Keith Ward is the 2008-09 Metanexus Senior Fellow. See the list of November 2008 lectures from The Big Questions in Science and Religion.

Value, Faith, and Science

What I am suggesting is that there are objective values—values that hold for everyone and that are more than matters of personal choice and opinion—that can be apprehended in and through ordinary experience. Their apprehension depends upon the development of an initial sensitivity, and the precise way in which they are seen and interpreted depends upon the deepest attitudes and beliefs of those who claim to apprehend them.

The tough-minded scientist will reject all such talk. There is nothing, such a scientist will say, to apprehend. There is only our own decision and the purpose we create for ourselves. Yet such a belief, too, is not verifiable or universally agreed. It is not a belief that forms part of any natural science. There is no demonstration of it that has been published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. Yet it is a factual belief, a belief about what sorts of things are, or can be, facts, about what sorts of things there are.

At least one thing, then, has been established. Not all factual beliefs are scientific beliefs. Not all can be publicly verified or verified at all. Not all are universally agreed on. The statement, “There are no objective values, values that would exist independently of human beings” is a statement of (alleged) fact that is not subject to any scientific or public method of verification. Yet it is either true or false, and our decision about that may, in some cases, have very dramatic practical consequences.

You may reject the objectivity of the value of truth and yet commit your life to a search for truth. You may also theoretically accept the objectivity of the value of truth and never bother to do anything about it. Human beings are extremely irritating and irrational. But it would certainly be reasonable, if you thought there was an objective obligation to seek the truth about the universe, to do so with as little self-interest as possible.

Whatever their theoretical beliefs about the objectivity of values (and most practicing scientists perhaps have no explicit theoretical beliefs on the subject), the best scientists have been driven by a passion for truth at whatever cost. They have also been driven by a passion for beauty, for intellectual elegance, and for understanding. The equations of science may seem cool, purely rational, and without feeling. But great scientists are people driven by passion for truth, intelligibility, and understanding. It would not be too much to say that they are people of faith—faith, often despite the evidence and against all odds, that the world will yield up its secrets to patient investigation and that it will prove to be comprehensible as a fully intelligible reality, accessible to the human mind at its best.

What can justify the scientists’ faith that there is no event without a cause or at least without a good explanation? What can justify the faith that the laws of nature will operate in the future as they have in the past? What can justify the belief that human reason is adequate to understand the structure of reality? As the Cambridge quantum physicist Paul Dirac said, “It was a sort of act of faith with us that any equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them” (quoted in Longair 1984, 7).

Not all scientists may have a strong faith in these propositions, but they must, nevertheless, act as though they were true. They must, that is, have practical faith, a commitment that often goes well beyond the evidence, a passion for truth and understanding that will not be undermined by repeated failure. Is this so very different from the passion of the religious believer that a different sort of truth can be found and understood, even though the way to it sometimes seems almost impossibly difficult and littered with the failures of past attempts?

“There is no different sort of truth,” an atheistic scientist may say. “There is only our sort of truth, the sort that our discipline alone can discover.” But that is precisely what is in question. The scientist is driven by passion—science is not, after all, value-free. And an assertion of the sole sovereignty of scientifically ascertainable truth is not itself a statement of science. The possibility exists that there may be a legitimate and admirable passion for a sort of truth that is not establishable by the methods of scientific inquiry.

Some Facts That Are Not Scientific— The Case of History

There are a great many factual claims that could not possibly be established by scientific methods. Some of them have been mentioned: most obviously, there is the claim that there are no facts that cannot be discovered by science. In order to test that claim, we first have to get some definition of science. This is subject to much debate, but the main characteristics of natural science are that its data are publicly observable, measurable, repeatable, and agreed on by all competent observers. The question, then, is: are there any data that are not publicly observable, measurable, repeatable, and agreed on by all competent observers?

