Arthur Stanley Eddington: Science And The Unseen World: part 7

We want an assurance that the soul in reaching out to the unseen world is not following an illusion. We want security that faith, and worship, and above all love, directed towards the environment of the spirit are not spent in vain. It is not sufficient to be told that it is good for us to believe this, that it will make better men and women of us. We do not want a religion that deceives us for our own good. There is a crucial question here; but before we can answer it, we must frame it.

The heart of the question is commonly put in the form “Does God really exist?” It is difficult to set aside this question without being suspected of quibbling. But I venture to put it aside because it raises so many unprofitable side issues, and at the end it scarcely reaches deep enough into religious experience. Among leading scientists to-day I think about half assert that the aether exists and the other half deny its existence; but as a matter of fact both parties mean exactly the same thing, and are divided only by words. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have not seriously considered what they mean by the term “exist” nor how a thing qualifies itself to be labelled real. Dr. MacTaggart, wrote a two-volume treatise on “The Nature of Existence” which may possibly contain light on the problem, though I confess I doubt it. Theological or anti-theological argument to prove or disprove the existence of a deity seems to me to occupy itself largely with skating among the difficulties caused by our making a fetish of this word. It is all so irrelevant to the assurance for which we hunger. In the case of our human friends we take their existence for granted, not caring whether it is proven or not. Our relationship is such that we could read philosophical arguments designed to prove the non-existence of each other, and perhaps even be convinced by them – and then laugh together over so odd a conclusion. I think that it is something of the same kind of security we should seek in our relationship with God. The most flawless proof of the existence of God is no substitute for it; and if we have that relationship the most convincing disproof is turned harmlessly aside. If I may say it with reverence, the soul and God laugh together over so odd a conclusion.

For this reason I do not attach great importance to the academic type of argument between atheism and deism. At the most it may lead to a belief that behind the workings of the physical universe there is need to postulate a universal creative spirit, or it may be content with the admission that such an inference is not excluded. But there is little in this that can affect our human outlook. It scarcely amounts even to a personification of Nature; God is conceived as an all-pervading force, which for rather academic reasons is not to be counted among forces belonging to physics. Nor does this pantheism awake in us feelings essentially different from those inspired by the physical world – the majesty of the infinitely great, the marvel of the infinitely little. The same feeling of wonder and humility which we feel in the contemplation of the stars and nebulae is offered as before; only a new name is written up over the altar. Religion does not depend on the substitution of the word “God” for the word “Nature.”

The crucial point for us is not a conviction of the existence of a supreme God but a conviction of the revelation of a supreme God. I will not speak here of the revelation in a life that was lived nineteen hundred years ago, for that perhaps is more closely connected with the historical feeling which, equally with the scientific feeling, claims a place in most men’s outlook. I confine myself to the revelation implied in the indwelling of the divine spirit in the mind of man.

It is probably true that the recent changes of scientific thought remove some of the obstacles to a reconciliation of religion and science; but this must be carefully distinguished from any proposal to base religion on scientific discovery. For my own part I am wholly opposed to any such attempt. Briefly the position is this. We have learnt that the exploration of the external worked by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Are not these too of significance? We can only answer according to our conviction, for here reasoning fails us altogether. Reasoning leads us from premises to conclusions; it cannot start without premises.

The premises for our reasoning about the visible universe, as well as for our reasoning about the unseen world, are in the self-knowledge of mind. Obviously we cannot trust every whim and fancy of the mind as though it were indisputable revelation; we can and must believe that we have an inner sense of values which guides us to what is to be heeded, otherwise we cannot start on our survey even of the physical world. Consciousness alone can determine the validity of its convictions. “There shines no light save its own light to show itself unto itself.”

The study of the visible universe may be said to start with the determination to use our eyes. At the very beginning there is something which might be described as an act of faith – a belief that what our eyes have to show us is significant. I think it can be maintained that it is by an analogous determination that the mystic recognises another faculty of consciousness, and accepts as significant the vista of a world outside space and time that it reveals. But if they start alike, the two outlets from consciousness are followed up by very different methods; and here we meet with a scientific criticism which seems to have considerable justification. It would be wrong to condemn alleged knowledge of the unseen world because it is unable to follow the lines of deduction laid down by science as appropriate to the seen world; but inevitably the two kinds of knowledge are compared, and I think the challenge to a comparison does not come wholly from the scientists. Reduced to precise terms, shorn of worlds that sound inspiring but mean nothing definite, is our scheme of knowledge of what lies in the unseen world, and of its mode of contact with us, at all to be compared with our knowledge (imperfect as it is) of the physical world and its interaction with us? Can we be surprised that the student of physical science ranks it rather with the vague unchecked conjectures in his own subject, on which he feels it his duty to frown? It may be that, in admitting that the comparison is unfavourable, I am doing an injustice to the progress made by systematic theologians and philosophers; but at any rate their defense had better be in other hands than mine.

Although I am rather in sympathy with this criticism of theology, I am not ready to press it to an extreme. In this lecture I have for the most part identified science with the physical science. This is not solely because it is the only side for which I can properly speak. But because it is generally agreed that physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology. On the other side of him stands an even superior being – the pure mathematician – who has no high opinion of the methods of deduction used in physics, and does not hid his disapproval of the laxity of what is accepted as proof in physical science. And yet somehow knowledge grows in all of these branches. Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek by the only methods that can be devised for that particular opening, not over-rating the security of our finding, but conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.