The ‘Religion’ of the Modern Age
Introduction
“Complete scepticism,” observes Julian Huxley, “is not practicable. Religion of some sort is probably necessary.”
But by his lights the religion of the modern age will be a godless one, without revelation. The absurdity of this contradiction in terms is patent, yet, as a concept, it is backed by a long-standing philosophy which has not failed to have its influence on the modern mind, so that not only anti-religionists, but also many religionists—whatever other differences of opinion they may have—subscribe currently to the view that guidance through revelation is an impossibility. They prefer to believe in human discovery in this realm as in all other sciences. “The next great task of science,” said Lord Morley, “is to create a religion for mankind.”
Of the ‘humanist’ group, even those who pay lip-service to religion, do not use the latter word with the traditional connotation of an appreciation of reality through divine revelation. They tend to treat it as just another intellectual art, in which there has been a transfer of the seat of power from God to man. That is why this modern ‘religion’ is termed humanism.
Dr Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), a French surgeon and physiologist, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912, attempted in his book, Man, The Unknown, first published in 1935, to elucidate this standpoint. Although this work cannot be said to be representative of the majority of these thinkers, it is probably the most exhaustive book on this topic written by a scientist using a purely scientific method and giving a detailed analysis of the facts hitherto discovered.
In spite of the progress of science and technology, man is still beset by the problems of not having been able to bring either himself or his environment to a state of perfection. Nor is his ultimate understanding of these matters in any sense complete. The ensuing difficulties are the constant preoccupation of thinking men of the modern world. Adherents of religion think that this results from the neglect and consequent downfall of religion, while atheists and apostates take quite a different view. The latter attribute our difficulties to the fact that the progress of those sciences which deal with inanimate matter has not been equalled by that of the biological sciences,—which are still, indeed, at a rudimentary stage. They feel that we are inevitably suffering because of their failure to move forward. Dr. Carrel, therefore, advocates far more intensive research in this field.
His book Man, The Unknown, is an attempt to discover this ‘man’ who is still ‘unknown’. He begins the chapter: ‘The Remaking of Man’ with these words: “Science which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself” (p. 252). He goes on, “For the first time in history, humanity, helped by science, has become master of its destiny. It has unveiled some of the secret mechanisms of his life. It has shown him how to alter his emotion, how to mould his body and his soul on patterns born of his wishes. But will we be capable of using this knowledge of ourselves to our real advantage? We know that intellectual apathy, immorality, and criminality are not, in general, hereditary. The evil is not irreparable.” (pp. 252-3)
Later he states that technology has constructed man, not according to the spirit of science, but according to erroneous metaphysical conceptions. We should break down the fences which have been erected between the properties of concrete objects, and between the different aspects of ourselves. The error responsible for our sufferings comes from a wrong interpretation of a genial idea of Galileo. Galileo, as is well known, distinguished the primary qualities of things, dimensions and weight, which are easily measurable, from their secondary qualities, form, colour, odour which cannot be measured. The quantitative was separated from the qualitative. This mistake had momentous consequences. In man, the things, which are not measurable, are more important than those, which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as, for instance, the physico-chemical equilibria of blood serum.
The separation of the qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and the soul. Then the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow, and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road, which led science to triumph and man to degradation.
In order to find again the right direction we must return in thought to the men of the Renaissance. We should reject the dualism of Descartes. Mind will be replaced in matter. The soul will no longer be distinct from the body. As much importance should be given to feelings as to thermodynamics.