What we need to do is to undertake a thought experiment (not a real, physical, scientific experiment) to see if we can think of any such data. This brings to light a function of reason that is not just an apportioning of belief to the evidence. For what we are asking is whether there is any evidence that does not count as scientific evidence. We think rationally about this question when we try to assemble all relevant information, classify and analyze it, discern patterns of similarity or difference within it, and possibly achieve an integrated, plausible, and coherent general interpretation of it.

This is an exercise not of experimentation but of rational inquiry. Reason addresses the data of experience, seeking comprehensiveness, consistency, coherence with other knowledge, elegance of classification, and awareness of all the implications of a proposed interpretation. It is more like pure mathematics than it is like experimental, natural science. One of the questions reason will ask is whether it is acceptable always to apportion belief to the empirically establishable evidence. Another is whether all forms of evidence have to be establishable by scientific, observational, and experimental, methods.

In pointing to the passion for truth and the faith in intelligibility that mark good science, we have seen that it can be reasonable and admirable to hold a passionate and morally grounded belief that goes well beyond the available evidence. And we have already discovered a question that cannot be answered by the methods of experimental science, no matter how long and complicated: “Are there any questions scientific methods cannot answer?”

But it might still be insisted that these points are about moral values and about matters of verbal definition. They are not really questions about facts. Are there any obviously factual matters that science cannot establish?

Consider some facts from past human history. Caesar crossed the Rubicon. That is either true or false; it is a historical fact (or a claim about one). Is it publicly measurable or repeatable? Obviously not. Is it agreed by all competent historians? It may be; but many historical claims are not agreed on, and there is no way in which universal agreement could be guaranteed. If we have read more than one history book, we should be aware that historians disagree continually. They are always providing new interpretations of past events and arguing about whether ancient historical records are legendary or strictly factual. Is it publicly observable? Obviously not; all we have are historical records; we can never gain access to the facts themselves.

This does not make us give up the attempt to understand history or deny that the past ever existed. It makes us aware that few historical judgments are absolutely certain or established beyond reasonable doubt. There is a truth to be known, but we will never have direct access to it and must be content with interpretations that will inevitably express our own preferences, beliefs, and inclinations. And we know that universal agreement will never be achieved.

To be a historical perspectivalist is to say that the facts of history will always be interpreted from a particular perspective and that such perspectives will probably always differ in ways that can never finally be resolved. But that does not make us doubt that historical truth exists. It might make us aware of the theoretical uncertainty of our perspective and of the usefulness of knowing about other perspectives that may be strong where ours is weak. But it will probably not make us give up our perspective or lapse into a complete agnosticism.

Sometimes, indeed, past facts are of immense practical importance— for instance, where a large sum of money belongs to someone only if it were bequeathed to him or her in the past. In a matter of great practical consequences, we might strive for one interpretation of history with all the passion at our disposal, with a passion that far exceeds a strictly neutral survey of the available evidence. It would be silly to say that we must always apportion our belief to the evidence. If we are lawyers, it may be our duty to argue a case strongly and to make the evidence conform to our committed view. This is not generally taken to be hypocrisy, much less irrationality. It is a practical commitment in the face of strictly objective uncertainty, in a case where we genuinely believe the facts are in our favor but where that is not beyond all reasonable doubt.

History suggests, then, that there are facts that are not publicly accessible or verifiable, measurable or testable, or susceptible to universal agreement. The evidence for such facts is often objectively less than certain, but it is often reasonable to believe more strongly than the available evidence strictly allows, if there is a great amount at stake, if we genuinely believe that the facts are as we judge them to be, and if there is no way of avoiding the issue.

