Alister McGrath - Richard Dawkins, C.S. Lewis and the Meaning of Life

Sir Peter Medawar (191587), a leading British biologist who championed the public engagement of science, highlighted the importance of transcendence in the human quest for meaning. We long to see ourselves as part of a bigger picture that stretches beyond our immediate needs and concerns. Science is part of that picture but only part: Only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on. Human beings seem to be driven to find something deeper than what can be found through an examination of the empirical world. Thats what the human quest for meaning is all about.

Other voices could easily be brought into this conversation. One of the most interesting is that of Albert Einstein, who held that questions of personal meaning and ethical values are beyond the scope of the natural sciences:

... the scientific method can teach us nothing beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other... knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be . One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is , and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.

Both the identity of that goal and the motivation to reach it must come from another source. Einstein was not an orthodox religious believer but was acutely aware of the need to have a deeper vision of reality than that disclosed by the natural sciences. A similar thought was expressed by the Cambridge physicist Alexander Wood, who highlighted the capacity of a religious world view to disclose the intelligibility and coherence of our existence: This is our first demand of religion that it should illumine life and make it a whole.

Its understandable that so many should focus on the question of what is distinctive about human nature, and try to express this scientifically. Yet this sometimes leads us to overlook questions about what human beings seem to need if they are to function properly. What does it mean to be human? Why is there evil and suffering? How do I find truth? What is a good life and how do I lead it? These can be treated as if they are scientific questions, but theyre not. At heart theyre existential questions. Although they may find philosophical answers, they are most naturally framed in terms of religion.

Lets look at a personal history that highlights some of these points. Paul Kalanithi (19772015) was a promising neurosurgeon who died of metastatic lung cancer at the age of 37, before he could ever practise as a fully qualified surgeon. Once he knew he was dying, Kalanithi reflected long and hard on the meaning of life, the importance of the practice of medicine and the place of science in human culture. His bestselling book, When Breath Becomes Air , was written during his final illness and published posthumously.

Kalanithi loved science but found that it failed to engage with some of the questions that both really mattered to him and increased in importance as his illness progressed:

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Literature, however, illuminated experience, providing a way of confronting the messiness and weight of real human life.

Now Kalanithi may not be representative, although the huge impact of his book suggests that his personal story and the ideas that emerged from it resonate with many people. Science, he argues, is not really about explanation but about reducing phenomena into manageable units. By its very nature it cannot engage with the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective. Theres nothing wrong with science; its simply that its answers are important in some areas of life but not in others. To deal with the complexity of life we need more than science.