The notion that life is an exciting and perilous journey is more than a common metaphor we use to share life’s experiences. We are born into a world teeming with life that existed many ages before we arrived and we know intrinsically that life will thrive ages after we depart this world. As we grow older, we search for the transcendent to make sense out of our short time on earth. Most of us are born into traditions that seek some meaning in a spiritual realm, beyond what we can experience with our five senses. Others of us search for meaning in our present existence and choose not to focus attention on the spiritual realm or on notions of eternity. 

 

However noble our own traditions may be, whether religious or not, we soon recognize there is a longing within us that reaches out for experience and meaning in another reality that earthly traditions and achievements can never satisfy. We want to touch the transcendent and ultimately, whether we realize it or not, we seek to touch the heart of God.

 

If you were born in the twentieth century, you most likely were born into a cultural environment in which modernism is the fundamental philosophical approach to life. This is especially true if you grew up in a western nation like the United States. There are many excellent books written on modernism, but since this term is unfamiliar to some, let me briefly summarize its characteristics. 

 

Modernism privileges science as the most credible epistemology, that is, as the most reliable means of knowing what is true or real or factual. Modernism assumes that if scientists say it’s so, then it must be so. In modernistic societies, only that which can be demonstrated through the scientific method – observation, measurement, control, prediction, falsifiability, objectivity or inter-subjectivity, testability, and replication – becomes the basis of knowledge. Subsequently, everything else, including the realms of philosophy, theology, and religious faith, are considered to be a deficient or less-valued source of knowledge. Thus, science trumps everything in modern society.

 

Some scholars refer to this prevailing paradigm or approach to life that privileges man’s intellect and reason as secular humanism, which I define as living according to the overarching belief that “the end of all being is the happiness of man.”

 

As a trained environmental scientist and practicing social scientist, I am very familiar with the scientific method and make a living using this method to analyze media effects. I have conducted social scientific research in more than 30 countries and have presented or published more than a hundred social scientific studies in the past twenty years. I greatly value and respect the role of science and its amazing contributions to mankind and to our knowledge of human communication.

 

Nevertheless, science is only one way of knowing, and it is limited in the kinds of knowledge it can produce. Science cannot tell us how the world was created because the beginning of the world is not replicable, testable or observable. Science cannot tell us why we have a human conscience that provides an inner law which tells us, irrespective of our social and cultural environment, what is right and wrong. Science cannot explain the amazing acts of courage, grace and forgiveness of individuals who have suffered great hardships and abuse. For example, consider how a famous Dutch citizen, Corrie Ten Boom, could forgive the German concentration camp officer who killed members of her family as powerfully portrayed in the film, The Hiding Place. Ms. Ten Boom’s actions cannot be explained scientifically.

 

Several years ago I walked into Nelson Mandela’s small cell on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. Consider how Mandela and thousands of others who followed his example were able to not only forgive those responsible for his imprisonment, but also work with the government that took away his freedom for opposing Apartheid to create a new South Africa. Science cannot adequately explain how anyone can live out Christ’s admonition, as Mandela did, to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

 

Science cannot adequately explain the feelings we experience when we see the beauty of a sunrise and the tranquility of a sunset; or when we hear music and singing that makes us tear up. Science cannot explain the transcendence of an Academy-Award-winning film, the majesty of a great orchestra, the magnificence of a great athletic feat, the grace of a gifted dancer, the visual aura of a masterpiece painting or work of art, or the peacefulness of calm ocean waves rolling onto the seashore. The magnificence of our planet, even though we have scarred, abused, and polluted it, lifts us to a place of transcendence and points us to God, whether saint or sinner, atheist or believer.

 

You may wonder what I mean when I write of transcendence. In the 7-time Academy-Award-nominated film, Shawshank Redemption, the main character in the film, Andy -  a man unjustly put in prison for the murder of his wife - locks himself into the guard room that controls the sound system throughout the prison camp. With the guards pounding on the door, Andy plays a record over the sound system of two female opera singers with exquisite voices. As their singing of Mozart reverberates through the prison camp, everyone stops working and moving, transfixed and enraptured by a sound so beautiful it takes them emotionally and spiritually beyond the confines of the ugly walls in which they suffer. That is a picture of transcendence – it involves the realm of the soul and spirit that goes beyond our five senses and beyond what we can observe, measure, predict, and reproduce.

 

I have never met a person who has not experienced one or more moments of transcendence. Recently my oldest sister sent me the BBC DVD video series Planet Earth, an award-winning production that took five years to produce, requiring 2000 days of film shooting in 200 different locations with 40 camera operators. If you need to experience moments of transcendence, I highly recommend that you watch the series on a wide-screen HD television. Science cannot explain what you will experience nor can it account for what you will see. The majestic beauty of our planet is still breathtaking.

 

We have so much to thank scientists for, but science is only one way of knowing our lives and our world. There are many other ways of knowing what is real and true, and they should not be less valued or considered less credible than that which can be demonstrated through the scientific method. When we try to use science to explain the origin of creation, the meaning of life, the purpose of our lives on earth, or what happens to us after we die, we are misusing science and forcing scientists to explain what they are not equipped to explain. We will ultimately end up with theories that take more faith to believe than the common philosophical and theological explanations for these questions about life and purpose. The “big bang theory” (an explosion turned chaos into an ordered universe) or “theory of spontaneous generation” (all life evolved from a non-living chemical soup) are more ludicrous than any creation story I’ve heard that has been passed down generation to generation in almost every culture.

 

Paul of Tarsus, the writer of the letter to the Romans in the first century, summarized man’s misuse of science when he stated that those who ignore the transcendence of creation create the most foolish explanations for our existence. When we begin to uphold science as the arbitrator of all truth we become like the king who paraded before the people with no clothes on.

 

There have been many scholars who have shouted: “the king has no clothes” when it comes to the overreaching domain of science. I require all my doctoral students to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn helps us to understand science with humility and to recognize its limitations. Science provides one way of telling a story, one way of making an argument, one way of seeing the world, but not the only way or the most credible way. Science is as much a human endeavor as is philosophy or theology; and human beings, the creators of scientific knowledge, are subjective, emotional, temperamental, and fallible. We can be way off in our scientific explanations and understanding. Science is created, lives, and changes within a deeply social and cultural context that provides only one dimension of the massive web of meaning in our lives.

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