These are the factors William James mentions in his famous essay, “The Will to Believe,” first published 1896 (see Burkhardt, Bowers, and Skrupskelis 1978). If a belief is forced (you cannot avoid it), vital (of great practical import), and living (a realistic and plausible option), then, James suggests, it is rational to commit yourself to it even with less than overwhelming evidence. That seems to me to do no more than reflect the practice of good scientists when they believe that “there is no event without a cause,” “there are universal laws of nature,” or “the universe is comprehensible and mathematically intelligible.” We admire the tenacity of Einstein who refused to give up belief in determinism in the face of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We may even admire Daniel Dennett’s determination to avoid dualism at all costs or Richard Dawkins’ refusal to read books of theology because he already knows they are rubbish. Much will depend upon our own perspective. What is certain is that there are few people who can live in the real world refraining from believing anything unless they have theoretically sufficient evidence for it. Human life is too short for that.

There are certainly facts of history. But they cannot be established scientifically, and they can rarely be established at all with theoretical certainty. There is much evidence for some historical facts, but, for many others, there is very little evidence, and narratives have to be filled in by what we think, on other grounds, is likely and by an imaginative patterning of the past shaped by our own experience of the present, adjusted as well as we can for cultural differences.

Facts about Human Motives and Goals

But at least, as positivists used to say, historical facts are observable in principle. They could have been observed publicly and checked if any scientists had been there to do so, even if they are beyond checking now. They might not be scientific facts, but at least they are the sort of facts that could have been observed.

However, history is rather more complicated than that. Many of the most interesting histories deal not just with observable events but with the motives, intentions, purposes, beliefs, feelings, and ideals of people. Are such things observable? In a way they are—we know what someone’s motives or beliefs are by observing how he or she behaves. But there will almost always be disagreement about such matters, however much behavioral observation we undertake. We have to interpret observed behavior in terms of motives assumed to be in play. But can we be sure what those motives really are?

Behaviorists used to say that human agents are not in the best position to say what their own motives are. That is true. But neither are behavioral psychologists in a better position to say what an agent’s motives are. The real driving forces and goals of human action may remain concealed to agent and observer alike. As Kant remarked, I can never be sure that I am really acting out of a sense of duty, that I am not deceiving myself. I simply have to do my best to try to act without self-deception and hope that I am succeeding. But if I ask the questions, “How far am I truly responsible for my actions? How far am I morally free to set my own goals, and how far are my actions due to dispositions I cannot really change?,” neither introspection nor the most minute study of behavior will answer those questions definitively.

Kant concluded that I must assume that I am free, though I can never prove it—this is a practical commitment that must be total but that cannot be conclusively established on the basis of empirical evidence. For Kant, the assumption of freedom is a condition of the possibility of moral action, of acting on moral principles. But the assumption also rests on common-sense experience. I feel that I am free and am the cause of many of my bodily actions. But determinists will say that is an illusion, and how could I refute that? My evidence is just that this is how it seems to me—and that a whole set of beliefs about praise and blame, just rewards and punishments would collapse if how it seems were not the case.

Determined determinists can bring lots of evidence for the all-encompassing rule of physical causality. But they are nowhere near showing that all my seemingly free acts are actually caused by deterministic brain events. There is some evidence, but it is far from sufficient for such a conclusion, and it never amounts to a rigorous and exhaustive causal breakdown into purely physical components of specific, free, and responsible human acts.

These are cases in which there is a true view—either humans are sometimes free, fully responsible, and able to set their own goals (nonphysically determined), or they are not; either they have specific motives, or they do not. But it is impossible to establish a view with certainty. The claim is not that nobody knows my motives and goals but me: the claim is that nobody, not even I, can know all my motives and goals with certainty. These are facts of the matter. They are not establishable. But we often have to commit ourselves to one view or another on the basis of ambiguous and theoretically insufficient evidence.

Truth in Art

There are other cases, however, where I can normally be sure of facts that are not publicly accessible. An example would be the fact of what, precisely, I am now thinking (but not writing down) or of what I am now feeling. Such facts, mental facts, may or may not be known with certainty by me, and they may or may not be identical with some of my brain states; but I know what they are in a way that no one else can, unless I tell them. Thus, there are thousands of facts that are not physically observable, and the evidence for them is just my own experience, unverifiable by anyone else. They are even unverifiable by me because, once an experience has passed, I can never have any other experience that will verify that it actually occurred as I think it did. But that does not stop me from claiming that I have had many experiences.

