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.
