{The Great Divide* [continued (4)]}[11th June 1988]

[Redbook5:148A-D][19880611:0000d]{The Great Divide* [continued (4)]}[11^th June 1988]

11/06/1988

[continued]

I hope that New Scientist is not, as a recent correspondent seemed to suggest (Letters, 19 May), deliberately conducting an organised attempt to influence political and educational thought, and the public consciousness, in favour of a rational view of life rather than one based upon mysticism** and religion (my emphasis). I hope not because it isn't necessary and it wouldn't work. It isn't necessary because the overwhelming majority of people have learnt from instinct and experience to balance inward rationality and irrationality in exactly the right proportions to enable them to cope with their everyday lives. It wouldn't work because when people adhere to strange irrational cults and beliefs, they do not do so because they lack rationality: they do so because they choose to. I suspect that they choose to because they miss the irrational element which they intuitively feel that their external lives lack. Church surveys show, not that the majority of people do not believe in God, but that they do not believe in the Churches: and a common complaint against the Anglican Church is that it is too rational. It doesn't look as though a greater dose of New Scientist rationality is going to solve this problem. Rational and irrational modes of thought are only means—not ends. People use them as they perceive the need for them.

So what's to do? Can Science help? Possibly; but only, I suggest, after looking very closely at its own means and ends, and distinguishing them very precisely. All applied logic is founded on assumptions: the basic assumptions of Science change from one period to the next. These assumptions can only be justified as part of a working framework. We don't know that any of Science's explanations are true, and we never shall: but they are good enough to be going on with, until something better comes along. Science is very good at suggesting how instead of why: at describing events without meaning, and producing material results without moral weight. A little humility in acknowledgement of these facts would be welcome.

But the end of Science is the end of Mysticism: Truth, if it exists. The beginning is probably the same for both: the Man who gazes at the Stars and experiences Wonder. The Scientist explores the Stars, but the Mystic explores the Wonder. Science informs us that the Stars we see do not appear to us as they really are: like any external phenomenon, they can be perceived more "truthfully" (or fundamentally) by exploration and analysis of their inner material structure than by the immediate impact of their properties on our external senses. Mysticism, on the other hand, explores qualities which can only be perceived by the means by which we perceive them: that is, directly, in an inner sense. Love, for example, cannot be directly perceived externally, although we may search for evidence of it among other individuals. Love can only be conceived of as we perceive it, directly, and its truth, once it is perceived, is therefore beyond doubt to the one who perceives it. The same cannot be said of any of the phenomena which are the subject of experimental Science.

*[Short essay written speculatively for New Scientist; see [Redbook5:160-161][19880615:1642f]{Mysticism and Science}[15^th June 1988]]

**[See last previous entry]

[continues]

[PostedBlogger28052018]