Such facts often cannot easily be described. But in art, music, and literature, they can sometimes be not so much described as expressed. Music, for example, expresses attitudes and moods. It communicates emotional depth and feeling, a certain “felt apprehension” of the world. What it communicates are not publicly perceived facts in the physical world but what might be called “facts disclosed by feeling,” ways in which the world is felt and responded to emotionally. Such personal apprehensions of the world do disclose aspects of what is seen. But the “seeing” is not a simple, universally shared perception. It involves creative imagination that is valued precisely for its personal uniqueness. It involves rare creative skill to express what is felt in a distinctive and original way. What is expressed is a unique feeling response to the world, and the expression requires a high degree of creative excellence. A distinctively p ersonal and unique sensitivity and active creative power are required to produce a work of art that may express factors of perceived meaning and value in the experienced world with which the sciences do not deal.

The arts express not how the world is apart from all conscious apprehension but how it is when it is perceived and felt in a uniquely individual way. If I am a good creative artist, I may skillfully express what it is like to feel and be in the world as I am, with my mode of consciousness. Does this tell us anything about the world? It expresses how the world is for a particular consciousness. This can tell us something about the human condition, in its pain and happiness, its egoism and altruism, its melancholy and compassion.

One of the attractions of good literature is that it may convey to us ways of seeing the world, of living in it and experiencing it, that are quite new to us. No one disputes that we live in a shared world, but we see it so differently that the whole quality of our experience can be distinct. There is, thus, a sense in which we inhabit different worlds, carved out of differing aspects of our shared world, and those differences are in part a consequence of how we see the world, of what we ourselves are, and of how we actively interact with the world.

The arts can disclose aspects of reality, but those aspects are not publicly accessible, measurable, law-like, or predictable. Art expresses thoughts and feelings that disclose how reality is personally experienced. It, thus, expresses a rich inner world of meanings and values and also expresses aspects of the objective world that are only cognizable by means of such an intensely personal approach.

Is there a truthfulness in art? There may be truthfulness to the tragedy and hope, the ambiguity and significance, of the human situation. Art may show us how to respond deeply, though the facts of which it speaks are facts as they are revealed to humans who approach them sensitively and creatively. The moral lessons art may teach are not usually didactic. They present their distinctive viewpoints and leave us to respond. But some works of art may change our lives, as we feel that they present the possibility of more penetrating perceptions and more fulfilling ways of being. Such perceptions remain individual and always diverse. They are always a matter of personal discernment, judgment, and decision. This is the richness, diversity, and uniqueness of personal life, that life with which the humanities deal and which the natural sciences rigorously and in principle eschew.

Art at its best communicates—it expresses what it is like to be a unique personal and creative agent and what the world is like for such an agent. It can arouse in the observer an empathy for, a felt understanding of, that way of seeing and being in reality. We take observed sounds or marks or colors as expressions of ways of understanding other than our own and of aspects of reality that can only be apprehended by adopting such ways of understanding and feeling. Those expressions have the function of evoking in us, if we are attuned to discern them, a mode of consciousness and an apprehension of reality that can enlarge and deepen our own way of being in the world.

Though this is not religion, the parallel with the religious sensibility—the interpretation of phenomena as expressions of a Transcendent Reality that can only be apprehended through the adoption of a specific mode of feeling and consciousness—is clear. That is why, though art is certainly not all religious, there is, nevertheless, a deep affinity between the intensely personal apprehension of meaning and value in art and the personal apprehension of transcendent meaning and value that is characteristic of religion.

