This is an excerpt from my new book „Das Wunderbare und seine Feinde“. The english translation „The Miraculous and its Enemies” will be completed within a few weeks.
Preface
This book is certainly not an esoteric attempt to counter the prevailing scientific worldview with a neo-obscurantist theory of miracles. It would be a miracle in the classical sense if, in a cemetery, coffin lids were suddenly lifted, and the dead were to rise again. It would be a miracle as well if an eagle suddenly hatched from a hen’s egg, if water turned into wine, if God stepped out of a burning bush, or if a magician succeeded in overriding a natural law of physics by the mere power of his mind.
Such and even more extraordinary miracles have been ascribed by religions all over the world to their respective deities – and their followers have believed them fervently Today, this is no longer the case. At least since the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, science has relentlessly ridiculed such claims and rejected them as superstition. This view is unswervingly maintained in the present book – even if, as already shown by Karl Popper, the sciences themselves are by no means immune to the temptation to flirt with superstition ….
The miraculous is an altogether different matter
It is all around us, even though the routine of everyday life has made most people almost blind to its presence. They are continuously told that only fools are amazed by the phenomena of this world. In contrast, every scientifically enlightened and educated person knows that everything happens in nature in the most natural way. A great poet like Saint-Exupéry had to transfer the Little Prince to an asteroid in order to make these educated and enlightened beings aware of their truly unbelievable situation in the vastness of the universe. And Immanuel Kant had to invoke the starry sky and the moral law in his chest to get in touch with the mystery of life and to make his readers shiver. But even this great man did not keep up the mode of inner shock for long; right after Kant was busy to press the mystery into abstract formulas. The trembling before a reality more powerful than human reason, that seeks to tame it, is the privilege of spiritual openness. It opens the eyes to mysteries that man has been trying to unravel since the beginning of history. In other words, such spiritual experience opens the eyes to the miraculous that lies at the bottom and beyond everyday life.
Who faces such mystery without blinders,
knows that THE TRUTH remains inaccessible, even if an infinite number of partial truths are constantly revealed. After two centuries of industrial revolution, the scientifically proven knowledge of facts and laws has swelled to a torrent that is getting wider day by day. Superficially, it might seem that modern man is about to solve even the last riddles of his existence. But it should give pause for reflection that he was already imbued with this conviction more than a hundred years earlier, when his knowledge was incomparably less than it is today. In 1899 Ernst Haeckel published a book with the title Die Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe). There, the author triumphantly claimed that all mysteries had by now been successfully solved by science. True, there still remained a last mystery, the Kantian „thing-in-itself“; but that was probably because this strange thing could be a mere invention.
From Haeckel’s book – by far the greatest popular success in the history of the German book – it can be seen that the proclaimed unraveling of mysteries has little or nothing to do with the actual state of knowledge of a particular time and author. This amazing realization is brought home to us even more forcefully when we take a much larger leap into the past. Two and a half thousand years ago, the two Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus were deeply convinced that they could fully explain and trace back all events to the different relations of smallest material particles, which they called „atoms“. In this way, they created an all-encompassing mechanistic worldview that made the gods as superfluous as sentient and willing humans. But note that the knowledge then was close to zero compared to its present state. Obviously, it is not its extent and depth that makes certain people accept or reject the miraculous. Indeed, it was simple wishful thinking that led the two Greek philosophers to anticipate Laplace’s notorious formula (see chapter Science-Religion: Disenchanting Man and Nature).
Modern science
is neither the only nor the first attempt to make the desire for divine knowledge the father of thought. No matter how great or limited actual knowledge was, there existed always some foolhardy theorists who thought themselves able to occupy that lofty armchair somewhere in space, on which man had previously enthroned the divine creator of the world. If these theorists had rightly claimed to solve all mysteries, then man would have succeeded not only in banishing forever all miracles but the miraculous as well. What mystery will remain once we have completely decoded all events, put everything into formulas, and used these to explain all futures so that we can predict human actions as reliably as the orbits of planets?
In truth, we are dealing
with mere wishful thinking, which I will call “science-religion”. It is precisely the greatest scientists who are quite aware that one solved problem immediately conjures up a dozen others. The brighter the ray of light that the discerning spirit casts into the surrounding darkness, the more the spaces touched by that light expand. Science is the attempt to advance into the infinite with the finite means of discerning reason. The miraculous is never exhausted in the process.
