During the last century, the Western World has seen a marked and even jarring improvement in standards of living, thanks, in no small part, to advances in the material sciences. Vaccines. Air-conditioning. Indoor plumbing. Chemotherapy. All are good things. However, alongside these creature comforts and salubrious aides, darker developments and practices have emerged along the way. The atom bomb. Zyklon B. Unit 731. Tuskegee. None of these can be swept beneath the rug of history or smothered by appeals to creature comforts and extended longevity. Their stains remain. And yet, today, there appears to be little in the way of sober and studied reflection on how such scientific undertakings came to be. It seems much more the case that the scientific community, or at least its most ardent materialist apologists, wish to prevaricate. The missteps of science are one-offs. Blips. Dismissed with an embarrassed shrug and purse of the lips followed by an exasperated, “Really? You’re bringing that up again? How tiresome. You know the crusades were very, very bad. You don’t see us bringing them up every third breath. Let’s let bygones be bygones. It’s all in the past.” But whether in the case of the crusades or the human slaughterhouses that punctuated the twentieth century, the past never becomes a matter of indifference to the present. In fact, as philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, “[i]t is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.” Therefore, all parties have an obligation to step back and assess, not only the manner in which they’ve swung but what they’ve been swinging at. Science is not distinct in that respect, and if we want to prevent future fouls, so to speak, the ends and the means of scientific inquiry warrant careful scrutiny because to boldly swing where no man has swung before without first pondering what exactly science is for seems a sure fire way to hurtle humanity towards destruction’s door. Therefore, this paper will examine the multifarious ends offered by the scientific community in the hopes that by juxtaposing them, it will be easier to see what ought to be the highest end of all forms of scientific inquiry. 

Knowledge

In the broadest sense, the purpose of scientific inquiry is to gather knowledge. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins clearly articulates this and contends that the principal difference between scientists and people of religious persuasion is the latter’s contentment with ignorance. Religious people, Dawkins says, are satisfied with a “god of the gaps.” They glory in what they cannot explain because human ignorance permits such a milquetoast god to retain a place. However, for men of science, such as himself, human ignorance does not breed contentedness. On the contrary, it compels them to do science:

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt Ridley has written, ‘Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.’ Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do.

Knowledge, according to Dawkins, is what scientists are meant to pursue. However, it’s worth asking, once they secure that knowledge, what exactly are they going to do? After all, greater knowledge is no guarantee that those who possess it will be more benevolent, humane, or trustworthy. Indeed, history provides ample evidence to the contrary. As philosopher and professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr has noted, greater scientific knowledge enabled man “to transform his dagger into a nuclear bomb without having gained any greater control over his passions.” In vicious or intemperate hands, knowledge has proven disastrous because it has no inherent ethical limits. As rock band King Crimson said in their 1969 song “Epitaph,” “Knowledge is a deadly friend, when no one sets the rules. The fate of all mankind, I see, is in the hand of fools.” In light of this sobering reality, the aim of many in the scientific community has long been on the move because perspicacious and enterprising scientists throughout the centuries have been quick to see that if they wanted to combat and/or control the so-called fools, they had to be the one to set the rules. And for that, they needed to be powerful. 

Power

According to Buddhist contemplative Dr. Alan Wallace, “Science has overwhelmingly focused on understanding the objective, quantifiable, physical universe in order to gain power over the natural world.” For Wallace, the principal aim of the sciences has not been a disinterested accruement of knowledge (as Dawkins would contend) but a dedicated attempt to bring the natural world to heel beneath the microscopes of man. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that—man’s power over the natural world has, after all, secured countless life-saving benefits from vaccines to cancer treatments—C.S. Lewis well said that “[w]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Wallace’s assertion about the power-seeking nature of science does not preclude this because under the mantle of the natural world, human beings are certainly included, and when some men gain power over others whether through science or other means, the question invariably becomes quis custodiet ipsos custodes? After all, regardless of their sesquipedalian degrees and heavy brocade of government funding, members of the scientific community remain prey to every kind of folly. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and either has the capacity to make even the most dour scientists intolerant and greedy. Indeed, it has even led some to demand not only resources but intellectual and personal fealty:

These unapologetically anticlerical scientists insisted that empirical, naturalistic science provided the only reliable knowledge of nature, human, and society… They sought to ‘expand the influence of scientific ideas for the purpose of secularizing society rather than for the goal of advancing science internally. Secularization was their goal; science, their weapon.’ 

Thus, in either the material or intellectual sense, for the more imperial-minded, both science and its fruits are a means to an end—a way to dominate and make others subservient. And some observers, both within and without the sciences, have rightly sensed that it will not be long until such industrious and determined scientists come for them. Given this, they take a more existential approach towards science.