Science and the Humanities and Social Sciences

To all this, tough-minded scientists, if they are still there, will say that art is not about truth at all. It is an expression of personal taste, and it only confuses the issue to speak of such mystical-sounding things as expressions, evocations, perspectives, and feelings. Such things are for softies, aesthetes, and the scientifically illiterate. There is only one truth, one way in which things are. The human mind is weak and prone to delusion, so coming to know the truth is difficult. Science offers the only sure route to truth because it observes closely and repeatedly, tests out many possible explanations, and checks with others for agreement. It guards against hasty or ill-considered judgments. It is based on tested, carefully checked evidence. It has the best and only chance of saying how things are.

This is one idealized view of science. But there is another. Scientists may not be white-coated technicians dispassionately dealing with facts discerned by their laboratory equipment. They may be poets of the universe, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone” (as Wordsworth said of Newton), awestruck by the intellectual beauty of nature, passionate to understand its integrated complexity, creatively inventing new modes of explanation and new ways of investigating the natural world. Perhaps the creation of “the scientific world” is itself a work of art, of creative imagination. In that case, science is shot through with value and creativity. Truth and compassion, beauty and intelligibility, the patient struggle against prejudice and irrationality are its hallmarks. Its martyrs are those, like Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin, who have given their lives in the search for truth. Its prophets are those, like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin, who have revolutionized human thought by the brilliance and originality of their insights.

It is, therefore, deeply misleading to separate science from the humanities and social sciences altogether, as if science were concerned only with dispassionate evidence and reason, whereas the humanities were concerned only with imaginative fantasy and subjective feeling. What is needed is a more integrated view of human knowledge in its total range, fascinated both by the regularities of the physical and by the uniqueness of the personal.

The humanities and social sciences take as their object of study the personal world of culture and history, of language and art, of political and economic activity. The natural sciences study the impersonal world of particles, atoms, elements, cells, brains, and universes. These are aspects of the same world, but one studies beliefs, purposes, feelings, and values, as expressed in languages, social institutions, and artifacts, while the other studies mathematical relations and the laws and structures of physical objects. In the human person, both aspects are integrated, the life of the body and the life of the mind being entangled and closely interwoven.

This difference in the aspects of reality that are studied brings with it a difference in methodology. Passionate curiosity, imaginative invention, and the search for understanding are common. But ideas have no physical structure; there is no way to measure them in quantitative terms; they follow no pattern of predictable regularity. The world of the humanities is the world of meanings, and meanings have to be understood by an effort of empathetic imagination, by learning to interpret experience as others do.

As the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to make clear, the world of meanings is not purely inward, individual, and private. Persons learn to think in a social context. Their inner lives are molded by their language, and we learn how others see things by coming to understand their language or by appreciating the nonlinguistic expressions of meaning in their art and social institutions. So, meanings are not completely hidden from view inside the minds of others. They are socially expressed and communicated.

Nevertheless, understanding a meaning is an intellectual skill different from the skill of a scientist who investigates the pattern of atoms in a molecule. Scientists need careful and technologically enhanced observation, experimental control of the object they study, and the capacity to repeat their observations. Humanists need to interpret visual or oral data as communications, as conveying imaginative visions and ideas. In this area, what you see is always a function of what you are. You have to learn to see things in a new way, even if you disagree with what is being expressed. Thus, you have to enter into a dialogue between how you see things and other ways of seeing. That dialogue may be fruitful or frustrating. It may enlarge your understanding or reinforce your prejudices.

There is no neutral, value-free access to the life of other minds and cultures. Social anthropologists try to be as dispassionate as possible, but they know there will always be a critical difference between one who naturally belongs to another cultural tradition and one who merely reports it, however accurately. They know that different anthropologists report the same data in very different ways, for interpretation and personal understanding are inevitably from a personal perspective. That perspective may be changed by interaction with another, but it will never simply be eliminated.

So, scholars in the humanities and social sciences expect diversity of interpretation. Indeed, they look for it as a way to counter their own limitations, and to offer new forms of insight. But that does not prevent them from developing commitment to their own personal view, and arguing for it as the most adequate view. For understandings of the world, like languages, are always fluid and changing and exhibit both a loyalty to their own history and tradition and a concern to embrace a more global perspective.

