Interview:

Huston Smith on the Sanctification of Science and the Dethroning of God

Micheal Toms: Huston, you're mentioning how the scientific paradigm has crept into academic circles, how the scientific model has actually become part of the research into the humanities, and how it can stifle creativity and originality. But in your writings you've also referred to David Bohm's theory of wholeness and the implicate order. David Bohm is certainly one of the foremost theoretical physicists of our era and has pioneered, I think, a theory of physics that almost sounds like a spiritual philosophy.
Huston Smith: It does indeed.
MT: One very similar to some of the Oriental philosophies you're so familiar with. What is your view of the possible coming-together, the linking, with science coming back around to its roots in natural philosophy?
HS: It's an immensely exciting time. The outcome hasn't been determined; we'll find out how things go, but the incursions are fruitful. On one hand, the developments in science have undercut a kind of crass Newtonian view of reality as consisting of ultimate little atoms that are unrelated to other things—our century has undercut that. The interrelation between the parts of being—which David Bohm emphasizes with his concept of implicate wholeness—clearly is a move back towards the unity which traditional philosophies, those of Asia included, emphasized. At the same time, I think we have to be careful here. Modern science has become a powerful symbol for transcendence—again I use "transcendence" to refer to that which is greater than we are by every criterion of worth we know, including intelligence and compassion. Modern science suggests such a realm, but I do not think that it proves it. Nor do I think that it can, for this reason: The crux of modern science is the controlled experiment; that's what distinguishes modern science from generic science, and what gives it its power by virtue of its power to prove. It can winnow hypotheses and discard those that are inadequate. What we don't see is the corollary of all this, which is that we can control only what is inferior to us. Things that are greater than we are, including more intelligent, dance circles around us, not we they. So there's no way that we are going to get angels, or God, or whatever other beings there may be that are greater than we are, into our controlled experiments. So I think modern science will never prove anything in the area of the human spirit. But it can suggest, and I find it suggesting powerfully. For me, modern science has come to rival, even outstrip at times, sacred art and virgin nature as a symbol of the divine.Now, if I can continue one more step. I think there's a trap if those who share our kinds of spiritual interests rush on to say, "Well, that's true of science up to this point. But that only shows that we need a new science that is larger in scope and can prove these transcendent realities." When I hear that, and I hear it very often, my impulse is to say, "In proposing that move, you show me where your loyalties lie, namely, in science! You're for transcendence, but you won't really believe it exists until science proves that it does. So your move shows that you continue to accept science as the ultimate oracle as to what exists." That acceptance is the heart of modernity's problem, so the call for a science that proves transcendence only perpetuates the problem.In probing the physical, material world, science is brilliant; it is a near perfect way of telling us about that. And to know about nature is a great good, for nature is awesome in its own right.But science doesn't have to do everything. And if we try to make it do everything, with every step of its expansion we will decrease its power and will end up with a kind of mushy science. Of course, we can define "science" in any way we please. I prefer keeping it hard-nosed, powerful and precise, while insisting that it can only disclose a part of reality.
MT: It occurs to me as I hear you present your case here—which I think is very compelling—that it may explain why it's so difficult to get psychic and paranormal experiences to happen in the scientific laboratory.
HS: Exactly. I believe that paranormal powers are real. But to get anything into a laboratory, we have to reduce the variables to a single alternative so we can discover which side of it is true. Where the object in question exceeds us in complexity, we can't do that.
MT: This may also explain why it has been so easy to change the agenda of colleges and universities, through the federal budget and the like. We've made science into some kind of god.
HS: Oh, clearly.
MT: And science has become our religion.
HS: Alex Comfort has a nice line on that. He says, "science is our sacral mode of knowing." Sacral is a coined word—it comes from "sacred." I think he's right. Science has almost exactly replaced the role that revelation served in the Middle Ages. Then, if you wanted the final verdict on what is true, you would go to the scriptures and the traditions of the Church. Now we go to science. One intellectual historian has pointed out that as far back as a hundred years ago, more people believed, really believed, in the truth of the periodic table of chemical elements than believed anything in the Bible. In the century since then, we've moved further in that direction. Science has become the revelation of our time.And to return to our previous point, it should be with regard to the material world. The slip is that we have turned science into scientism—scientism being defined as the assumption that science is the only reliable way of getting at truth, and that only the kinds of things it tells us about really exist.
MT: It may require some sense of humility to admit that we have confused science with scientism.
HS: It will. In a way, we know what we need to know. It's one of these things that we know but never learn.
MT: Or that we know but haven't integrated.
HS: That's right. It has to be assimilated. But everything in our culture—almost everything—works against that assimilation. The visible bombards us from dawn to night. The tangible is so much with us that it's hard to put it in perspective. That's all we need to do, just put it in perspective. But that saving grace is difficult to allow.