If empirical science itself does not lead to atheism, the approach to science that has been taken surely has. For modernity to give way to something better, we need to trust our reason in an expansive sense as a gift of God to know our own hearts and minds—and to know the whole of his creation. This would be a truly Christian and appropriately humble empiricism.
The spirit of the age is almost always a combination of good and bad, a mixture of ideas and impulses that are meant to correct the distortions of previous ways of thinking… and end up introducing new distortions with them. We are, it would seem still in a time called “modernity”—a period whose name is ultimately derived from the Latin adverb modo, which can have a lot of meanings but in this context means “presently,” “recently,” or “just now.” “Modern” began to be used during the 17t-century’s so-called “Age of Reason” and the 18th-century “Enlightenment” to indicate an attitude and quite often the stated belief that what happened in the past was inferior to the way we do things now—what C. S. Lewis liked to call “chronological snobbery.”
Some people, including some historians, will tell you that modernity actually ended almost a century ago or perhaps when the Berlin Wall fell. We all live, they say, in a time called postmodernity. I think there is something to that—we seem to be moving out onto uncharted waters these days that seem to be completely free of reason. If in the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was still defending the legitimacy of Christian faith against the all-encompassing claims of “reason” and “science,” by the late twentieth century Pope John Paul’s writings were about defending the legitimacy of human reason to come to any conclusions about the world. Fides et Ratio, his 1998 encyclical letter, took note of this new skepticism about reason, a skepticism that bordered on “nihilism,” he said. I think that’s correct. Nihilism, the belief that there really is no overarching meaning to life nor any philosophical, religious, or moral principles to guide us, is pretty compatible with tyranny—and that’s something that is being pushed on us slowly but surely. In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”
How did we get to this point, however? It’s a complicated story with many threads, many labeled with names ending in “ism.” Let’s simply pull out one called “empiricism.” What is it?
Dictionary definitions often give a little bit of help. Merriam-Webster gives one definition as “a theory that all knowledge originates in experience.” In terms of the history of philosophy that gets you somewhere, but it’s a pretty broad term and would probably include Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, the latter of whom said, “There is nothing in the intellect that is not in the senses.”
Though some might do so, let me assure you that I am not arguing that the problems of modernity are with St. Thomas Aquinas.
If you read any articles from encyclopedias of philosophy, you will find that the definitions of “empiricism” are many. Some mean by this term, not the understanding that all our concepts originate in sense experience, but that all of them have reference to something that can be experienced. And some say that any rational beliefs must be justified by some sort of experience. There are further distinctions to be drawn, as philosophers are wont to do, and many forms of empiricism. One could get lost in all the differences between the various empiricists themselves and between them and the figures known as rationalists—especially Kant and Descartes. But let us stick to the big picture.
If we are going to talk about one figure who is most important, it is Francis Bacon. Probably all of you are aware of his most famous line, either from historical reading or from the 1970s animated shorts that went under the title “School House Rock.” That line is: “Knowledge is power.”
What kind of knowledge was he talking about? Well, Bacon was a devout Anglican Christian who believed that natural science was best done based on a rigorous investigation of physical realities, experiments designed to test what seemed to be the case, and a skeptical approach to the results one achieved. He believed science was best done inductively, meaning that that rigorous investigation involved a lot of observation before starting to generalize, quantify things, and then come up with a theory that would be testable experimentally.
Now, is there anything wrong with this as a model for natural or physical science? In a general sense, even we who sit around cursing the darkness of the twenty-first century have no problem with the scientific method as a general way to approach questions of physical science. In the stereotyped ways it is presented as a kind of objective and detached program that scientists rather mechanically follow, it is bogus. But scientists know that and only treat it as a rough approximation of what they do anyway. The general ideals of physical scientific research are what we refer to. And they have been successful. We may prefer the thirteenth, the greatest of centuries, but nobody has ever thought of inventing a time-travel machine to visit Thomas Aquinas’s dentist. No, we like empiricism in science.
Even Saint John Henry Newman did. Some people assume that because he was in favor of liberal education and faith, he was somehow anti-scientific. Far from it. He thought natural science was deeply important and established professorships in science. He even gave lectures on science that were published in his great work The Idea of a University. And in the famous nine discourses that are the foundation of that book, he reflected on that empirical, scientific world that Bacon wrought and what he thinks of him.