Perhaps the greatest lesson scholarship in the humanities and social sciences can teach is that historical change and human diversity are ineliminable aspects of the study of human beliefs. To place ideas in their cultural context and to be able to give the history of their development are to understand them better. Nevertheless, the question of rationality and truth is not lost in the admission of diversity and development. Rationality is expressed in the concern to place ideas in a perspicacious and intelligible pattern, systematically set out so that their logical relationships can be clearly seen. Truth is neither just what anybody thinks it is (“it’s true for me”) nor a matter of clear propositions picturing clear states of affairs in the world. Truth lies in a relation between concepts and reality, and the nature of that relation depends on the concepts available to a given culture and on the extent to which reality can be depicted ac curately in such concepts.

It is possible that human language is inadequate to provide a comprehensive and fully adequate description of reality. Why should the world fit our concepts exactly? Concepts divide up the world, classify it, and systematize it in specific ways. One of the miracles of science is that the language of mathematics does seem to depict and illuminate the nature of the physical world—as Eugene Wigner put it, “The appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve” (1960, 14). But the more beautiful and elegant the mathematics becomes—in quantum theory, for example—the less we are able to picture what the world it depicts is like or even whether it is depicting a real world at all.

Ordinary language more or less fits the trees and people and rocks we tend to bump into in everyday life. Mathematical language gives insight into the ultimate, but unpicturable, nature of the material world, the world of matter and beyond. But what other aspects of the world might there not be, and what different uses of language might we not need to depict them?

There is no reason that truth should consist only in the conclusive public verification of some precisely formulated statement in a human language. There are certainly some truths like that—the truth that there are forty-six chromosomes in the normal human genome is a good example. It is unambiguous and precise, and the statement corresponds to the facts. But truths about personal life are about a richly entangled, rarely fully explicit, constantly evolving, creatively interpreted set of thoughts and feelings. The language we have for expressing or describing such a life is limited and crude. We can hardly ever get a precise, unambiguous statement that corresponds to a mental fact, much less one that all of us could verify for ourselves. So, truth is much more a matter of degree, of metaphors that produce insight, if taken in the right way, of a more-orless appropriateness.

There is, no doubt, only one way in which things are. But our language may not be able to state that precisely. Concepts may sketch it in a rough outline, with more-or-less adequacy and in rather different, even apparently conflicting, ways, if taken too literally. To gain a truly comprehensive and adequate view requires wisdom and sensitivity, and, given our human situation of vast ignorance and corruption of desire and will, hardly any one will manage to do it. Most of us will continue to live in a world of conceptual antagonisms, overemphasized inadequacies, and oversimple keys to understanding. The best we can do is to make of this situation a dialectic to enable wider understanding. The worst is to dismiss the views of others as ridiculous, being blind to the limitations of our own.

Religion between the Sciences and the Humanities and Social Sciences

This brings us back to the topic of religious experiences. In the life of religion, such experiences were seen to be fairly rare and to be associated with outstanding individuals of great wisdom and sensitivity. They were interpreted in different ways, depending on the concepts available to the cultures in which those individuals lived. But, at a general level, they seemed to have in common an apprehension of a Reality of Supreme Value, of beauty and wisdom, of bliss and compassion. This was interpreted as encounter with God or as union with a Reality of Supreme Value, either in a personal or an impersonal form.

Most religious traditions are at pains to say that the concepts in terms of which such experiences are described are metaphorical, not literal, for the reality is beyond precise description in any human language. It is also clear that conceptual interpretation enters into the description of experience, producing differences even at the highest level. But humans are, in general, so unbalanced and benighted that a great many so-called “religious experiences” will be pretty obviously harmful or irrational. For that reason, religions usually seek to make the normative experiences of their founding prophets or teachers authoritative for the tradition. They do not deny that believers in general may have religious experiences, but they do not grant them independent status or authority.

