This is going to be an ongoing reprint series of mystical writings by famous physicists. The view expressed herein are presented merely for consideration and are not necessarily those of the blogger.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”280” caption=”Werner Heisenberg”][/caption]

Scientific and Religious Truths

By Werner Heisenberg

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. In what follows, then, we shall first of all deal with the unassailability and value of scientific truth, and then with the much wider field of religion; finally—and this will be the hardest part to formulate—we shall speak of the relationship of the two truths.

Of the beginnings of modern science, the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it is usually said that the truth of religious revelation, laid down in the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and dominant in the thought of the Middle Ages, was at that time supplemented by the reality of sensory experience, which could be checked by anyone in possession of his normal five senses and which—if enough care was taken—could, therefore, not in the end be doubted. But even this first approach to a description of the new way of thought is only half correct; it neglects decisive features without which its power cannot be understood. It is certainly no accident that the beginnings of modern science were associated with a turning away from Aristotle and a reversion to Plato. Even in antiquity, Aristotle, as an empiricist, had raised the objection—I cite more or less his own words—that the Pythagoreans (among whom Plato must be included) did not seek for explanations and theories to suit the facts, but distorted the facts to fit certain theories and favored opinions, and set themselves up, one might say, as co-arrangers of the universe. In fact, the new science led away from immediate experience in the manner criticized by Aristotle. Let us consider the understanding of the planetary motions. Immediate experience teaches that the earth is at rest and that the sun goes around it. In the more precise terms of our own day, we might even say that the word “rest” is defined by the statement that the earth is at rest, and that we call every body at rest that no longer moves relative to the earth. If the word “rest” is understood in this fashion—and it generally is so understood—then Ptolemy was right and Copernicus was wrong. Only if we reflect upon the concepts of “motion” and “rest,” and realize that motion implies a statement about the relationship between at least two bodies, can we reverse the relationship, making the sun the still center of the planetary system, and thereby obtaining a far simpler and more unified picture of the solar system, whose explanatory power was later fully recognized by Newton. Copernicus has thus appended to immediate experience a wholly new element, which I shall describe at this point as the “simplicity of natural laws,” and which, in any event, has nothing to do with immediate experience. That same can be seen in Galileo’s laws of falling bodies. Immediate experience teaches that light bodies fall more slowly than heavy ones. Galileo maintained, on the contrary, that in a vacuum all bodies fall with equal speed, and that their fall could be correctly described by mathematically formulable laws, namely the Galilean laws of falling bodies. But motion in a vacuum was at that time still quite impossible to observe. The place of immediate experience, has therefore been taken by an idealization of experience, which claims to be recognized as the correct idealization by virtue of the fact that it allows mathematical structures to become visible in the phenomena. There can be no doubt that in this early phase of modern science the newly discovered conformity to mathematical law has become the true basis for its persuasive power. These mathematical laws, so we read in Kepler, are the visible expression of the divine will, and Kepler breaks into enthusiasm at the fact that he has been the first here to recognize the beauty of God’s work. Thus the new way of thinking assuredly had nothing to do with any turning away from religion. If the new discoveries did in fact contradict the teachings of the Church at certain points, this could have little significance, seeing that it was possible to perceive with such immediacy the workings of God in nature. The God here referred to is, however, and ordering God, of whom we do not at once know whether He is identical with the God to whom we turn in trouble, and to whom we can relate our life. It may therefore be said, perhaps, that here attention was directed entirely to one aspect of the divine activity, and that hence there arose the danger of losing sight of the totality, the interconnected unity of the whole; attention is too much drawn to the narrow field of material welfare, and the other foundations of our existence are neglected. Even if technology and science could be employed merely as means to an end, the outcome depends upon whether the goals for whose attainment they are to be used are good ones. But the decision upon goals cannot be made within science and technology; it is made, if we are not to go wholly astray, at a point where out vision is directed upon the whole man and the whole of his reality, not merely on a small segment of this. But this total reality contains much of which we have not said anything yet.

First, there is the fact that man can develop his mental and spiritual powers only in relation to a human society. The very capacities that distinguish him above all other living creatures, the ability to reach beyond the immediate sensory given, the recognition of wider interrelations, depend upon his being lodged in a community of speaking and thinking beings. History teaches that such communities have acquired in their development not only an outward but also a spiritual pattern. And in the spiritual patterns known to us, the relation to a meaningful connection of the whole, beyond what can be immediately seen and experienced, has almost always played the deciding role. It is only within this spiritual pattern, of the ethos prevailing in the community, that man acquires the points of view whereby he can also shape hes own conduct wherever it involves more than a mere reaction to external situations; it is here that the question about values is first decided. Not only ethics, however, but the whole cultural life of the community is governed by this spiritual pattern. Only within its sphere does the close connection first become visible between the good, the beautiful, and the true, and here only does it first become possible to speak of life having a meaning for the individual. This spiritual pattern we call the religion of the community. The word “religion” is thereby endowed with a rather more general meaning than is customary. It is intended to cover the spiritual content of many cultures and different periods, even in places where the very idea of God is absent. Only in the communal modes of thought pursued in modern totalitarian states, in which the transcendent is completely excluded, would it be possible to doubt whether the concept of religion can still be meaningfully applied.

