"There is a semi-autonomous helicopter on Mars. Do you need any more reasons why we should continue with science?"

This remark came from John Richards, president of Atheism UK, partway through a debate with Glen Scrivener, evangelist and Christian apologist. The debate was not nominally about science, and its focus was meant to be on the origins of Western values; however, it seemed to cover much wider ground. At this point in the debate, Scrivener had raised a problem: if you don't have an underlying framework of values, then reality is just a puzzle with no solution, and there is ultimately no point in doing science. Richards responded to this with a list of scientific accomplishments, principally in the field of medicine, terminating with the observation quoted above (I was interested to learn that this helicopter has a name: apparently, our semi-autonomous friend is called "Ginny", short for "Ingenuity"). What this suggested to me is that he really hadn't understood the problem which had been raised; I thought I might explore it in further detail here.

The road to nowhere

So, there is a semi-autonomous helicopter on Mars. What does that mean to me? We already had a penchant for cluttering up the place with tech; now we've taken it to a new planet. Am I supposed to celebrate this? I am sure many people would say that Ginny the Helicopter is a mark of human achievement; but "achievement" is precisely the word we cannot use. An achievement is a step up, a milestone on a road to a desirable goal, the attainment of an end which is good in itself. In the harsh and rationalistic world inhabited by Richards and his co-believers, there are no such good ends, and all roads lead nowhere. Life on this planet is an accident, spurred on by unguided processes, mutating and adapting and struggling until eventually, after however many millions of years, it spits out the apelike form of our first human ancestors. We look at this and say "progress", but there is no such thing; we are simply applying a comforting veneer over a terrifyingly indifferent series of brute biochemical facts. If this is the basic reality, then it is entirely meaningless to talk about "achievement", scientific or otherwise. It leaves us with the unpleasant conclusion that, however much it may prolong our lives or teach us about the cosmos, science is fundamentally pointless.

I feel I should point out before I go any further that there are things I'm not saying. Here are some of them:

1. Science is bad and we shouldn't do it.
2. Science can't tell us anything of import about the world.
3. Science is a threat to what I believe and should be stopped.

None of these things are true. When I say that science is fundamentally pointless, I'm not casting aspersions on the work of real scientists. I'm also not stating what I personally believe about science. I'm certainly not objecting to the presence of helicopters on Mars, semi-autonomous or otherwise. On the contrary, I think it shows one of our interesting little quirks: the insatiable desire to find out what things do and what they're made of. I am, however, objecting to the notion that this in itself tells us that we should do science. If all you have is science, then you have lost access to the world of the normative. No hypothesis, no empirical observation, no scientific discovery made under the microscope or through the telescope will ever tell you that you should do science- only that you can. It would be nice to believe that Ginny the Helicopter is playing some integral part in a grand story, but as long we're stuck in the land of science, that possibility will remain forever out of reach.

Like most people of my generation, I grew up believing there was just something good about science. If you had asked me why, I would probably have told you that it was because it told us stuff about the universe, and the quest for knowledge was an intrinsically good thing. I don't think this is uncommon, and I don't think it's a bad thing, either. I still believe the quest for knowledge is important. However, to treat knowledge (or the search for it) as good for its own sake is naive in the extreme.

I find it helpful in this case to use the example of nuclear fission. The knowledge of this process gives us access to an astounding source of energy; we are not at any point given directions for how to use it. Nothing whatsoever compels you to turn it into a reactor rather than a bomb. The scientific knowledge is indifferent to its own use in either case. One might protest that it is better to build reactors than bombs because the former (typically) will sustain human life, while the latter will destroy it; but here we have still not escaped the issue. Seen through a purely scientific lens, human life has no more value than any other form of life. Nor can we ascribe more value to life than to non-life; in the end, they both reduce to meaningless configurations of atoms. If, in our brief spell of sentience, we have managed to convince ourselves otherwise, then that is our mistake. We can learn all we can about the universe; we can quest after knowledge until there is nothing left to know; we can place as much semi-autonomous clutter as we can on every planet within reach; none of it will ever solve that most fundamental problem of what makes any of it good. It is a road that leads absolutely nowhere.