Survival

For individuals and communities that do or have felt the hot breath of power-driven science wafting across the back of their necks, scientific inquiry is driven largely by necessity. Far from being a leisurely exploration of nature’s mysteries, the enterprise of science is a matter of some urgency because the knowledge and power science can provide are seen as requisite if they are going to survive. Within Muslim and Jewish communities, this attitude obtains in degrees. According to Professor Nasr, awareness and dread of the West’s military and fiscal dominance has meant that “[t]he interest of Muslim governments in science and technology today is almost always because of what they feel is their need to gain power, whether it be economic or military…” Dr. Norbert Samuelson, a scholar of Jewish studies, has written that even exceedingly conservative Jewish communities which are typically suspect of, if not outright hostile towards, modern science and its discoveries, are willing and eager to utilize the latest in reproductive technology because “[p]ost-Holocaust the number of living Jews is dangerously low. Hence, to ensure the future survival of the people, help is welcome from every corner.” Thus, according to Nasr and Samuelson, the enterprise of science can be a means of survival and resistance—a secular instrument of deliverance. And once science fulfills that end, rescuing the oppressed and giving them reprieve and rest, “the hope… is that science enables human beings to improve the quality of human existence.” That is, once science has made sure that its practitioners will survive, the further hope is that it can give them (and us) more comfortable lives. 

Comfort

That science can be a means to alleviate suffering and increase standards of living is a nigh on self-evident fact. Whether enabling us to grow and distribute more food or laying the groundwork to colonize Mars and the moon, science has been a tremendous boon, keeping people fat and happy and promising ever more elbow room. Moreover, according to Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology Owen Flanagan, the successes of sciences don’t appear to be stopping anytime soon: 

We have been very successful as a species at overcoming obstacles, e.g. our inability to fly, by inventing prosthetics. Airplanes get us to fly, and microscopes and telescopes get us to see beyond nature’s endowment. Past success at overcoming physical or cognitive barriers may partly explain why we are not inclined to accept any limit as insurmountable. 

And why should we accept any limit or boundary? After all, if science can improve human existence, providing us with ever more comfort and happiness, why limit it? The answer, per Dr. Wallace, is a matter of ethical judiciousness because comfort and happiness, or “hedonic well-being,” as he terms it, “is contingent upon outer and inner pleasant stimuli, and is often pursued with no regard for ethics…” A lack of ethics, even when wedded to comfort and happiness, is a dangerous and dehumanizing thing. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, this can be clearly seen because while there is much in keeping with “hedonic well-being” from soma to feasts to sex-parties, the people are little more than pleasure-seeking, puerile beasts. An outsider to the New World Order, John “The Savage,” at one point asks the inhabitants, “‘But do you like being a slave?… Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking!… Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?’” He’s later told by “The Controller” Mustapha Mond,  “‘Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness.’” And, as The Savage witnesses, the results of the teleological shift are utterly tragic. For the Brave New World-ers, the cost of comfort and happiness is their very human-ness. They have become the savages. And Huxley isn’t the only one who’s offered a prescient warning of the risks of being driven by comfort and happiness. Over two-thousand years ago, in his Politics, Aristotle noted much the same thing, writing,

For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony. 

Comfort alone won’t satisfy the human soul. Its pursuit and acquisition do not invariably make men noble, and while some might argue that “most ethical knowledge is local,” I contend that ethics, properly understood, must be global. Indeed, universal. And I’d further argue that when it comes to identifying science’s ultimate end, both ethics and a sense of what it means to be human must figure in.

Flourishing

The belief that there is such a thing as human flourishing stretches back into antiquity and is couched within a sense that human beings have a purpose. There is something that we are for—beyond mere happiness and comfort—and whatever that ultimate end is, great thinkers across time and space have agreed, we should muster our all resources, including science, to achieve it. So what does it mean to be a human being? According to Buddhist philosophy, answering this question “begins with ethics, then focuses on the cultivation of mental balance, and finally centers on the cultivation of wisdom, particularly that stemming from insight into one’s own nature.” So what is the nature of a human being? According to Richard Dawkins, “living organisms and their bodies are best seen as machines programmed by the genes to propagate those very same genes.” We are, in the words of late MIT Professor Marvin Minsky, “meat machines.” Human beings are nothing special, really. Our highest and best end is to have endless and procreative sex, which means Viagra and Octomom are the pinnacle of human achievement. Perhaps. But there are other perspectives. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine observed that our highest end was to rest in the One for whom we were created, writing, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Chair of Rice University’s Department of Chemistry and practicing scientist Dr. James Tour holds Augustine’s view, and in describing the work he and his lab are doing in nanotechnology, he says this: “What we’re trying to do is make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, and have the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” That is a different perspective entirely. There are many more, and whichever prevails will ultimately decide what science is for. But until then, it might be best for scientists to be a bit more cautious and reflective about their ends. After all, history has made it clear that Frankenstein-esque experimentation has been a costly and tragic heuristic again and again. Personally, I think Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr put it best:

Only a science that issues from the source of all knowledge, from the Knower, and that is cultivated in an intellectual universe in which the spiritual and the ethical are not mere subjectivisms but fundamental features of the cosmic, as well as the meta-cosmic Reality, can save humanity today from this mass suicide that parades as human progress. 

Religion & Science. Spring 2022