At this point, we also recognize the characteristic difference between genuine religions, in which the spiritual realm, the central spiritual order of things, plays a decisive part, and the narrower forms of thought, especially in our own day, which relate only to the strictly experience-able pattern of a human community. Such forms of thought exist in the liberal democracies of the West no less than in the totalitarian states of the East. Here, too, to be sure, an ethic is formulated, but the talk is of a norm of ethical behavior, and this norm is derived from a world outlook, that is, from inspection of the immediately visible world of experience. Religion proper speaks not of norms, however, but of guiding ideals, by which we should govern our conduct and which we can at best only approximate. These ideals do not spring from inspection of the immediately visible world but from the region of the structure lying behind it, which Plato spoke of as the world of Ideas, and concerning which we are told in the Bible, “God is a spirit.”

But all that has here been said about religion is naturally well known; it has been repeated only in order to emphasize that even the natural scientist must recognize this comprehensive significance of religion in human society, if he wants to try to think about the relation of religious and scientific truth.

I have already sought to enunciate the thesis that in the images and likenesses of religion, we are dealing with a sort of language that makes possible and understanding of that interconnection of the world which can be traced behind the phenomena and without which we could have no ethics or scale of values. This language is in principle replaceable, like any other; in other parts of the world there are and have been other languages that provide for the same understanding. But we are born into a particular linguistic area. This language is closer akin to that of poetry than to the precision-orientated language of natural science. Hence the words in the two languages often have different meanings. The heavens referred to in the Bible have little to do with the heavens into which we send up aircraft and rockets. In the astronomical universe, the earth is only a minute grain of dust in one of the countless galactic systems, but for us it is the center of the universe—it really is the center. Science tries to give its concepts an objective meaning. But religious language must avoid this very cleavage of the world into its objective and its subjective sides; for who would dare claim the objective side to be more real than the subjective? Thus we ought not to intermingle the two languages; we should think more subtly than we have hitherto been accustomed to do.

The care to be taken in keeping the two languages, religious and scientific, apart from one another, should also include an avoidance of any weakening of their content by blending them. The correctness of tested scientific results cannot rationally be cast in doubt by religious thinking, and conversely, the ethical demands stemming from the heart of religious thinking ought not to be weakened by all too rational arguments from the field of science. There can be no doubt, in this connection, that through the enlargement of technical possibilities new ethical problems have also appeared that cannot be easily resolved. I may mention as examples the problem of the researcher’s responsibility for the practical application of his discoveries, or the still more difficult question from the field of modern medicine of how long a doctor should or may prolong the life of a dying patient. Consideration of such problems has nothing to do with any watering down of ethical principles. Nor am I able to conceive that such questions are capable of being answered by pragmatic considerations of expediency alone. On the contrary, here too it will be necessary to take into account the connection of the whole—the source of ethical principles in that basic human attitude which is expressed in the language of religion.

Today, moreover, we may already be able to effect a more correct distribution of the emphases that have been misplaced by the enormous expansion of science and technology in the past hundred years. I mean the emphases we ascribe to the material and the spiritual preconditions in the human community. The material conditions are important, and it was the duty of society to eliminate the material privation of large sections of the population, once technology and science has made it possible to do so. But now that this has been done, much unhappiness remains, and we have come to see how compellingly the individual also has need, in his self-consciousness or self-understanding, for the protection the spiritual pattern of a community can provide. It is here, perhaps, that our most important tasks now lie. If there is much unhappiness among today’s student body, the reason is not material hardship, but the lack of trust that makes it too difficult for the individual to give his life a meaning. We must try to overcome the isolation which threatens the individual in a world dominated by technical expediency. Theoretical deliberations about questions of psychology or social structure will avail us little here, so long as we do not succeed in finding a way back, by direct action, to a natural balance between the spiritual and material conditions of life. It will be a matter of reanimating in daily life the values grounded in the spiritual pattern of the community, of endowing them with such brilliance that the life of the individual is again automatically directed toward them.

But it is not my business to talk about society, for we were supposed to be discussing the relationship of scientific and religious truth. In the past hundred years, science has made very great advances. The wider regions of life, of which we speak in the language of our religion, may thereby have been neglected. We do not know whether we shall succeed in once more expressing the spiritual form of our future communities in the old religious language. A rationalistic play with words and concepts is of little assistance here; the most important preconditions are honesty and directness. But since ethics is the basis for the communal life of men, and ethics can only be derived from that fundamental human attitude which I have called the spiritual pattern of the community, we must bend all our efforts to reuniting ourselves, along with the younger generation, in a common human outlook. I am convinced that we can succeed in this if again we find the right balance between the two kinds of truth.