To reiterate: I believe that science is good, I believe that Ginny the Helicopter is serving an important purpose, and I believe it is impossible to establish either of these things through purely scientific means. Do we need any more reasons why we should continue with science? Yes, we do. We are in dire need of some sustaining meaning behind the whole scientific endeavour. As long as we remain trapped within a purely scientific view of reality, no such meaning is possible; there is nothing which cannot be reduced to an accident of physics. If I want to make the claim that science is worth doing, I have to step outside of the bounds of empirical observation, and reach beyond.

Fording the river

Fortunately, I am far from the first to have trod this ground. I want to begin by considering something which CS Lewis said, which will be of some help in escaping the problem:¹

We are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

This is a completely different view of things. I invite the reader to take a moment and think about it. Here we have two worldviews. In one, rationality is an illusion, something superimposed over a set of facts which have no inherent meaning; the poor creatures who call themselves rational are only deluding themselves into thinking it has any final significance. In the other, rationality is an integral part of the universe itself; all the facts which it contains are actually related to each other by a web of order and purpose and sense-making. On this view, when we do science, we aren't simply seeing patterns and tricking ourselves into thinking they mean something; we're unearthing a system of complexity and significance which existed long before we did, something which governs the entire cosmos.

If we allow ourselves to entertain this view, then all of a sudden we realise that we now have a very good reason for taking delight in science. The horrible spectre of meaninglessness has vanished. The reason we feel the scientific endeavour to be meaningful is because it is, independently of us, regardless of whether we're around to perceive it. We are no longer walking a road which leads to nowhere. Consider another, far older, observation:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Psalm 19:1-3 ESV

I appreciate that this might be too much for some: the idea that the universe bears the imprint of a creator is one which is fraught with all kinds of possible misunderstandings. To this, I would say that if the universe really is a place of meaning, then that meaning has to point to something beyond itself. There must be a source, a wellspring, a point of origin superior to the thing created.

Note that this also opens the way to solving our previous difficulty about nuclear fission. We feel at the deepest level that reactors, and not bombs, are the right choice. When pressed, we say that this is because nuclear weapons are a grave threat to human life. The trouble with this, of course, is that it's purely self-referential. The reasoning here is circular: human life is good because it's human life. As we saw, this isn't something science can ever tell you. It's not a fact, but a value. It says nothing about objective good or evil, and is not rooted in any normative truth; it stems from the utterly amoral world of natural selection, an extension of the selfish desire to beat the odds and go on living.

However, if it is really the case that our sense of meaning points to something beyond the universe, then we have a way out of this trap. Perhaps our instinct that reactors are better than bombs isn't just a self-preservatory holdover from our evolutionary past, but an actual apprehension of ethical truth. As we saw above, science can't give us any ethical maxims about this matter, but that isn't to say there aren't any. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper observed:²

Some great scientists, and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation. The fact that science cannot make any pronouncements about ethical principles has been misunderstood as indicating there are no such principles.

Start with science alone, and you will never reach ethics; subordinate science to ethics, and you solve the problem. A reactor is better than a bomb because both these things, though attained through the same principles of science, are regarded differently by the principles of ethics. Naturally, you can't establish this as a scientific truth, because ethics transcends science. The claim that human life is valuable, and therefore shouldn't be reduced to blast shadows (see below) is no longer a purely arbitrary and subjective one. Instead, it proceeds from a greater moral law, one which accords great value to human life, and objects to its destruction. This law cannot be found under a microscope or through a telescope; its source lies elsewhere, beyond the limits of the cosmos.

There is a semi-autonomous helicopter on Mars. What does this signify? On one view, nothing whatsoever. It is whirring and unnecessary contraption, telling us trivia about a universe which has no purpose and never will. On the other, it signifies very much. Ginny is an integral part of an effort to understand the fundamental truths about something more profound than we know. Her significance isn't determined by science. It comes in from without, giving context and purpose to the whole endeavour, placing it all within the context of a greater narrative.

This isn't the place to start talking in depth about the moral argument, or the cosmological argument, or the argument from contingency (though I plan to explore all those things). All I want to do here is put up a signpost. There is a path which will take us across the river. As we walk it, we will begin to glimpse the further bank, that place from which these intimations of meaning proceed.

What is it, exactly, that calls our eyes upward to the heavens?

Resources

The full debate: YouTube | Did Christianity Build the West? Glen Scrivener vs Atheism UK President John Richards
Ginny the Helicopter: Wikipedia | Ingenuity (helicopter)
The blast shadow: Wikipedia | Human Shadow Etched in Stone

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