Based on principles
proposed by Plato and Aristotle, developed by astronomers in Greece
and Arabia, and completed in the fifth century by a Syrian monk -
who claimed it owed much to a dialogue between St Paul and
Dionysius the Areopagite - the model answered the questions men and
women have asked since the beginning of time.
Who are
we?
How did we, the
world, the sun and the stars, come into being?
What supports us
all) what is our purpose, and what will become of us when we
die?
Because the answers
which the model offered were so widely accepted we know what Aelred
at Rievaulx and Francis at Assisi saw when they looked up at the
night sky and contemplated the colossal drama of universal
existence. True to men's physical perceptions, not to mention their
psychological disposition, the stationary earth was at the centre
of the cosmos, though smaller than any star. It was a globe, like
the sun and the moon, but a barrier of scorching equatorial heat
prevented access to the other half of it, on which life existed,
moving about like flies on the underside of an apple. Although
sophisticated minds did not accept this literally, the fires of
Hell, reached by a tunnel, were said to burn at earth's centre;
beside the mouth of this tunnel rose the Mount of
Purgatory.
The security a faith
provides seems, on the surface, to be of the same sort as that
provided by science. To the faithful, events happen the way they do
because God, alien beings, the stars, or other remote powers cause
them to. As with science there is the same apparently casual chain
of explanation. But these remote powers possess two much more
attractive features not contained in the scientific world of cause
and effect.
Many of us are
impatient. Life is short, and we wish to have as much satisfaction
as we can obtain as rapidly as possible. In particular we want a
reason here and now for why the world is the way it is. We have to
make crucial decisions in our lives which depend upon this world
picture. We cannot wait for a lengthy chain of causes to be
discovered by the patient analysis of science, especially because
the longer the chain the farther removed it becomes from the human
sphere of relevance. We might appreciate that matter is made up of
atoms, but when the atom is found to have a nucleus inside it and
that nucleus has elementary particles inside it which themselves
may have quarks inside them, well, we tend to lose track and
interest. This is especially so when the quarks are to be expected
to have internal constituents, which will themselves have
components, and so on in a never-ending succession.
So scientific
explanation does not really seem an explanation at all because it
never ends. There are always further steps of the explanation
waiting to be uncovered.
The second feature
that makes faith score over science is that it can be all-embracing
and explain every aspect of the world, not just a severely limited
part of it. The scientific method only applies to reproducible
phenomena, and the effort to achieve this repeatability often
drives phenomena away completely or at best distorts them severely.
This is especially so as far as human experiences are concerned,
and imagination, creativity, feelings and indeed any mental
experiences would seem to be well beyond the scientific pale. An
example of this is the act of love observed under the cold gaze of
laboratory scientists; in the words of the poet "we lost the love
some time ago, now we've only the act to grind". This limitation
leaves the major part of human experience apparently out of bounds
to scientific scrutiny. So faith steps gracefully in and explains
all.
A rapid,
all-embracing framework with which to explain the hostile Universe
makes faith and fantasy far more appealing than science in this
short life of a mere human. Even scientists may turn to clutch at
religious straws as their lives thunder on towards the final
whirlpool. The certainty they searched for during their too-short
lives could only be obtained in the last few years, days or minutes
of it by rejecting the scientific code they lived by up till
then.
There is another
feature of science which gives ground to the other side, and may
well cause this breakdown of the scientific spirit. As
understanding of the world increases ignorance also expands, for
there are fresh problems which are exposed to view by the new
advances. It is as if our known world lies on the surface of a
balloon, with the unknown just on the outside of it. As the balloon
expands so the known world increases, but so does the area outside
it with which it comes into contact; our ignorance is
simultaneously expanded. This increasing ignorance of our
surroundings can finally sap the confidence of an ageing scientist
ever to understand the world by scientific analysis. This
difficulty is also seized upon by the anti-scientific to show how
little we understand about the world by the help of science. How
much easier it is to appeal to supernatural forces in some form or
other!