There’s a profound sort of idolatry associated with science at the moment, something that has been building in the West for the last several hundred years, at least since Copernicus/ Galileo/Newton and the so-called “Scientific Revolution”, although it has its roots much deeper in human history. It’s what I call “scientific literalism”. But more of that later; let me start by presenting to you the amazing words of Wisdom 9:13-18:
“We can hardly guess at what is on earth, and what is at hand we find with labour; but who has traced what is in the heavens?”
The ancients clearly understood the radical limitations, both of human understanding of the world, and of our practical ability to get it to do what we want it to do. But that was back then; would you say the same thing now? Now, in the 20th-21st century we have the amazing phenomena of modern science and technology, ruling the world and our lives. We seem to know what is even in the distant heavens (witness recent astonishing pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope), and we can do almost anything we want with our technology and industry.
For the wisdom writers of the Bible true understanding—true wisdom—could only be found by revelation—wisdom, such as we could garner it, was always revealed. Wisdom was understood as a central aspect of divinity—God created the world through wisdom, the logos, the divine word (John 1:1-3).
So, here’s the question I want to ask: has science now replaced wisdom? Well, it seems to have—a few of us still read the Bible and go to church, but for virtually everybody else (at least in the West) science is now the primary and ultimate source of wisdom.
This is what I have to say on the matter, however: science is not revelation, is not wisdom. Science does not reveal the world, what the world really is, what is in the world. It doesn’t describe the world, represent the world, explain the world. It is not revelation, it is not wisdom.
The false idea—one virtually all of us have swallowed, hook, line and sinker—that science reveals, describes, represents, explains the world, is what I call “scientific literalism”. It’s every bit as blind and dogmatic as biblical literalism, every bit as foolish and misleading as thinking that God created the world in seven literal days.
Science doesn’t describe or explain the world, rather it is an unsurpassably powerful set of theoretical models/tools for doing things to the world, for changing the world. It is the human practical problem-solving tool par excellence—but is does not reveal, describe, represent, explain the world. If it did, it would be of no use to us practically, because describing the world and being a tool for changing it are two completely different things.
Scientific literalism is a profound, and insidious, form of idolatry, in which we build idols or models of the world, then, in sinful admiration of our own brilliance in doing so, mistake these idols or models for the world itself.
The map is not the territory is another way of putting it. Senior science and mathematics students in secondary schools now learn just this distinction in all their courses—that all the amazing mathematical/scientific models of reality we build are not the same thing as reality itself—so that an important learning outcome always involves an assessment of the assumptions, reasonableness and limitations of mathematical/scientific models in relation to the real life situations they are modelling. They’re learning the critical life lesson of not confusing the two things: the ideal and the real, the map and the territory.
So, science cannot, does not, reveal things as they really are—that’s not what it’s for. Here’s what Cervantes had to say on the matter, through his favourite mouthpiece:
Then Don Quixote said, “O man, you see not the world itself, but only the measures in which the world is veiled. Woe unto you, blind one.”[1]
Our wonderful science and technology wrap reality up in “measures” which, however amazingly useful, blind us from seeing “the world itself”.
How, then, can we see the world itself, experience true reality, experience the One who is truly hidden from us by all our science and world wrapping up measures? Well this is ancient wisdom, and it is how humanity has been searching for wisdom all along. From God first, of course, through the special revelation of Jesus Christ, then through religions in general the world over, and now, in an amazing way, through Art in all its forms. Science is incredible and we wouldn’t want to live without it, but it is not revelation, not wisdom.
September 2022
[1] From Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605/1615. Quoted in J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus (1999, Text, Australia), page 99.