Her loss of faith is a familiar story. As writer Margaret Wheeler Johnson explains it, the personal integrity that religion instilled in her “made it impossible to maintain faith” in religion. A while back, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla made a similar disclosure; namely, the truth that led him to faith was the very thing that led him “out of faith.”
What Johnson and Lilla don’t realize is that they don’t lose their faith; they merely shift it from one object to another. For many folks like them, that object is science.
No doubt, scientific discovery has led to breathtaking technological achievements over the last century. However, our technological successes have given us the false impression that we know more than we do. Science, for all of its utility in our manipulation of nature, has not resulted in a commensurate understanding of nature. We are like a car owner who believes he knows how cars works, because when he turns the ignition key and presses the gas pedal, his car moves. And while the physics of auto mechanics could be learned, a comprehensive understanding of nature is unlikely, if not impossible.
That’s because only 4 percent of the universe is made up of things that we can see, probe and measure. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy that remain hidden from our investigative tools. What’s more, what we know about that accessible “4 percent” is precious little.
For example, we “know” that matter is made up of atoms consisting of elementary particles which are (take your pick): localized excitations in the quantum field or Planck-sized “strings” or “membranes” whose “vibration patterns” produce the qualities of mass. Either way, the inescapable conclusion is that there is no “there” there – at least, any “there” we could recognize as such.