It will be difficult to get rid of a doctrine which, during more than three hundred years, has dominated the intelligence of the civilized. If scientific civilization should leave the road that it has followed since the Renaissance, strange events would immediately take place. Matter would lose its supremacy. Mental activities would become as important as physiological ones. The study of moral, aesthetic, and religious functions, would appear as indispensable as that of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Hygienists would be asked why they concern themselves exclusively with the prevention of organic diseases, and not with that of mental and nervous disturbances, why they pay no attention to spiritual health—Pathologists would be induced to study the lesions of the humours as well as those of the organs, to take into account the influence of the mental upon the tissues, and vice versa. (p. 256)
Thus, according to Dr. Carrel’s diagnosis, the causes of human suffering stem from the fact that the sciences of inanimate matter have become far more developed than the science of man, which is still in a rudimentary state. He sees this as one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity. If black, malodorous charcoal can be converted into lovely colour, and ungainly lumps of iron into shapely, moving machines, man and his society can also, by the help of science, become a burgeoning orchard. I again quote Dr. Carrel:
We are the victims of the backwardness of the sciences of life over those of matter. The only possible remedy for this evil is a much more profound knowledge of ourselves. Such a knowledge will enable us to understand by what mechanisms modern existence affects our consciousness and our body. We shall thus learn how to adapt ourselves to our surroundings, and how to change them should a revolution become indispensable. In bringing to light our true nature, our potentialities, and the way to actualize them, this science will give us the explanation of our physiological weakening, and of our moral and intellectual diseases. We have no other means of learning inexorable rules of our organic and spiritual activities, of distinguishing the prohibited from the lawful, of realizing that we are not free to modify, according to our fancy, our environment and ourselves. Since the natural conditions of existence have been destroyed by modern civilization, the science of man has become the most necessary of all sciences. (pp. 38-39)
What is the way to acquire this science?
We learn each year that tremendous progress has been made in eugenics, statistics, ethics, biology, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, medicine, hygiene, sociology, economics and so on. But for all practical purposes, their results are not very important. This may seem very surprising. Indeed, it is, and this is because, as Carrel puts it: “These sciences will be utilizable only if, instead of being buried in libraries, they animate our intelligence.”
No one single individual has mastery over all these sciences. It is highly desirable that certain individuals should rise to this task and having acquired a profound knowledge of all the subjects, should utilize the science scattered in books in a unified and integrated manner. Dr. Carrel goes on to say:
But is it possible for a single brain to assimilate such a gigantic amount of knowledge? Can any individual master anatomy, physiology, biology, chemistry, psychology, metaphysics, pathology, medicine, and also have a thorough acquaintance with genetics, nutrition, development, pedagogy, aesthetics, morals, religion, sociology, and economics? It seems that such an accomplishment is not impossible. In about twenty-five years of uninterrupted study one could learn these sciences. At the age of fifty, those who have submitted themselves to this discipline could effectively direct the construction of the human being and of a civilization based on his true nature.
The making of man requires the development of Institutions wherein body and mind can be formed according to natural laws. The already existing organizations have to undergo important changes in order to become fitted for the work of human renovation. They must, for instance, eliminate the remnants of the narrow mechanisticism of the last century, and understand the imperativeness of a clarification of the concepts used in biology, of a reintegration of the parts into the whole, and of the formation of true scholars, as well as of scientific workers. The direction of the institutions of learning, and of those which apply to man the results of the special sciences, from biological chemistry to political economy, should not be given to specialists, because specialists are exaggeratedly interested in the progress of their own particular studies, but to individuals capable of embracing all sciences. The specialists must be only the tools of a synthetic mind. They will be utilized by him in the same way as the professor of medicine of a great university utilizes the services of pathologists, bacteriologists, physiologists, chemists, and physicists in the laboratories of his clinic. None of these scientists is ever given the direction of the treatment of the patients. An economist, an endocrinologist, a social worker, a psychoanalyst, a biological chemist, are equally ignorant of man. They cannot be trusted beyond the limits of their own field.
Scores of such institutions have already devoted their activities to worthwhile tasks in different fields, but their researches are not equal to the task in hand. Mathematics, physics, and chemistry are indispensable but not basic sciences in the researches concerning living organisms. They are not capable of constructing the concepts specific to the human being. The biological workers of tomorrow must realize that their goal is the living organism and not merely artificially isolated systems or models: that general physiology, as considered by Bayliss, is a very small part of physiology.
We know that the evolution of humanity is very slow, that the study of its problems demands the lifetime of several generations of scientists. We need, therefore, an institution capable of providing for the uninterrupted pursuit for at least a century of the investigations concerning man. Modern society should be given an intellectual focus, an immortal brain, capable of conceiving and planning its future. (pp. 261-67)
These dicta of Carrel sum up the thoughts of those who, after forsaking religion based on God, want to develop a religion made by man. In making a review of human knowledge, Carrel has pointed out how many unknown corners are there in human life. He rounds off his 300-page book with these words:
For the first time in the history of humanity, a crumbling civilization is capable of discerning the causes of its decay. For the first time it has at its disposal the gigantic strength of science. Will we utilize this knowledge and this power? It is our only hope of escaping the fate common to all great civilizations of the past. Our destiny is in our hands. On the new road, we must now go forward. (p. 293)
Review
The above contentions may appear to be attractive propositions from the philosophical point of view, yet the thinking behind them is basically flawed.
