Silliman's Papers

HISTORY PAPER
The End of the Soul and the Cold Emptiness of Science:
The dilemmas of the modern in the choice between reason and faith
By Daniel Silliman
April 17, 2002

The 20th century saw the maturation of Modernism, man turning to science for explanations of the world around him and seeing faith as irrelevant. Theology and religion, central to all the understanding and all of life to the pre-modern man, is lost for the modern turning to science. Faith is no longer integrated with the reason, in the tradition of Aquinas; now the two are seen as competing for exclusive dominance. Knowledge has deprived man of his faith; God and knowledge of God has become of no importance. Modern man has stuck his head outside the inverted bowl of order, seen the functioning chaos of the universe, and found he did not need God. The cosmos runs distinct of and independent from a sovereign Being, and God is painfully irrelevant. In this departure from faith, this retreat of God from the world, man has lost the things that made him human. Man, in the modern world of reason, logic, and the ultimate judge of science, has lost poetry, myth, and religion. In the modern world man has gained a mind and lost a soul. He seemingly faces two options: he must choose his mind or his soul. If he chooses his mind he looses poetry, myth, and religion—the things that make him human. If he chooses his soul he looses logic, science, and rationality—his ability to know and his reason for belief. History has placed the two in conflict, and men must either accept or reject modernism, seeing no other options. This is the dilemma of man in American society in the beginning of the 20th century, he must choose between reason and faith, science and theology, modernism and anti-modernism.

Joeseph Wood Krutch, writing in 1929 on the challenges faced by modern Americans, said that the progress of knowledge has carried man into this dilemmas with no way to turn back (420). Man has been taken by his intellect, his pursuit of knowledge, and moved himself from a place of comfortable ignorance to uncomfortable—even destructive—knowledge. Krutch wrote: “Thus man seems caught in a dilemma which his intellect has devised. Any deliberately managed return to a state of relative ignorance, however desirable it might be argued to be, is obviously out of the question” (420). Our knowledge, our intellectual curiosity has slowly and gradually deprived us of our God, and allows us no return. God had, for the ancient man, had complete and sovereign direction of the universe. With the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions God retreated, surrendering his complete direction of the cosmos for the modified role of Uncaused Cause, the Clockmaker, or the Author of natural laws. The men of the early 20th century saw God loosing even this modified and limited role. Darwinism forced the final step of God’s retreat. Krutch described the retreat and man’s uneasiness of man watching God loose all significance:

God, instead of disappearing in an instant, has retreated step by step and surrendered gradually his control of the universe. Once he decreed the fall of every sparrow and counted the hairs upon every head; a little later he became merely the original source of the laws of nature, and even to-day there are thousands who, unable to bear the thought of losing him completely, still fancy that they can distinguish the uncertain outlines of a misty figure. But the role which he plays grows less and less, and man is left more and more alone in a universe to which he is completely alien (471).

The lessening relevance and significance of God in the universe leaves man alien, alone in a world he does not know and cannot cope with. God has exited the scene and man is left with the emptiness. Science, reason and the pursuit of knowledge, has stripped the world of myth and poetry. Man now sees clearly but he sees a world he does not want to live in, deprived of the things that made him human. The world he had lived in and the world he now saw were, Krutch claimed, irreconcilable (416). The orderly world was destroyed and man was left with the maddening emptiness and pointlessness: “For the cozy bowl of the sky arched in a protecting curve above him he must exchange he cold immensities of space, and, for the spiritual order which he has designed, the chaos of nature” (416). Modernism presented man a world without an order or a greater purpose; it deprived him of a soul, of anything making him human. Man, accepting the progress to the early 20th century, lost his soul—his faith, his poetry, his myths. “The mind leaps,” Krutch wrote of the barren landscape of modernism, “[b]ut the world of modern science is one in which the intellect alone can rejoice” (419). Man didn’t know how to cope with the new, barren, and empty world. Deprived of God (417), order (417), and ethics (418), he has nothing to stand on, nothing to bolster his humanness. Man is a still lover, Krutch explained (419), yet he believed that love was no more than a function of the intricacies of psychology. Man wanted to, and attempted to, maintain his society while the ground beneath everything dear was lost.

The trial of John Thomas Scopes trial, famously named the “Monkey Trial” and characterized in the play Inherit the Wind, was the meeting of modernists embracing science as it deprived them of faith and poetry and the anti-modernists rejecting reason that they might retain their past. The Scopes trial was the long and public debate the past and the future, faith and reason, science and poetry. The trial was a weighing of faith and reason, determining which would be subjugated and which would be elevated. The anti-modernists failed the debate and theology was placed under science. The Bible is privatized, reduced to the sphere of personal opinions or convictions and excluded from the public. Malone tells Bryan, the court, the audience, and the listening world that they should not discard their Bible in this new future that is upon them:
And we say “keep your Bible.” Keep it as your consolation, keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your own conscience, in the world of your individual judgment, in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy, keep your Bible in the world of theology, where it belongs, and do not try to tell an intelligent world and the intelligence of this country that these books written by men who knew none of the accepted fundamental facts of science can be put into a course of science (408).

The Bible, faith, and theology must be, according to Darrow and Malone, subject to science (406). The poetic and mythical beliefs of man from an earlier, pre-scientific age can be kept, if we cannot do without them, privately where they will not influence anything.

The American philosopher William James, a Darwinist proposing “easy-going ethics,” with his theories sliding into an American version of nihilism (Reader 380), pronounced the triumph of science and the end of the conflict (James 385). Science has explained the world and Theism has lost: “Darwinism has once for all displace design from the minds of the ‘scientific,’ theism has lost that foothold” (385). The triumph of science, the eradication of faith and poetry, creates a dilemma for modern man: keeping a mind but loosing his soul, retaining his reason but letting slip the things that make him distinctly human.

The dilemma of modern man, faced in the early 20th century and still with debated today, has been the conflict between faith and reason, pitting one against the other but not knowing what to do without either. Science seemed to have taken us beyond faith, leaving us in a void without foundations. Of course, the conception of the conflict, the two choices the only competing options, is oversimplified. This division is a false dichotomy. The spirit and tradition of Thomas Aquinas was not as dead as modernists and anti-modernists believed. Neither the side in the Scopes trial could have conceived of the recent work to rectify modern science and the Bible, or even the intelligent movement. The divisions between believers of science to the exclusion of poetry and the believers in poetry to the exclusion of science are still with us, but they are not all there is, those sides are not the only possible angles. The dilemma of modern man, as Krutch sees it, is a misreading of the ramifications of faith, myth, poetry, science, and reason. Faith is not the enemy of reason, nor is science the destruction of poetry. The medieval picture of the priest and scientists has not completely passed. The hope of synthesizing modern concepts of faith and reason, the 21st century Aquinas equivalent, is alive, present in our modern world.