I introduced into the discussion an imaginary “tough-minded scientist” (but there are real-life cases of people who think like that), who argued that only scientifically established truths should count as truths and that religious experiences belong to the realm of subjective feelings and have no cognitive content. For such a person, religious experiences could certainly not be evidence for God: their interpretation is disputed, even at the most general level; there is no way of publicly verifying these claims; and many, perhaps most, religious experiences are irrational and occur to mentally unbalanced people. Evidence has to be available to everyone, publicly checkable, and carefully inspected to guard against trickery and delusion. Religious experiences fail these tests, so they are not evidence for anything, except the mental states of deluded maniacs.

Religious believers may be grateful that at least they are allowed to have mental states. But it is perhaps not so clear that their experiences are delusions. In this chapter, I have suggested that the claim that all evidence must be publicly testable, universally agreed on, and repeatable under controlled conditions, like much scientific evidence, is not really defensible.

In courts of law, there is rarely universal agreement—at the very least, the prosecution and the defense lawyers do not agree. The evidence cannot be repeated or controlled, and, if it lies in the past, it cannot be publicly tested. We have to make do with a lower standard of evidence and say that we rely on the majority judgment of people exposed to all available evidence, guided by expert opinion as to what the evidence suggests.

This is true of human history in general, where there is no question of control, repetition, universal laws, or universal agreement. There is evidence, and it should be made available to everyone. But there will always be differences of interpretation, and they will be partly due to differences in the personalities and experiences of the persons doing the interpreting. Some judges are better, more perceptive and discerning, than others. They are the leading historians, and most people will be wise to accept their guidance, even though experts often disagree.

When it comes to the thoughts, feelings, motives, and intentions of others, there is even more room for disagreement. Some are completely hidden from the observers’ view. Many are ambiguous, and, even when the subject says what they are, many questions remain about how to interpret such statements and how much credence to give to them.

We know other people have thoughts and motives, but we have to rely for our knowledge of what they are on behavioral and linguistic clues that are more-or-less revealing and ambiguous. In such cases, the evidence is not always available to everyone or open to public observation, and it is almost always open to variant interpretations.

People often try to express how they see and feel about the world of their experience in art and literature. Literal description is eschewed, and metaphor and imagery are used to evoke in others something of what it feels like to live in the world as the artist does. But what is evoked depends even more upon the observer, who must engage in a personal interaction with the work of the artist in order to understand, in a uniquely personal way, what is being communicated.

We are now far removed from the alleged scientific world of impersonal control and analysis of publicly verifiable facts. The practice of science is not in any case, I have argued, as impersonal and value-free as this may suggest. But science does attempt to investigate a testable world of publicly verifiable facts. The humanities do not. They try to enter, though empathetic feeling, into semantic worlds that express perspectives on human experience, less literally describable or mathematically denumerable, more intensely felt and passionately committed.

These worlds are part of reality, too. They are worlds of thought and feeling, and sometimes they may change the interpretation we have of our own lives, as they present a perspective that makes sense of the complexity of experience in a way that nothing else has done.

Religion may no longer be the “queen of the sciences.” But it may be a bridge between the humane world of empathetic feelings and the scientific world of objective facts. For there may be forms of objectivity that are only accessible through empathetic feeling and passionate commitment. Religious sensibility may be one, even the primary one, of such forms.

Basic Perspectives

Religions offer perspectives on human experience. What seems characteristic of a religious perspective is its placing all things sub specie aternitatis, in the light of eternity, as related to a supreme actually existing Ideal or Value. Is there evidence for such a perspective? There can be no independent evidence for basic perspectives since they are what determines what sorts of evidence we will take seriously.

Statements expressing the basic perspective of science, like “every event has a cause” or “laws of physics are universal” are not based on evidence. Of course, we can say they have been confirmed so far, but their claims go far beyond what we have so far experienced. It is important that they are confirmed in experience. But they function as axioms of faith that make science possible.