The Philosophy of Utility, you will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it,—it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its aim…. His mission was the increase of physical enjoyment and social comfort; and most wonderfully, most awfully has he fulfilled his conception and his design. Almost day by day have we fresh and fresh shoots, and buds, and blossoms, which are to ripen into fruit, on that magical tree of Knowledge which he planted, and to which none of us perhaps, except the very poor, but owes, if not his present life, at least his daily food, his health, and general well-being. He was the divinely provided minister of temporal benefits to all of us so great, that, whatever I am forced to think of him as a man, I have not the heart, from mere gratitude, to speak of him severely.
Newman would never have one of those signs reading, “In this house we believe in science!” But he, like we do, appreciated it. Modern science and its rigorous empirical way of doing things has indeed provided us with great powers—a “magical tree of knowledge” doesn’t seem terribly out of place.
And yet, technological progress, for all its wonders, is not a panacea for the ills of the world. You can put people in a technological heaven, but you cannot with science put heaven into human beings. For very soon after this way of scientific thinking inhabited the intellectual landscape of the modern world, it came to deform it. Yet another reason I’m not interested in rehearsing for you all the differences between the philosophers who are called empiricists and those who are called rationalists is that, in the history of the modern world, they both kind of won. As Pope Benedict XVI said in his famous Regensburg Lecture, what happened in the modern world is that the notion of reason itself got contracted into a sandwich. We all love BLTs—bacon, lettuce, and tomato. What we got is a BCT—a Baconian, Cartesian, Technological sandwich. Here’s Pope Benedict:
This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other.
This sandwich is only superficially appealing. Reason itself has been reduced to those questions on which we can use math to figure out scientific experiments, the proof of which is shown by how well we can manipulate matter and use technology.
The first result of this, says Pope Benedict, is that “the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity.”
To make a long story short, all the scholars looking at the past, the human mind and soul, cultures and societies, and even wisdom itself, were told that they were required to show evidence of what Sigmund Freud would probably have called “natural science envy.” They were to take on only questions of a narrow and quantifiable scope. They were required to become “specialists” in particular fields, studying narrower and narrower subjects. There is no doubt that using mathematical and experimental research methods in these areas produced important discoveries. But there is a great narrowing as well.
To take human psychology as one instance, who wants to deny that some of the neurochemical and pharmaceutical discoveries about the brain in the 1970s were fruitful? Even so, there has been a tendency to reduce psychology to brain chemistry in the modern age, often without a lot of good evidence for it. The retired prison psychiatrist and writer Anthony Daniels, who sometimes writes under the nom de plume Theodore Dalrymple has, in both books and articles, vociferously decried this tendency to fixate on adjusting chemicals and hormones to the exclusion of developing habits of thought and action that would lead to better mental health. So, too, Joseph Davis, a research professor at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Study who has studied this trend for years. His 2020 book, Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery, shows—through both statistics but also in-depth interviews—how people today think about their suffering as not to do with heart, soul, or mind, but only with their “brain.” And pills can fix that.
In sum, scientific psychology ends up simply being biology. The human is lost. So too the other social sciences. John Paul II wrote that the problem with modern philosophy is that it “has largely abandoned metaphysical study of the ultimate human questions in order to concentrate upon problems which are more detailed and restricted, at times even purely formal.” The flight from the ultimate is due to this radically reduced notion of reason—or what John Paul calls a “distrust” of reason.
If this empirical/Cartesian outlook has deformed our understanding of what it means to be human, it has done worse to our understanding of God. Pope Benedict gives a second consequence of this reduction of reason. “[B]y its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question.” It’s not clear Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin actually said “I see no God up here”—but it’s a common enough modern sentiment. We don’t have “evidence” of God, we are told. The kind of evidence we need is, of course, assumed to be quantitative and ultimately material.
If empirical science itself does not lead to atheism, the approach to science that has been taken surely has. It is no wonder that so much of modern theology and pastoral formation over the last sixty years has itself taken on a tinge of the atheistic. St. John Paul observed that the Second Vatican Council “stressed the positive value of scientific research for a deeper knowledge of the mystery of the human being.” “But,” he added, “the invitation addressed to theologians to engage the human sciences and apply them properly in their enquiries should not be interpreted as an implicit authorization to marginalize philosophy or to put something else in its place in pastoral formation and in the praeparatio fidei.”
The pope was not addressing a hypothetical, but instead what had happened in many a seminary and theology department. A rigorous and broad philosophical basis for thinking theologically had often been abandoned in favor of a layer of thin, social-scientific gruel, the assumptions of which were that God is not the topic but man is. Theology departments in many Catholic (and Christian) universities were re-labeled “Religious Studies” because it was assumed that one couldn’t really study God—theos—but one could study the human phenomenon of religion. God, after all, cannot be measured or experimented upon and get quantifiable results. But the behavior of religious people could!