1. We must first consider that there is a fundamental difference between the material and human sciences such as makes it impossible for man to penetrate to the depths of himself as successfully as he can analyse the physical properties of matter. Nor is it true to say that insufficient work has been done on the human sciences for this to be possible. In actual fact, research on, and perusal of the latter can be traced much further back in time than those of the material sciences. Even so, efforts in these fields have met with only partial success. As Dr Carrel says, “A materialist and a spiritualist accept the same definition of a crystal of sodium chloride; but they do not agree with one another upon that of the human being.” (p. 17)
No research to date gives any indication that this state of affairs is likely to change or improve. On what basis then can man hope to discover the secret of life in future? The writer has criticized those who wish to apply to man information, which actually relates to the material world:
The second law of thermodynamics, the law of dissipation of free energy, indispensable at the molecular level, is useless at the psychological level, where the principles of least effort and of maximum pleasure are applied. The concepts of capillarity and of osmotic tension do not throw any light on problems pertaining to consciousness. It is nothing but word play to explain a psychological phenomenon in terms of cell physiology, or of quantum mechanics. (p. 43)
In spite of adopting this stance, he goes on to say that human sciences are discoverable to us, just as material sciences are. This is just repetition in different words of the concept of the mechanistic psychologists of the nineteenth century, because the only valid information that can be acquired on man is of a purely descriptive nature relating to his material aspects. It follows that those who want to understand man by treating him in isolation from religion, will be no different in their final judgement from the 19th century materialists.
2. The writer makes the point that unconnected individuals specializing in their respective fields cannot discover a truly human science. It is rather a single individual with a sound knowledge of all basic sciences who would be successful in this domain.
Such a synthesis cannot be obtained by a simple, round table conference of the specialists. It requires the efforts of one man, not merely those of a group. A work of art has never been produced by a committee of artists, nor a great discovery made by a committee of scholars. The syntheses needed for the progress of our knowledge of man should be elaborated in a single brain. (p. 55)
But to find a man who is truly capable of producing such a synthesis of all knowledge is almost impossible under present circumstances. This is because man suffers the temporal limitations of the normal human life span, the laws governing which are inexorable. No method ever having been discovered to stay the advent of old age and death, the time available for such work is barely sufficient to master one of the scientific fields in its entirety, far less all of the fields which have been explored till today.
The writer has suggested a period of 25 years as being sufficient to master all of the fields that it would be necessary to study. This is, indeed, a daring idea. But is it feasible? Not, if we are to judge by the many unsuccessful examples of interdisciplinary studies which have been undertaken to date. Even the study of a single subject can swallow up a whole lifetime. Karl Marx, for example, had wanted to study only economics and he devoted 35 years of his life to this subject. Even so, his study of it was incomplete, and he was ultimately able to write only one volume of his proposed book, Capital.
This is far from being all that there is to the matter. The reality of man is so complex, such a mixture of opposites that, in the words of a philosopher, the only definite thing we can say about it in the light of present knowledge is that it is impossible to hold an indisputable and consistent opinion on man. It would follow that only those with insufficient knowledge could feel confident about entertaining certain convictions about man, which the writer has dismissed as ‘illusive confidence’. (p. 231)
With the increase in knowledge, such contradiction and disparate questions appear before one that it becomes impossible to strike a balance or find any compatibility between them, far less reach any final conclusion about them. For confirmation of this, we need only see how the opinions of specialists in various fields differ quite drastically from one another. For instance, Watson and the Behaviorists proclaim that education and environment are capable of giving human beings any desired form. To their way of thinking, education would be all, and heredity of negligible importance. Geneticists, on the contrary, hold that heredity pursues man like the furies of antiquity and that the salvation of the human race lies, not in education, but in eugenics. This being so, it is hardly to be supposed that such men exist as will adequately cover a broad spectrum of the human science without becoming a prey to the same disparities and dislocation as have plagued the various specialists.
