People Smarter Than Me, Part VII: Meaning and Meaninglessness

Mark Shea on the Search for Meaning Apart from God and the Meaninglessness Found There

Hopelessness assaults us from all sides. When a culture no longer looks to the eternal God, it starts looking to this passing world—and it passes. So we fret about demographic winter amid the barrenness of a contraceptive culture facing its doom both economically and socially (as the Muslims happily attest). The stock market goes through convulsions, the debt balloons and an expanding bulge of Baby Boomers starts to burden its allowed-to-not-be-aborted children with the enormous task of providing for them in their impending geezerdom. Not a few are starting to get the bright idea that it would be a lot cheaper to just murder those aging Boomers (mercifully, of course). Elsewhere, those who trust in the “spirit of democratic capitalism” rather than the Holy Spirit look blankly at the horrors it produces:

Philosophy, Jr.

This post is by guess-blogger Christopher Antonetti.

That is my new motto: “Science is philosophy jr.” Seriously folks, the more I learn about science, the more I am convinced that it is entirely unable to explain anything.

Now I’ll readily admit that I’m not much of a scientist or a philosopher. I’m also not the kind of guy who rails against science like it’s witchcraft straight from satan himself. In fact, for the majority of my life, I have held the opinion that science is the bee’s knees while philosophy is for airheaded dopes. BUT NOT ANYMORE.

This revelation came to me after reading two entirely different books: first, A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and second Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. To summarize, Hawking believes that one day the entire universe will be explained by one mathematical model or by one system of mathematical models. Either way, the whole universe is entirely explainable and predictable naturally (at least to a probability). On the other hand, Chesterton mentioned in his book that just because something acts the same way over and over doesn’t mean it is not animate or even sentient or under sentient control. I more or less extrapolated from this (although it was not necessarily the point he was making) that every force in the universe could very well be God’s direct intervention acting the same way every time.

So I’m playing around with this in my mind a bit, and my scientific side comes in and says to me “Pish posh,” (my scientific side has a British accent), “pish posh, all forces are obviously natural. They work the same way every time to a mathematical model. If God is involved at all, he just set up the forces so they would work the way they do when he created them. It is a much simpler solution.”

But it is really a simpler solution? If God is omnipotent and omnipresent and such, isn’t it just as easy for Him to personally work every gear and mechanism of the universal machine? I’d think setting it up and letting it run only seems easier to us because we fatigue and cannot be everywhere at once.

Also, when you really come down to the basics of matter and energy, what makes those basics work? To explain my question better, let us assume that all matter and energy and held together and interact through tiny strings (this is NOT string theory, I’m just making up a basic idea). What, then, makes it so that strings have the property of holding things together? I find this very hard to explain from the naturalist standpoint. Is there some final fundamental where logic pops in and x=x and it all makes sense? The supernatural theory just seems to explain things, if not better, then with equal validity.

My point is not to debunk science as pointless here (as if I could!) or even to prove that forces are fundamentally controlled at the supernatural level. I am merely sharing my observation that science, while being an incredibly useful tool for interacting with reality, is not the be-all and end-all for life, the universe,and everything (or at least we can’t really know).

Am I just stating the obvious or am I totally missing something? If it’s the former, I’m sure someone else has written about this, so comment and let me know. I’d like to read it. Likewise if I am missing something. Just something to ponder today!