Nor is science
the only way in which we approach reality. This is impossible, since science addresses only the intellectually cognizing faculty. Feelings and sensations are suppressed because they are only „subjective“ – dependent on the wishes and desires of the person. In contrast, scientific truth is said to be fundamentally independent of desire and will, so that it can grasp reality „objectively“ without involving personal inclinations. A piece of glucose on my tongue can trigger joy, but the chemical formula C6H12O6 leaves my feelings untouched. This is because the emerging scientific formula owes its origin exclusively to the requirements of the analytical mind. The value of science to man is thus only instrumental (although the act of discovering a scientific law can, of course, move its author strongly in an emotional way). Science gives us security in dealing with the things of the world; it achieves its greatest success when it allows us to plan or predict the future. In this way, it indirectly serves human emotions as well, for security satisfies an elementary need – it frees us from fear of the unplannable, the unpredictable.
But man would be deprived of the fullness
of his humanity if he encountered reality only in a scientific way, i.e., by applying his analytical abilities to describe reality objectively – without regard to his feelings. In addition to the scientific approach, there is a second way of dealing with reality that radically differs from the scientific one. Here, too, we are dealing with a form of cognition, but it is of a completely different kind. Instead of deciphering existing reality, this cognition consists in creating realities. In other words, it creates truth and its physical manifestations instead of merely recognizing them.
Of course, I am talking about art
It is not miracles that manifests itself in art – miracles were rightly disposed of by science – but the miraculous. Though art is by no means identical with the beautiful (this point will be discussed later), it often consists in its conscious creation. Beauty is not a description of what exists on the basis of intellectual analysis, and it is certainly not an emotionally uninvolved testimony. Beauty is the projection of our intellectual together with our emotional forces to bring forth something that does not yet exist. Art makes man a creator, because beauty is a new truth and reality that cannot be deduced from the existing one, but originates in the human being – his brain and his heart. Science, on the other hand, does not establish a new truth and a new reality because both can be derived – in an analytical and generalizing form – from what is already objectively present in an infinite number of individual events. A law of nature is not an invention of man – it is a finding of something already existing.
Let us arbitrarily pick out
one of an infinite number of examples illustrating beauty: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. From a scientific perspective we can easily understand why the supply of calories keeps us alive. But how can we understand that mere vibrations of the air can put us into ecstasy – vibrations produced by blowing through pipes and by the scratching of horsehair on metallic strings, for that’s indeed what symphonies consists of. This is and remains an insoluble mystery: the epitome of the beautiful and the miraculous. In order to be shaken by this mystery, we do not need a suspension of the laws of nature, and we do not need miracles. We only need to look at the smiling face of a human being, when the latter, conquered by rhythm and melody, experiences something invisible, intangible, which touches him more strongly than the everyday acts of his physical existence.
From a physical point of view, the mere vibrations of air molecules are almost unreal. And yet their effect can be so overwhelming that some of us can only endure everyday life because music temporarily catapults us into another, higher form of existence – into the miraculous. Of course, this too is a form of cognition, for it shapes us just as it shapes our experience of external things. The world transforms itself and ourselves through the experience of the beautiful
Contact with the miraculous
makes everyday life tolerable, it bewitches reality. On the other hand, the de-enchantment of reality is responsible for the fact that many people find their own lives and the world around them difficult to bear. Must science take the blame for alienation from nature and man?
No, it is certainly not that simple. It is only partially correct to blame science for this disillusionment. But there is no doubt that they have deprived the world of much charm and poetry. Before William Harvey (1578 – 1657) the heart was a mysterious organ – for many peoples and times the seat of supernatural powers. After Harvey, the heart was just a simple pump. On the one hand, this was an enormous leap of knowledge – expansion of verifiable truth, on the other hand, it was an emotional loss: a pump no longer lends itself to extravagant poetic parables. For poetry, the heart was lost – disenchanted. The same trivialization of reality due to successive advances in truth achieved by the analytical mind soon affected larger and larger areas of nature as for instance the celestial bodies. Until the advent of modern astronomy and spectroscopy, planets and stars were considered the seats of the gods or even their very embodiments. Today they are only flying clusters of different chemical structure. For our feelings they have become icy cold and lost all attraction. We would not wish our worst enemies to stay on one of these desolate structures, let alone the gods (if we still believe in them).
What a radical disenchantment! When we look around us, we see that scientific explanation has laid a gray mildew on things robbing them of their poetry. The heart became a pump, the whole reality surrounding us became a mere machine of varying complexity.
However, since the beginning of the last century
something strange, rather unexpected has happened. Quantum theory made physics so extraordinarily complex that its theories and products once again exude a kind of magic. Newton’s general celestial mechanics, which describes the motion of stars as well as that of a falling apple on our planet, was comprehensible (almost) to everyone. By virtue of the reliability of its formulas it worked as a revelation for the inquiring intellect, and as a cold disillusionment for human feeling. While the cosmos had been pulsating with life before Newton, after him man only faced a gigantic clockwork, which he could understand but not love. Who loves such a dead thing as a mechanism working according to stubborn rules?
