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“Life? Don’t talk to me about life.”
Marvin the Paranoid Android

‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘ by Douglas Adams

There is so much pressure, these days, to accept the science. We have no need, so we’re told, for faith or belief in anything for which we cannot provide evidence. Reason and the scientific method are all that are needed to explain all we need to understand and overcome anything that might serve to hinder us.

The problem with seeing humanity as homo scientificus is that it is just insufficient. Such a view of humanity simply fails to take into account so much else that goes into making us human. The most rational of us must still sleep and enter a world born of the irrational; the most objective must experience the subjectivity of the emotions; the most mathematical must yet live in a world in which simply fails to add up.

It isn’t that science isn’t up there with the very best of human achievement, just that it should be recognised as one among a pantheon. It may well be that science sits in the place of Zeus on this Olympus of human accomplishments, still it is accompanied by those other fickle-hearted gods of human nature.

It is far more likely, however, that science has no such lofty position but is, rather, the lame and ugly god Hepheastus. It was this god, after all, who fashioned the armour of Achilles and it cannot be denied that science’s most observable results have always been in the art of war and destruction.

It goes without saying that the scientific study of this world in which we live has reaped many rewards and bestowed many benefices upon humanity. Yet it is also the single most significant contributor to what yet may be the end of life on this planet in the shape of climate change. It may be my responsibility to minimise my carbon footprint yet it was science that engineered the fossil fuel guzzling machines that spew the climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere.

Whatever it’s more ardent supporters might claim, the scientific approach to life is no less the product of the very same imagination that placed God in His Heaven and created some of the greatest works of art as temples for His worship. The same pair of eyes can see the world both ways.

It is a refusal or inability to accept this duality in the human psyche that will forever hold full comprehension of what it means to be human beyond our reach.

It is the fact that we spend a good proportion of our time asleep and not conscious – and certainly not objectively rational – that should alert us to the lie of those who would have us believe only the scientific approach is to be appreciated. We just are not such staunchly rational animals. These advocates of the scientific method actively seek to deprive humanity of an essential quality of our nature. And one can easily see why. The more irrational the more uncontrollable, and science is nothing if not a method of control. Every experiment conducted in science has a “control” group. Science is, among other things, nothing less than an attempt to fulfil God’s intention, in creating human beings, that we “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”. (Gen. 1:26-28)

Science, despite its protestations to the contrary, is humanity’s attempt to live up to our having being created in God’s image.

This is not too surprising when one considers that it was the specifically Catholic understanding of God as the Creator of an orderly universe which gave birth to the scientific approach to knowledge acquisition. If the Universe is so ordered it just might be possible to understand its workings – and, in understanding the workings of the Universe, could we not come to a deeper understanding of the workings of Him who so ordered it? Science, like a character from Greek tragedy, seeks to kill its father (God) and have its wicked way with its mother (the natural world) – not unlike Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein.

That the origins of science and its purpose and hubris can all be identified within stories from long ago should begin to aid our understanding of the real source of meaning; one that can incorporate both the rational and the irrational, the objective and the subjective, the dispassionate and the emotional. Before all else, human beings are storytelling animals – even when unconscious, we communicate with ourselves in story form. Journalists refer to a significant event as a great story; religions convey the acts and the will of God through stories; even scientists describe the origin of the universe with a metaphor. Stories are what make us human; describe how to be human; explain why we need to be human. Without story there is no humanity.

The attribute of story which makes it so essential to the success of humanity as a species is the very attribute derided by those who claim only scientific objectivity is worth our investment of time and resources. It is the fact that story doesn’t depend upon factual data in order to convey its meaning, purpose or intent.

While George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ is a great novel, one of the truly great realist novels of the nineteenth century, it is evidently not as popular as any of Jane Austen’s romances. We can see this just by looking at the number of times Austen has been adapted for the screen (big or small) compared to Eliot.

While Eliot inserts a love story at the heart of her novel, there is so much else, not least it’s ‘didactic realism’. The novel bears the subtitle ‘A Study of Provincial Life’, making it a sort of fictionalised sociology which probably goes a long way towards explaining why it suffers in the popularity stakes as compared to an ‘Emma’ or ‘Pride and Prejudice’ – as well as its daunting length.

Of course, we shouldn’t lose track of the obvious fact that Eliot’s novel is a work of fiction, however much it might disguise its identity in its studious aspect. But, even as a fictional monument to the achievements of the human imagination, ‘Middlemarch’ remains one of those novels we’re often told we should read but probably never will. It likely rests right alongside Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ on many a bookshelf.

Jane Austen’s six major novels remain ever popular with, notably, ‘Northanger Abbey’ most likely to occupy bottom place in most reader’s ordering. Of all her novels, ‘Northanger Abbey’ is the one that comes closest to the style Eliot would later perfect. ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Emma’ would seem to be the most popular if we adopt the book-to-screen test. Austen remains popular, even if more so in the cinema than the library, because she tells such good stories. Of course there is much by way of social comment that can be gleaned from an Austen novel, but, unlike Eliot, she doesn’t overshadow the romance with details of real life. There is an escapist quality to Austen’s stories. This is precisely what makes these early nineteenth century novels such good screen material.

It is also this escapist quality that science can never provide. There may be many a wonder in the universe that only science can show us; there may be great beauty in unweaving a rainbow; there may be endless possibilities in the quantum realm; there will never be that purely subjective emotionality that is able to make us laugh and cry at the very same time, that connects us with another human being (even if that other is entirely fictional), that makes us feel real. For human beings, reality is fiction and fiction is reality. And no amount of unweaving will ever change this simple truth.