Science isn't enough

Since the Enlightenment, we've become obsessed with understanding the world by using the scientific method; that is, by isolating hyper-reproducible phenomena and measuring them. This is a tool that has given us immense power. Indeed, almost every advancement in technology has come through this process, for knowledge of these highly reproducible patterns lets us build highly reproducible devices that depend on them. This technique gave us the ability to cross the globe. It lifted mass amounts of people out of poverty. It cured disease; it gave us the nuke. It got us to the moon; it gave us the internet. It even gave you the device that you're reading this on right now.

Because of the immense power that was gained by this process, the smartest people in our world became hyperfixated on advancing it for hundreds of years. Generations and generations passed by, with our power ever increasing and the ability to get what we wanted becoming more and more streamlined.

At a certain point, many of our smartest people even became convinced that the entire world must be reducible to an understanding brought to us by this process. And we started to view ancient understandings with skepticism, even mockery. We started to redefine the most basic categories of our perception to be aligned with these measurements.

Time stopped being the cause of change and started being the abstract parameter against which the progression of certain material processes can be measured. Light went from being that which allows us to see to being electromagnetic waves with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm. Water went from being the agent of renewal that falls from the sky, that houses the chaos and monsters at the edge of the world, to simply being H2O. One by one, all of our immediate graspings of the world became alienated from our immediate experiences of them and became hoisted up and abstracted to the results of these measurements.

We then lost reference to what all the ancient stories were even talking about in the first place. If you read about Jesus walking on water, the ancients would have understood this as him being the master over chaos. It was a hyper-event that embodied, to the fullest extent, the spiritual truth that if you line up your life fully with the source of your being, and you have that source, that light, move completely through you, that even the chaos and monsters at the edge of the world would become harmless; that you could walk on the water. Whereas, when moderns read this, they see a spiritual guru walking on H2O.

We then convince ourselves that all these ancient stories were just told because they didn't have access to science. The stories of magical effects in the air, the spirits moving through us, and, indeed, miracles were just primitive attempts to understand the world. Smart as the people of these times may have been, without science, their understandings would remain primitive.

This remained convincing for a long time. Indeed, our lives were getting easier, and there seemed to be no reason to listen to these outdated stories. We realized the constraints that these old stories laid upon us as well and sought to free ourselves from them. We mocked dogma; we questioned moral teachings; and, indeed, we lost trust in our spiritual authorities. After a while, many of us left religion altogether.

How surprising must it then have been to realize that most phenomena that we encounter in our daily lives do not meet the criteria of being isolatable, reproducible, and measurable, and that we are still in dire need of having understandings of these patterns in order to be able to navigate our lives?

The feeling of the sun's rays hitting your face in the morning while overlooking a beautiful mountainside; the experience of your first kiss; of getting broken up with by your girlfriend; of being lied about by others, where that brings you, how to escape; of getting married; of holding your newborn baby in your arms. All of these things may have correlations, and indeed even causations, with things that can be measured by science, but the experiences in themselves are something profoundly different.

How surprising must it have been to realize that these ancient stories existed precisely to account for these experiences? They existed to account for the immediate graspings that we encounter in every moment, to account for how these experiences relate to each other. They existed to ground our perception of the world, to explain the fundamental categories of our perception, and, further, to explain how these categories relate to each other and build our world.

These stories sought to situate us in the world, to tell us who we were, to tell us where we came from, where we're going. They sought to tell us what was good and what to care about. How surprising must it have been to realize that scientific measurements don't tell us what to care about? They don't tell us what is good, and they don't tell us what our place in the world is.

Ironically, they don't even tell us what measurements to make. Science can never be our guide for this very reason; and this is the reason why the founding myth of the Enlightenment was bound to be shattered: a world without aim is bound to die.

We should never just trust the science for this reason: because, by itself, science is aimless. And indeed, since we tried to reduce the world to science, we forgot our aim. We forgot who we were; we forgot what was good; and we forgot how to navigate our lives.

At the same time, with technology streamlining the process of giving us what we wanted to a ridiculous extent, we realized that we forgot what we wanted. We ended up just being driven by our immediate desires and found ourselves trapped in cycles of self-destruction afforded to us by the very technology we thought would free us. We awoke from our slumber and found ourselves alone in ugly suburbs, not knowing our neighbors, mindlessly scrolling on social media, eating fast food, consuming obscene content. We found ourselves being disappointed with ourselves and not knowing where to go. We thought technology would bring us paradise, but when we forgot our aim, it brought us hell.

We now find ourselves at the end of this whole story. We're at the end of the Enlightenment. We have found that science and reason alone are not enough; that they alone cannot give full accounts of the world; that they can't answer the questions that we care most deeply about. We find ourselves lacking any of the spiritual wisdom of the ancients, with technology so powerful that we could end the world in an instant. We find ourselves needing to look back to these old stories to remember what is good, to remember who we are and how we fit into the world and how to navigate our lives.

We have to remember what was lost; and, indeed, it is being remembered. Resurrection was not just something that happened to Christ, but it is a pattern that lives on all around us in the world. And yes, I do believe that resurrection awaits. Live in hope, my friends.