Originally published 7 November 2004
Last week I spent three days in Corvallis, Oregon, as a participant in a gathering celebrating “The Sacred in Nature.” I was invited by two of the conference organizers, philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore and poet Charles Goodrich, friends of nature and writers of exceptional grace.
It has been easy these past four years to become glum about environmental degradation. Certainly, the Bush administration is no friend of nature. It was a reaffirmation of hope, therefore, to be with people who attend to the spirit moving on the face of the waters, the land, the sky.
Christians, Muslims, Jews, Native Americans, agnostics, and atheists came together to affirm that we are bound to each other and to the planet itself by something ineffable and holy. No need to put a name on it: it bids us to compassion and restraint, to stewardship and peace.
These people are my friends and allies in the struggle to create a more just and generous world, environmentalists all, so I knew from past experience to expect a bit of antipathy towards science. I don’t mind; I’m used to the role of science defender.
The antipathy has two sources.
First, science takes the rap for a host of “sins”: genetic modification of organisms, human cloning, animal experimentation, and so on, all perceived to be irredeemably immoral. Second, the basic paradigms of science — that nature is material, mechanistic, mathematical — are seen as the enemy of everything that is organic and sacred.
These views are by no means universal among environmentalists, but they are common enough to deserve respectful comment.
For starters: Science is not a body of knowledge.
Science is a way of knowing, the most effective way yet invented for obtaining reliable knowledge of the world, knowledge that is not hostage to religious or political authority, nor bounded by tradition. Science is not Truth with a capital T, but tentative, evolving knowledge that passes the test of empirical experience.
The proof is in the pudding. If it weren’t for post-Enlightenment empiricism we’d still be burning witches at the stake, dying by the millions of plague, and living in fear of hellfire.
All knowing is metaphorical. If science has made good use of the material and mechanical metaphors, it is because they work. There is nothing taboo about the organic metaphor — so dear to my environmentalist friends — but if that were the only way we had to know the world, we’d still be gathering nuts and berries in the woods.
And please don’t tell me that the materialist, mechanical metaphors dominate our society. Gallup polls make abundantly clear that the overwhelming majority of Americans hold miraculous, animistic views of the world. We are a people who eagerly embrace the health and material benefits of science, while largely rejecting the scientific way of knowing.
And who are those mechanics in white coats, the scientists? They are ordinary people like you and me, embracing the same range of virtues and vices. If society wants to put constraints on scientific research — on the use of experimental animals or embryonic stem cells, for example — it is free to do so. Ethics is not something for which scientists have any particular expertise. Decisions on the application of knowledge should involve the collective wisdom of people from all walks of life.
The poet-farmer Wendell Berry wisely tells us that an explanation is a bucket, not a well. As successful as science has been — and it has been extraordinarily successful — it has barely plumbed the well of mystery.
In the meantime, I like having reliable, empirical knowledge of the world, and I’m willing to use whatever bucket it takes to get it. I like living in the universe of the galaxies and DNA, just as I like living in the world of organic creatures. The more I learn about the world as it is, in all of its depths, complexity and beauty, the more I feel myself to be in the presence of the sacred.
