SOMETIME IN THE new atheist fad of the 00's I felt moved to type out the entirety of A. S. Eddington's Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World and post it online. I don't remember where I first posted it but I posted it later on my now largely unremembered utility blog. I haven't gone through it in the next fourteen or so years to check for typos and other problems and like all major efforts, its importance to me has faded since then. If I'd known about it, I could have saved myself the bother of typing it out because Archive dot org had posted it the year before that. Though I think I first typed it out earlier than that posting, I don't remember when that was.
Some of the descriptions of science are quite vintage, now. Though looking at it, it had some good things in it. Here's how he ended. I think I kept Eddington's Brit spelling though probably not consistently.
Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require. I recognise that the practice of a religious community cannot be regulated solely in the interests of its scientifically-minded members and therefore I would not go so far as to urge that no kind of defence of creeds is possible.
But I think it may be said that Quakerism in dispensing with creeds holds out a hand to the scientist. The scientific objection is not merely to particular creed which assert in outworn phraseology beliefs which are either no longer held or no longer convey inspiration to life.
The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton’s laws of motion, to Maxwell’s equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, of if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and transcribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. I would not be sorry to borrow for our scientific pronouncements the passage prefixed to the Advices of the Society of Friends in 1656 and repeated in the current General Advices:
“These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”
Rejection of creed is not inconsistent with being possessed by a living belief. We have no creed in science, but we are not lukewarm in our beliefs. The belief is not that all the knowledge of the universe that we hold so enthusiastically will survive in the letter; but a sureness that we are on the road. If our so-called facts are changing shadows, there are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine which has settled for all generations just how the spiritual world is worked; but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes from our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.
Religion for the conscientious seeker is not all a matter of doubt and self-questionings. There is a kind of sureness which is very different from cocksureness.
I'll add that I doubt anyone, no priest, bishop, pope, patriarch, reverend, etc. has ever been as rigidly attached to and observant of creeds as is imagined even by them. I think for just about everyone who is sincerely religious, all such things are held as the late Walter Brueggemann once put it, held onto but loosely, in regard to the reading of Scripture.
And I think Eddington viewed the actual culture of science in regard to rigid creedal adherence with unrealistic idealism. It may not be formally required that an affirmation of belief in creeds be made in science but in most science departments in most universities there will be one or two different denominations of whichever science holds sway there through the ideological and professional interests of the faculty members (often chosen by which ever faction dominates) and in places where two competing creeds are represented on a faculty, students will be under pressure to choose one or the other. Eddington certainly experienced that, himself, in the earliest years of his adoption of the new physics starting with his acceptance of Einstein's theories.
While the evidence in physics may have been sufficiently compelling to force the reluctant to adopt those theories as the evidence grows vaguer along with the complexity of the subjects of science lends itself to less and less exactness, those denominational struggles and wars can get pretty bad. The slapping fights in the soft sciences can get really vicious.
At times during Eddington's lifetime, such as in biology in the Soviet Union, the state supported ideology oppressed and even executed many scientists in ways that the supposed martyrs of science, such as Galileo never was subjected to by the Catholic Church. Copernicus, by the way, had the full support of bishops and even popes for his science during his lifetime, as he noted in his book dedicated to Pius III AND AS GALILEO POINTED OUT IN HIS OWN DEFENSE. And that was hardly the only place where science with support of the state and ideological and financial institutions enforced creedal discipline. That can be everything from such drama instigating incidents as Edward Teller getting Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked to scientists making sure that those who are not strictly adherent to their preferred creed don't get grants and funding. That is a weekly if not daily occurrence in science.
But I especially liked how Eddington ended in advocating the opposite of arrogant certainty in our conceptions, that the sureness we have is a matter more of experience than of articulating stands and dogmas. Sincere religion isn't what the new atheist faddists of that time claimed it was but it also wasn't what the rigid creedalists and other religious types hold it to be, either.
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