John Waters writes on pp. 31 of Beyond Consolation:
“The cultures of present-day societies appear to construct themselves or be constructed so as to avoid contemplation of the great questions. This is certainly the case with Irish society. In our public square today there seems to be more open discussion than ever about how reality is structured, where human beings came from and why we are here. But this discussion exists almost entirely on the level of abstraction, removed from the fundamental reality of the individual human being…There is much talk about evolution and the fact that we know, up to a point, how mankind developed from an uncertain moment of initiation. But most of us have no more than a crude grasp of this story…Behind the easily trotted out ‘rational’ assumptions are the ineffable mysteries: where the first spark of life came from; where there might be a ‘come from’; what happened in the aeons of time before everything we know about?”
I think John Waters puts his finger on a significant current of contemporary thought in the passage above. It appears that today, generally speaking, people will appeal to a seemingly ‘rational’ account of human nature – our significance, origins and destination is thought to be accounted for in the abstract language of what might be called ‘science’. On closer examination, what appears to be a forthrightly and rigorously ‘rational’ or ‘scientific’ account of human nature and significance is seen to be anything but. Under-girding scientific discourse of any kind whatsoever is an array of fundamental beliefs that are in no way rational in the sense so many people assume (that is, many assertions about reality deemed to be ‘scientific’ rest on beliefs about reality that cannot be empirically proven – see Refuting Scientism post below.) In a sense then, what is deemed to be true, proper and enlightened ‘rationality’ is nothing of the sort; rather it is an agglomeration of unexamined presuppositions that have the appearance of rationality.
This is precisely what John Water’s driving at when he states:
“...in our public square today there seems to be more open discussion than ever about how reality is structured, where human beings came from and why we are here. But this discussion exists almost entirely on the level of abstraction… Behind the easily trotted out ‘rational’ assumptions are the ineffable mysteries: where the first spark of life came from; where there might be a ‘come from’; what happened in the aeons of time before everything we know about?”
So much of the current-day story of origins is built, as John Waters says, on a crude (often second-hand, lazily borrowed) account of biological evolution. Although the public sphere is rife with scientific debate and press-releases disclosing recent discoveries and breakthroughs, no part of contemporary scientific discourse comes close to setting its finger on “the ineffable mysteries”; the elements of reality that simple cannot be grasped by a system of thought built purely on the premises of natural science – a system of thought limited to the description and classification of natural, physical phenomena. Ultimately, natural science cannot hope to answer the baffling question of human origins and significance.
What we do have, then, is a form of discourse that pushes around a ‘scientific’ language of ever-growing complexity, which seemingly addresses the question of our origins and significance, yet leaves us strangely unmoved. Indeed, as I’ll try to show in the next post, not only does a purely ‘scientific’, ‘rational’ (in the false sense) account of reality fail to satisfy the lingering question of human significance, it also leaves us with a greatly impoverished account of reality – in every sense. Not only (and especially) intellectually, but also spiritually and artistically.
What, then, is the alternative? If ‘science’ so-called cannot furnish us with intellectually, existentially, spiritually and emotionally satisfying answers to the riddle of human existence, beauty, death and The Ultimate, what can?
To furnish a proper answer to this question, I must begin a new post – and unfortunately, due to time constraints, I cannot do that now. So, to see where Waters takes us for the uncovering of a viable alternative, tune into the next post -
Until then,
Sincerely,
The Scribbling Apprentice.
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