השקפת העולם המדעית והדתית ג׳The Scientific and the Religious World View 3
א׳
1Meaning and Purpose
ב׳
2That God created the world is, of course, not a scientific statement. But no statement concerning the ground of reality or the ultimate Encompassing can be scientific. Scientific statements are only possible within the object realm. The sentence, God created the world, posits this realm and its orderliness; it establishes it and in such a manner that it is made accessible to scientific investigation. It does not describe the object as it is, but explains why it is. It is because God willed it. A new principle is introduced into the interpretation of reality, the principle of intention. The world is willed, it is planned, it has a purpose. But if willed and intended, reality has value. “And God saw all He has made and behold it was good”. Being has value, for the world ground is the divine intention.
ג׳
3The scientific interpretation is quantitative. The object may be adequately described only insofar as it is measurable. The essence of the object is ideally expressed in the mathematical formula. But only objects may be so represented, not intentions or purposes. The scientific interpretation of reality recognizes only facts, not meanings. It can deal only with what is, not with what ought to be or should be. Objects in themselves just are; as the facts of science they are brutally indifferent toward all considerations of meaning or purpose. This in itself is not a bit disturbing as long as the scientific interpretation remains limited to the domain of the object. Conglomerations of atoms and molecules do not ask for meaning or purpose. They just are what they are. The trouble arises when the scientific method becomes the foundation of a world view that is bound to objectify the whole realm of existence. The scientific world view, not being able to break through to the ground of reality, has no access to the source of meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are regarded merely as human inventions, they are the drives and desires of a human being who is himself objectified and should be seen as a mere sample of the world of objects. Thus, man is obliged to see his existence as the accidental result of the interplay of impersonal natural forces, which are utterly indifferent toward the mirage of his imagined personal destiny. In truth, however, man cannot be objectified. He is a person. And the characteristic mark of personality is the quest for meaning in existence. As the person possesses ontological authenticity, so too the quest for meaning and purpose, which is inseparable from personal being, has ontological status. It is inherent in Being itself. Within the objectifying world view of science, man’s longing for meaningfulness cannot be satisfied. Here is one of the roots of despair in certain forms of existentialist philosophy of the day.
ד׳
4Within the religious world view, man, in his search for purpose, turns naturally to the ground of being in order to discover the meaning of his own existence. In search for meaning, he comes face to face with the ultimate ground of being, the intention and will of the Creator. But now the world of the object too appears in a new light. The will of the Creator embraces the whole of creation, subject and object. The energy-charged space-time structure of “brute facts”, so efficiently described by science, is now itself referred to that other dimension of the Ultimate Encompassing, the dimension of meaning and value, the ontological homeland of both, subject and object. The object realm itself becomes thus injected with purposefulness. Man has now to meet it with a sense of awe and find fulfillment in it for his personal destiny in a spirit of responsibility toward the all-embracing reality, which has issued from the hands of the One Creator.