But in 1900 Max Planck developed the basic idea of quantum mechanics and one and a half decades later Albert Einstein achieved world-wide fame with his general theory of relativity. As its greatest authorities unanimously proclaim, quantum theory can no longer be visualized. The reality of the atom no longer corresponds to the reality of the Middle World where we live (cf. Chap. “The Failed Revolution of Quantum Physics”).
The failure of the human mind to grasp the strange reality of the infinitely small could not remain without consequences. Suddenly, the image of nature as a clockwork and dead mechanics had become obsolete. Mystery had returned, because for natural science there is no greater mystery than when it must admit that it can no longer explain parts of the external world (even if these can still be manipulated – otherwise the new theory would be superfluous in the first place). In view of this development, we may claim that the supreme discipline of science, physics, while having radically disenchanted nature in the past, has now given it back some of its lost mystery. What we do not understand is mystery to our mind.
This re-enchantment applies not only to theory,
but extends to many modern products that we owe to it. Just think of computers or cell phones to get an idea. People would not be so addicted to them, they would not work and play with these things so obsessively, if these devices did not seem to them to be mysterious and downright inexhaustible. How a classic telephone worked was still easy to understand, even for the layman. It had a specific task to fulfill, the transmission of speech; its use was confined to that purpose. A smartphone, however, offers an almost unmanageable wealth of these and other functions; not only does it pose an intellectual challenge, but it also captivates the emotions when its users lose themselves in exciting games. For many people, the latest products of science suddenly turn into gadgets of magic and sorcery, because at best one in a thousand persons knows how such devices actually work.
Ours are paradoxical times
I just claimed that art creates new, unprecedented realities, while science describes existing realities. This statement seems logically incontestable, but is it not contradicted by facts? Until the 18th century, the shaping of reality all over the world was mainly achieved through art. Temples and cathedrals, gardens and castles are the most visible examples of this transformation of reality by man. Add to this the realm of the invisible, namely music and poetry, and the evidence for the reality-shaping power of art is overwhelming.
But this power of art over reality has been broken since the end of the 18th century. Since then, it is the products of science that transform the nature around us to such an extent that the people of earlier times would hardly recognize their former world in the present one. There are thousands of new scientific devices – railroads, automobiles, airplanes – and thousands of factories for their production that now determine the appearance of our cities and landscapes as well as our daily life. The real achievement of science, visible to everyone, is obviously not that it correctly describes the order of nature with its laws, but that it radically reshapes nature in the briefest of moments in an unprecedented way – and far more comprehensively than art has ever been able to do.
How does this fit together?
On the one hand, science as the totality of all objectively verifiable statements about the world around us and, on the other hand, science as the most effective instrument for the creation of new, unprecedented realities, i.e. as an instrument for the unleashing of human freedom?
As we will see, this does not at all fit together. It is precisely at this point that we encounter the miraculous, which science itself is not able to explain. The unleashing of human freedom by a science that denies freedom altogether or equates it with meaningless chance is surely one of the greatest paradoxes of our time (see chapter: “Democratic Antignosis in Our Time”).
Seen in this light, it is a rather modest paradox,
that for at least a century the most talented and ambitious minds have been crowding into the sciences, and specifically into the sciences of nature, because their utility in increasing the wealth, power, and prestige of states is so evident. On the other hand, the arts and the sciences of the mind have been withering away for decades. They are being kept on an ever-shorter leash because the material benefits that can be derived from them are comparatively small.
What a contrast to the past? While five hundred years ago men of talent devoted themselves to the arts and made Italy the wonder it remains today because of its many testimonies of beauty, the outstanding minds of today devote all their energy to the natural sciences and everything related to them. However, although they produce intellectual wealth, increase analytical abilities, and turn us into rational people with growing intelligence quotients, the sciences leave a spiritual and emotional vacuum because they do not satisfy the human need for emotional warmth and spiritual security. In their theoretical foundation they have no place for ethical ideals and aesthetic beauty. What concerns the human being, if he wants to give a meaning to his existence, is beyond their grasp and their interest. We easily understand why miracles have no place in the scientific world view. If the laws of nature are by definition eternal and unbreakable, then breaking them constitutes a logical absurdity. But why has the miraculous disappeared completely from man’s field of vision since the advent of science? This fact cannot be justified with logic – it belongs to the prejudices of science as a new type of secularized religion.Uncovering these prejudices is not a task for experts, who are rather anxious to administer their knowledge like a monopoly. It is a task of that basic human faculty which Kant had called „pure reason“. I will speak of „democratic antignosis“.