Integrity in Science

Cherie Harder

Human experience is larger than science can describe

Science and its role are in the news yet again with the recent directives by President Obama on stem cell research. He spoke about the need for scientific research and science policy to be freed from “ideology”—a provocative claim which was eloquently addressed by Yuval Levin in a Washington Post op-ed entitled “Science Over All?”

Behind the immediate policy question is a larger concern that flows from the triumph of the scientific method over other considerations, no matter how serious their claims. As many people have noted over the past century, science’s undisputed success in areas like medicine has encouraged people to extend its analytical approach to other spheres as well, notably the inescapably messy areas of culture, history, faith, and the ways we understand ourselves as human beings. Some have gone so far to declare that scientific method should trump all others, and hold authority over the “ideological” spheres of politics, philosophy, and theology. The end result is a vanquishing of the humanities and a disregard of the truths they offer on what it means to be human.

But the dream for a science free from ideology is an illusion—in fact, it is itself an ideology. As the late agnostic Neil Postman explains in his 1992 classic, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, such a dream is better called Scientism:

It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world.

Scientism is all of these, but something profoundly more. It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called “science” can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like “What is life, and when, and why?” “Why is death, and suffering?” “What is right and wrong to do?”

What is more, human experience is larger than science can describe, and there are consequences when we try to so restrict our self-understanding. The novelist Robert Musil offers a fascinating articulation of this truth in his unfinished work, The Man Without Qualities, written before World War II, which we feature in our curriculum on character, When No One Sees. In this excerpt (posted here), Musil’s characters Walter and Clarisse are discussing Walter’s childhood friend Ulrich, and come to the realization that the highly analytical Ulrich has become a “man without qualities”—and so, Walter declares, hardly human at all.

You will see that even Clarisse, who is sympathetic with Ulrich, recognizes that once you have analyzed the human body down to its component atoms and systems, you are still left with fundamental questions of identity and purpose.

No one will dispute the need for scientists to operate with integrity and to follow the results of their evidence. But integrity in science should be matched by concern for integrity of the human person and of human experience—which includes a recognition of the limits of the scientific, technological approach to life. Walter reminds us of some of what science leaves out. Human life has for millennia involved more than analysis. It includes enjoyment, beauty, gratitude, community, place—and wonder.

Does Walter’s defense of the human heart go far enough? Too far? However you decide, it seems clear that holding on to all these elements of our humanity is all the more essential in our increasingly technocratic society.  

Cherie Harder is President of the Trinity Forum.

Features, Being Human, Faiths and Worldviews, Science and Technology, Fri 13 Mar 2009