3. The writer has ignored the fact that man is a creature with a will. This places a wide and insurmountable gulf between him and all material objects. Of material things, we are confident of knowing the truth, because we are sure that with all matter of a similar kind, identical results will be ensured in every similar experiment (e.g. water will always boil at 100°C at standard atmospheric pressure). But man is a different matter altogether. Any human being, provided he has the will, can change himself at any point in time. In the words of Dr. Carrel:
There is a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life. Astronomy, mechanics, and physics are based on concepts, which can be expressed, tersely and elegantly, in mathematical language. Such is not the position of biological sciences. Those who investigate the phenomenon of life are as if lost in an extricable jungle, in the midst of a magic forest, whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and their shape. They are crushed under a mass of facts, which they can describe but are incapable of defining in algebraic equations. (p. 15)
Hence the impossibility of constructing a rigidly scientific matrix which would provide the groundwork for the elucidation of our purely human problems. The greatest factor in solving such problems is the control of the human will. When man does not, of his own volition adhere to the highest code of conduct, there is no scientific law whose application can cause him to mend his ways. Entire electrical installations spring to life by the mere throwing of a switch at the powerhouse, but no such system exists whereby the actions of men can be so directed. Man can act, or refrain from action, only by willing himself to do so, a process in which external intervention would normally play little or no part.
4. This point of view supposes that immorality, dishonesty and criminal tendencies are kinds of mental and nervous “diseases” which can be “cured” like colds and fevers. He writes:
Moral sense, like intellectual activity, apparently depends on certain structural and functional states of the body. These states result from the immanent constitution of our tissues and our minds, and also from factors, which have acted upon us during our development. In his essay on the foundation of Ethics, presented at the Royal Society of Sciences of Copenhagen, Schopenhauer expressed the opinion that the moral principle has its basis in our nature. In other terms, human beings possess innate tendencies to selfishness, meanness, or pity. (p. 125)
This supposition is also absurd. Although there are certain causes for the tendencies to commit crimes, they are purely peripheral, and their real reason is man’s own decision to launch himself on this course. Without control over decision-making, the criminal mentality will never be eradicated. For this reason, it is futile to expect that moral offenders and criminals may be cured of their deficiencies in hospitals, just as other patients are treated for physical diseases. Crime is an act of will, whereas diseases are a material happening. Our surgeons can perform surgery upon matter, but they cannot operate upon the human will. They cannot, therefore, control it.
The writer himself is forced to admit that the complexity of life’s issues will always place a true science of man beyond the reach of humanity. This avowal notwithstanding, he hopes (we think, in vain) that man will be able to attain to this. He says:
In short, the slow progress of the knowledge of the human being, as compared with the splendid ascension of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and mechanics, is due to our ancestors’ lack of leisure, to the complexity of the subject, and to the structure of our mind. Those obstacles are fundamental. There is no hope of eliminating them. They will always have to be overcome at the cost of strenuous effort. The knowledge of ourselves will never attain the elegant simplicity, the abstractness, and the beauty of physics. The factors that have retarded its development are not likely to vanish. We must realize clearly that the science of man is the most difficult of all sciences. (pp. 22-23)
All thinkers admit this fact regarding the human sciences. Julian Huxley writes:
However—and this is vital—the fading of God does not mean the end of religion. God’s disappearance is in the strictest sense of the word a theological process: and while theologies change, the religious impulses which gave them birth persist. The disappearance of God means a recasting of religion, and a recasting of a fundamental sort. It means the shouldering by man of ultimate responsibilities which he had previously pushed off on to God.
What are these responsibilities which man must now assume?
First, responsibility for carrying on in face of the world’s mystery and his own ignorance. In previous ages that burden was shifted on to divine inscrutability: “God moves in a mysterious way.”—Now we lay it to the account of our own ignorance, and face the possibility that ignorance of ultimates may, through the limitations of our nature, be permanent. (p. 133)
It is indeed contradictory that faced with this admission, we still have the lingering hope that, one day, we shall solve the problems of life—when we have mastered the human sciences! It is equally a contradiction that discoveries, which should have alerted man to the necessity of turning to God, have served only to turn him in the opposite direction.
