phenomenology and
existentialism were rooted in this cultural legacy, and those movements, in their turn,
have contributed to much of what is described today as "postmodern" and New Age
thought.
Furthermore, there is nothing scientific about the approach to knowing favored by
mystics. Indeed, their attack on science is grounded not in a sophisticated understanding
of that enterprise, but in a profound ignorance of the nature of modern scientific theory
and method. The paradigm they attack is pre-Darwinian; in fact it predates Hobbes and
Hume. Most philosophers of science since Hobbes have written about the necessary
interrelationship between valuing and reasoning. Thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, August
Comte and John Stuart Mill recognized the crucial role of emotions in human attempts to
make sense out of (or "know") their surroundings. Karl Marx was aware of the
inevitable influence on human consciousness of that encompassing existence of which we are
a part. And after Darwin, our understanding of cause and effect at the organic level of
evolution was changed forever. The modern paradigm of science, incorporating the Darwinian
concept of after-the-fact causality among living things and social beings -- and a belief
in the unity of science -- was articulated by John Dewey and other pragmatists, as well as
by twentieth-century thinkers such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Mystics, in their
ignorance of the philosophical underpinnings of our modern scientific world view, are
attacking an anachronistic straw man.
What, then, are the characteristics of the modern scientific world view of which
the mystics seem so unaware? I submit that these involve: 1) a reliance upon a systems
approach to analysis based on the principle of hierarchy in nature; 2) a belief in the
universality of cause and effect, along with the recognition of a difference in the nature
of the causality operating at the inorganic and organic levels of organization; 3) a
specific objective of seeking regularities in experience, and of devising and testing hypothetical
explanations of these, according to a rigorously objective process which allows only the
fittest to survive; 4) a skeptical, agnostic stance toward those explanations of events
that are not supported by evidence; 5) an inability to live comfortably with
contradiction; 6) an appreciation of the central role of language in the search for the
necessarily conditional knowledge available to fallible humankind; and 7) a belief that
the causal connections ordering human relations are so complex and difficult to identify
that, for practical purposes, we must expect much in life to appear random.
Modern science recognizes a hierarchical ordering of systems of relations as we move
from the sub-atomic particles studied by physics to the atoms of chemistry; then to the
genes ordering organic life and, finally, to the subjects of the social sciences:
instincts, conditioned reflexes or habits, social norms and cultural institutions. This
means that it is the mystic's interpretations, concerned as they are with the significance
for human nature of hypotheses from astronomy and physics, which are simplistic and
reductionist in the correct sense of the words. That is, they are interpreting a complex
level of organization in terms of a unit appropriate only to a much simpler level.
Second, modern science also recognizes a different kind of causality operating at the
organic level from the mechanical push-pull governing cause and effect among inorganic
relations. Ever since Darwin we have come to understand more and more about how organic
life has been shaped both by random mutations and the consequences of the
organism's forays into its environment: consequences which then feed back to affect the
species' future by determining which individuals live to reproduce. This is a contingent,
or after-the-fact, kind of causality which applies at the psychological and socio-cultural
levels as well.
A third crucial aspect of modern science which the mystics fail to understand is its
objective. Those scientists true to their calling are not looking for absolute truth; nor
is their overriding goal the verification of hypotheses. Science seeks to identify
regularities in human experience by means of a public or objective process of
testing (and attempting to falsify) hypotheses. It does this by (1) communicating the
exact conditions under study; (2) predicting probable effects of a plan to alter those
conditions and (even more important) those precise effects which would refute the
hypothesis; and (3) providing a means of observing and corroborating what actually does
happen in these controlled circumstances. For the scientist, there is no knowledge without
regularities, and regularities claimed but undocumented by objective test are not
sufficiently reliable to be worthwhile or safe as guides to action. However, scientists,
as individuals, have no monopoly on understanding. Their unique responsibility is to the
rigorous public process of testing possible explanations of those regularities
experienced by us all. For science, unlike magic and ideology, imitates evolution. It has
a self-correcting process at its very heart.
Fourth, a personal commitment to scientific explanation is characterized by the
agnostic stance: a refusal to believe what is unsupported by evidence. For liberal
religious people, only belief in a God that does not interfere arbitrarily in nature is
excepted from this. However, as Albert Schweitzer (a self-described theistic humanist)
noted wryly, it is an exception that can do little real harm. A fifth defining
characteristic is an inability to live easily with contradiction. Aristotle's syllogism
provided a powerful impetus for the scientific orientation, in that the tension elicited
within the organism by the experience of disjunction in its surroundings was supplied with
a conceptual tool for distinguishing what makes sense from what does not. Like the feeling
of wonder, this tension in humans in the face of the illogical has operated as a necessary
engine in knowledge building throughout our history.
A sixth characteristic of the scientific world view is an acceptance of the defining
function of symbols and concepts in human self-consciousness. This view sees language not
as artificial baggage interfering with "authentic" experience, but as that which
gave us our great advantage in evolution by making knowledge possible at all. It views
concepts, and the symbols that both create and encase them, as our only windows on
meaningful experience -- not doors that block and distort it.
Finally, the scientific world view is based on the premise that much in life is apparently
random; that is, it occurs because of complex chains of fortuitous circumstances far
beyond our current means of observation and comprehension. This premise involves the
understanding that our responsibility is to expect coincidence, while searching out the
natural explanation in such situations, even though it may be far from obvious.
On all these counts, the magical explanation of the mystic is the exact opposite. And
it is fraught with internal contradictions as well. Mystics cling to a mechanistic concept
of causality appropriate only to the relatively simple level of inorganic relations, and
they define all existence in terms of the unit of analysis applicable to physics only. Yet
they accuse those who uphold the scientific world view of being mechanistic where cause is
concerned, and reductionist in their interpretations of social behavior. They claim access
to ultimate Truth by means of subjective intuition, while arguing that all is unfathomable
mystery. They employ ambiguous language and fallacious logic to support the proposition
that language and reason impede access to the "immediacy" of experience. They
brandish the so-called scientific postulate of ultimate chaos to support their faith in a
collective Mind ordering every detail of current existence; while at the same time, they
refuse to acknowledge the everyday occurrence of coincidence.
As a final argument for the incompatibility of science and mysticism we can do no
better than to refer to George Santayana. In commenting on the mystic's goal of suspending
language and logic in order to achieve the immediacy of "Oneness with the
Universe", he wrote: "The immediate is not God but chaos; its nothingness is
pregnant, restless and brutish; it is that from which all things have emerged...so to
lapse into it again is a dull suicide, and no salvation."2 It is this
possibility of suicide for the human race that worries scientifically oriented people and
makes them justifiably concerned about the dangers of a wholesale cultural lapse into
mysticism.
