The Meaning of It All

Throughout all the ages, men have been trying to fathom the meaning of life. They realize that if some direction or some meaning could be given to the whole thing, to our actions, then great human forces would be unleashed. So, very many answers have been given to the question of the meaning of it all. But they have all been of different sorts. And the proponents of one idea have looked with horror at the actions of the believers of another—horror because from a disagreeing point of view all the great potentialities of the race were being cha

The dream is to find the open cha

Admitting that we do not know and maintaining perpetually the attitude that we do not know the direction necessarily to go permit a possibility of alteration, of thinking, of new contributions and new discoveries for the problem of developing a way to do what we want ultimately, even when we do not know what we want.

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

So I have developed in a previous talk, and I want to maintain here, that it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. I say that we do not know what is the meaning of life and what are the right moral values, that we have no way to choose them and so on. No discussion can be made of moral values, of the meaning of life and so on, without coming to the great source of systems of morality and descriptions of meaning, which is in the field of religion.

And so I don’t feel that I could give three lectures on the subject of the impact of scientific ideas on other ideas without frankly and completely discussing the relation of science and religion. I don’t know why I should even have to start to make an excuse for doing this, so I won’t continue to try to make such an excuse. But I would like to begin a discussion of the question of a conflict, if any, between science and religion. I described more or less what I meant by science, and I have to tell you what I mean by religion, which is extremely difficult, because different people mean different things. But in the discussion that I want to talk about here I mean the everyday, ordinary, church-going kind of religion, not the elegant theology that belongs to it, but the way ordinary people believe, in a more or less conventional way, about their religious beliefs.

I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion, religion more or less defined that way. And in order to bring the question to a position that is easy to discuss, by making the thing very definite, instead of trying to make a very difficult theological study, I would present a problem which I see happens from time to time.

A young man of a religious family goes to the university, say, and studies science. As a consequence of his study of science, he begins, naturally, to doubt as it is necessary in his studies. So first he begins to doubt, and then he begins to disbelieve, perhaps, in his father’s God. By “God” I mean the kind of personal God, to which one prays, who has something to do with creation, as one prays for moral values, perhaps. This phenomenon happens often. It is not an isolated or an imaginary case. In fact, I believe, although I have no direct statistics, that more than half of the scientists do not believe in their father’s God, or in God in a conventional sense. Most scientists do not believe in it. Why? What happens? By answering this question I think that we will point up most clearly the problems of the relation of religion and science.

Well, why is it? There are three possibilities. The first is that the young man is taught by the scientists, and I have already pointed out, they are atheists, and so their evil is spread from the teacher to the student, perpetually… Thank you for the laughter. If you take this point of view, I believe it shows that you know less of science than I know of religion.

The second possibility is to suggest that because a little knowledge is dangerous, that the young man just learning a little science thinks he knows it all, and to suggest that when he becomes a little more mature he will understand better all these things. But I don’t think so. I think that there are many mature scientists, or men who consider themselves mature—and if you didn’t know about their religious beliefs ahead of time you would decide that they are mature—who do not believe in God. As a matter of fact, I think that the answer is the exact reverse. It isn’t that he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know it all.

The third possibility of explanation of the phenomenon is that the young man perhaps doesn’t understand science correctly, that science ca

There are two sources of difficulty that the young man we are imagining would have, I think, when he studies science. The first is that he learns to doubt, that it is necessary to doubt, that it is valuable to doubt. So, he begins to question everything. The question that might have been before, “Is there a God or isn’t there a God” changes to the question “How sure am I that there is a God? “ He now has a new and subtle problem that is different than it was before. He has to determine how sure he is, where on the scale between absolute certainty and absolute certainty on the other side he can put his belief, because he knows that he has to have his knowledge in an unsure condition and he ca