But what about belief in God and morality? If theology was changed out for social sciences, what got taught? There were a number of attempts to create a “scientific” morality, but having no notion of this world as a creation or a nature with a structure that is more than just mathematical and material, that didn’t work. As Pope Benedict observed, “Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.”
Because they were and are inadequate, what has been taught is ultimately a form of subjectivism or relativism. I remember filling out tests in my public grade school in Indiana that were aimed at getting us to distinguish between “facts” and “values.” I don’t remember now if the question of God’s existence was brought up, but I do remember moral judgments being located in the “value” category.
Pope Benedict described the end result: “the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science,’ so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical.”
Alas, we have seen this notion of the subjective conscience judging morality and religion being taught even by bishops and cardinals of late.
As Pope Benedict concludes, “This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.”
Indeed, it is. For when the question of God and even morality is simply a subjective value, we are ripe for the nihilism and tyranny of which I spoke at the very beginning. Pope John Paul alluded to this problem in that 1998 encyclical when he described how, following that godless and amoral scientific point of view, “certain scientists, lacking any ethical point of reference, are in danger of putting at the centre of their concerns something other than the human person and the entirety of the person’s life. Further still, some of these, sensing the opportunities of technological progress, seem to succumb not only to a market-based logic, but also to the temptation of a quasi-divine power over nature and even over the human being” (FR 46).
This was the path of the various forms of Marxism, which all claimed to be “scientific” and left in their wake tens of millions of dead human bodies. This has also been the path of we who live in the ostensibly free world. Perhaps you’ve heard what Robert G. Edwards, the inventor of in vitro fertilization—popularly known as test tube babies—said in a 2003 interview: “I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory.” He concluded, “It was us.”
We may be in a period of “postmodernity,” as I said before, but the particular claims of this vastly reduced understanding of reason are still what tend to cow or convince a certain portion of the public. Scientists, politicians, and even insurance adjusters, healthcare ethicists, and business managers have been claiming to speak in the name of “The Science” up to this very day.
Those dealing with the elderly or the infirm will give QALY scores. That stands for Quality-Adjusted Life Years. This scientific measure of the number and quality of years a patient might live tells us whether a life-saving treatment ought to be given or not. Those who live in places where physicians can (and now often must) participate in helping people commit suicide often use such scientific measures to give advice.
Those in charge of public health in many countries throughout the world used such quantitative measurements to determine that they could lock down our businesses, our schools, and our lives for several years because of a respiratory virus. There are countless other examples of this tyranny justified by numbers.
As St. John Henry Newman had argued, modern reason acting on empirical evidence and some good math has given us countless blessings for which we should indeed be grateful as a form of light. But as he, borrowing from the German poet Goethe, was always ready to say, the brightest light brings the darkest shadows. Our modern empire of empirical research and mathematical reasoning, shorn of the fullness of divine light and human wisdom, has struck back at us in a most destructive way. The Baconian-Cartesian-Technological sandwich had some delicious and healthful elements, but in considering it the only thing on our menu, we have become malnourished and perhaps even poisoned.
What do we need now? I suggest we need to teach people to reason again, to understand that all of us, including scientists, reason and even find certainty about many things in our life in very unscientific ways that cannot be fit under the narrow understandings that have been proposed to us over the last few hundred years. Experience in a broad sense plays a part, but we bring to experience certain first principles that we did not get from experience itself and that cannot themselves be proven. Further, our experiences are not all able to be weighed or measured in a scientific fashion and analyzed according to statistical methods. If you are married, is it because you did a Quality-Adjusted Life Years score for the marriage before you said, “I do”? If you came to faith in Christ, was it because of that? Or were there other ways of thinking and knowing?
It is blindingly obvious that certain narrow questions can be analyzed in an empirical, detached, statistical way. But most important ones can’t. If I were to provide another way of thinking about thinking that manages to capture how we really think, I would point to many of the names mentioned. We need to return to the common sense of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the understanding of the personal character of our knowledge described by Newman and Michael Polanyi, and the courage to follow them pioneered by John Paul and Benedict.
For modernity to give way to something better, we need to trust our reason in an expansive sense as a gift of God to know our own hearts and minds—and to know the whole of his creation. This would be a truly Christian and appropriately humble empiricism.
This essay is adapted from a lecture titled “The Empirical Strikes Back” given at the Church of St. Agnes in St. Paul, Minnesota as part of their 2023 Lenten lecture series, “Architects of Modernity.” Readers can listen to the original lecture as well as the others in the series here.
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The featured image is “A meeting in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters” (1897) by Peder Severin Krøyer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.