Letter From a Scientist to a Priest

DEAR—,
It was a real joy to see you after so long a time, a real pleasure to enliven the ghosts of our boyhood experiences. But I cannot pretend that your visit was not also a shock. Imagine my surprise when, after years of thinking of you as a successful young architect, I saw you approaching my house in the dark habit of the seminary. You said the beauty of old churches had inspired in you the desire to seek its spiritual source; that you had decided to become a Catholic priest; that perhaps some day you might find courage to join one of the more severe monastic orders. You talked, and about your eyes was a strange light I had never seen there before. Whatever had entered you had obviously taken full possession.
There must have been a shock in that meeting for you, too, for when our talk swerved away from mutual memories it was clear that the destiny which had allowed the friendship of our youth to survive had forbidden that we understand each other as men. I think we can agree at least in this: that the attitudes toward life engendered in me by science and in you by religion are utterly irreconcilable. Of course there are those who argue that science and religion are not necessarily opposed, but they are generally the leaders of cults who love leadership too much to endanger it for the sake of intellectual honesty. We lesser ones may indulge in the luxury of disregarding appearances. Any fool who had heard us would have known from what opposite poles we look out upon life, and what different sights we see. It is enough to give pause to both of us when we think of a world whose essential verities, if they exist at all, are so obscure that one man should grope for them in scholastic philosophy and the other in science.
I have not forgotten how I was moved when, as a boy, you took me to listen to that fine old archbishop, thundering from the brink of the grave his defiance of death. Indeed, I can still admire him for the staunchness of his simplicity. I can even envy a man whose faith is strong and irrational enough to make him believe at eighty what he was told to believe at eight. Such a man is superior to life, superior to all the miserable tricks it plays on those of weaker fibre. Alas, I am one of the weaklings. My faith in the archbishop’s certainties long since volatilized in the crucible of science. Only a thin dry film of hope remains.
Naturally enough, I should like to believe that the spirit of the archbishop is even now triumphant, that it does not lie cold and still with his bones beneath the cathedral floor. You believe this and other satisfying things about human life and death. I want to know how you can; I want you to show me how I can. You told me that in Thomas Aquinas you had found the perfect philosophy. You tried to explain it to me and thereby restore my faith, but I could not understand. You strung such abstractions as ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘substance’ in logical sequences which for you embody the ultimate truth. When I detected presumption in your premises, you bombarded me with more abstractions and logic. But you failed to give me the observable facts which a scientist must have before he can begin to think. The evening passed before we could even shape a working vocabulary.
The books you sent fell as seeds upon the same poor ground. I could see in them only the clever rationalization of prejudice. Perhaps you were right when you said that I have no capacity for philosophy. I have certainly been a long time traveling on the slow nag of induction without arriving anywhere in particular; too long, I fear, to be comfortable on the swift wings of your mighty generalizations.
One rather surprising truth has come clear to me since the evening of our talk. You and your brothers of the Church live in a world which for you has lost its mystery. Your philosophy explains everything. We of the laboratories live in a world which for us is essentially dark, and which we try to illumine here and there with a thin ray of light. When you churchmen face the less pleasant exigencies of life, you do so with a spiritual strength that we scientists lack. You always think you know what should be done in any emergency; you always grasp life with a firm hand. Since you never doubt that you are right, even your blunders become successes and leave you in exalted peace.
Unfortunately, your Divinity is a little too rough for the scientific digestion. He is continually violating his own most cherished laws to work a miracle for some good but unfortunate soul. A scientist might accept such inconsistency in a man, but he prefers a higher reliability in his god. Yet I, personally, am not willing, as I am sure you know, to dispatch either your God or you with easy derision. Your philosophy, whatever its faults, has given you the best defense against life I have ever seen. I want some such defense for myself. I want to escape the pessimistic reflections that so readily come to a scientist when he stops investigating and begins thinking about the world.
How can I escape, for example, the belief that Pascal expressed only part of the truth when he said that most of the evils of life arise from man’s inability to sit still in a room? It seems to me that most of the good rises there, too; that, in fact, the inability to sit still is life itself. It seems the source, not only of what men choose to call good and evil, but of all the varied activities of those lesser ones of creation whom we do not ordinarily favor with moralistic phraseology. Every leaf that turns to the light, every salmon rising from the sea to spawn, exemplifies it; even the waves of the sea and the atoms of each wave writhe in the same turmoil. Every day, in the materials with which I work, and in myself, I see restlessness. For me, it is the essence of the universe. But I should like to believe that restlessness is not all.
A world in the throes of St. Vitus’s dance may be amusing to a whimsical god, and at the same time not particularly irksome to most of the dancers if they know not and care not what they do. But for me, with the curse of self-consciousness on my head, the gyrations of existence grow sometimes distressingly wearisome. But as a human being I am enough of an angel to realize that I am too much of an animal ever to escape the fundamental compulsions of an animal’s life — the everlasting drive to eat, to avoid being eaten, and to reproduce. I know that I cannot be forever successful even in this; that I must pay for failure, if not with immediate physical death as do the animals, then with the crueler lingering death of disillusion and regret. Eventually there will be physical death, too; my body will enter a new cycle of activity with me left out. I am fond of myself, and I wish that my ego as well as my bones might have a future. But nowhere in science can I find consolation.
Life described in such terms is not acceptable to you, and indeed there are many not of your faith who would reject such a view, however inevitable it may seem to a scientist. No matter how painful life may be, few lose their love of it, and consequently their desire to explain away its futilities. But there are others who are moved by the explanations only to pity; who admit no sadder spectacle on earth than the vociferous glorification of the Creator by a churchful of devout and defeated people. Both the air-tight finality of theologians and the plaintive bleating of their flocks suggest that even religious people are not quite sure that life has been justly, intelligently, and purposively conceived.
I should not be writing now if I were one of those who can feel only pity for religious people. I must admit that my feeling is closer to envy, especially for such a religionist as you yourself. Apparently you have found some magic formula whereby you can believe — or nearly believe — the pleasant things you whisper into your own ear. I am just as fearful of the dark as you are. I too should like to be able to cry down life’s ironies with beatitudes, to solve death’s enigmas with sophistries. You have told me to hope and pray that God will give me a glimpse of the marvelous beauty in the plan of creation. You beg me not to be blind to it. But it is useless to advise one to pray who has lost his belief in the efficacy of prayer, useless to tell a blind man with no faith in miracles to see.
As a scientist, I should like to suggest a problem which seems worthy of your effort. There are others who feel as I do. If there is any fundamental beauty beyond the tragic beauty of universal futility, or any hope but the blind hope of the wishful ego, we should like to know it. And if there is no true beauty or hope in the world, we should like to understand the technique of convincing ourselves that there is. We have lost our capacity for deluding ourselves, but, being human, we are willing to try to regain it. Our minds and our hearts are open, but you will have to develop a new method to reach them. The old syllogisms, the old platitudes, will not work.
Until the Church can devise a new method, I suppose there is nothing for a scientist to do but work as happily as may be for the little facts and the small, tangible comforts of this world, trying the while to keep busy enough to forget the uncertainties of the next.