Similarly, statements expressing the basic perspective of philosophical naturalism—like “there are no objective moral values,” “all factual statements must be statements of science and can only refer to what is physical,” “it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence,” or “all values are subjective”—are not based on evidence. They express fundamental axioms that determine the way in which we interpret all our experience. For a philosophical naturalist, they are confirmed by the fact that they make possible a no-nonsense, empirically fruitful approach to the world. Sir Francis Crick, for example, has said that his distaste for religion was a prime motive for the work that led to his discovery of the structure of DNA (reported in the Daily Telegraph, March 20, 2003). For him, religion supported theories about a mysterious “life-force” or spiritual basis for biology, an d it was important to find a purely chemical basis for life. His view was confirmed by his discovery, but it was based not on evidence but on “distaste,” or what I have called a basic perspective.

The basic perspective of religion is that there exists an Objective Reality of Supreme Value. One way to construe this is that the value is apprehended and enjoyed in a Supreme Consciousness, which also intends that Value to be realized to some extent in the finite world and especially in finite consciousnesses like those of human beings.

To believe in God is primarily to believe in the objectivity of value and purpose. That view is not based on evidence but is an axiom that makes a life of faith—of seeing all experience in the light of such objective value and purpose—possible. Such a belief is confirmed primarily by the sense it enables people to make of their lives (and will be disconfirmed if it does not do so). It is also confirmed by the greater vitality, happiness, and moral dynamism that it brings to those who accept it.

This is where experience assumes importance. The claim to experience a state or being of supreme wisdom, compassion, and bliss, when made by a person who is wise, compassionate, and blissful and who, with some plausibility, can be seen to be free from hatred, greed, and ignorance, gives experiential confirmation to the hypothesis of the objectivity of value.

Conceptual interpretations of such experiences vary, but that is because different cultures have developed different languages and concepts for expressing their experiences. An important area of convergence exists in claims to experience a reality of wisdom, compassion, and bliss. The divergences are like those found in any area where personal judgment is involved—history, the law, and descriptions of people’s characters. It would be odd if such differences did not exist.

There is no possibility of public verification of religious experiences. But public verification is only possible where there is sensory experience of a common material environment. We cannot publicly verify any statements about feelings, thoughts, motives, and intentions or, in general, any data of personal consciousness. Tests for the authenticity of religious experience lie in consonance with other knowledge, internal coherence, and conformity with the occurrence of similar experiences by others.

The character and conduct of authoritative experients are important. But if they seem not only sane but extraordinarily well balanced, not only rational but extraordinarily perceptive, not only good but extraordinarily compassionate and unselfish, there is reason to give credence to their claims. Where religious beliefs seem to cause moral or psychological harm, we may find that the best explanation for that is to be found not in the religious beliefs but in the antecedent character of those who claim to have them. Of course, there are millions of damaged and unstable human beings, and one would expect many of them to be adherents of some religion. But if the question is about the character of those prophets and teachers who have authoritative and normative religious experiences, most unbiased observers would reckon them to be not evident deluded maniacs but among the wisest and best of humanity.

That is the case for taking religious experience seriously, as evidence for the existence of a Supreme Spiritual Reality. Those I have called “tough-minded scientists” will always be able to discount such evidence because it does not conform to their definition of evidence, as publicly observable and experimentally testable sensory experience. But perhaps we should make a clear distinction between that view—which is really a basic philosophical perspective—and natural science proper.

Natural science has little to say on the issue of the genuineness of religious experience because it is very difficult to devise any strictly controlled scientific tests for religious experiences. In the next chapter, I will return to this subject. In this chapter, I have focused on the question of whether there are limits to the methodology of science, on how the sciences relate to the humanities and social sciences, and on whether there are questions of fact and of reason with which science cannot deal. My argument has been that there are, and that the question of the truth-affirming character of religious experience is one of them. The arguments must be carefully assessed on their merits. My final barbed comment is that, if you do that, you will not be using the methods of any science when you do so.

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