I. Introduction

A. Contemporary revival of natural theology

With his political gift for speaking directly to the center of his conservative constituency, President Reagan informed Congress and the nation, in his recent State of the Union Address, that some physicists are finding God in the atom. He marshaled in a brief hour's talk the reassuring vision of progress in America, with science like some prodigal son returning home, reaffirming traditional American values.

We cannot dismiss the President's evocation of the nuclear god as merely optimistic misinformation, for Ronald Reagan's remark reflects the resurgent popularity and respectability of natural theology in the United States. For two decades, popular publications have broadcast the news to the lay public that physics was on the verge of pointing to, if not proving, the existence of a supernatural deity. What has stimulated this new movement of popularization has been the replacement of steady-state cosmology by a “Big Bang” cosmology based on General Relativity and quantum mechanics. From 1946 to 1965, Western astronomers debated, and certainly many accepted, in order to explain the observed structure and expansion of the cosmos, the idea that matter spontaneously and continuously comes into existence. Arno Penzias's and Robert Wilson's discovery in 1965 of the cosmic microwave radiation, however, seemed to evidence of a primeval cosmic explosion, the “Big Bang” that originated our physical universe and time and space.

Scientific popularizers have since then teased the public into believing that it is scientifically sensible to link age-old theological questions to the Big Bang Theory. One writing team hint that the symmetries and asymmetries of a quantum-driven cosmology are “similar” to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceptualization of natural law and miracles. [1] Another writer, a physicist, addressing a technical audience, finds “reinforcement for the traditional teaching that God created the Universe,” from the discovery that the laws of physics permit some physical universes to exist but not others. [2]

If physics has found evidence permitting scientists to say, within the rationality of contemporary science, that they can point to God, then contemporary physics has, indeed, returned as a prodigal son to a former cultural role. For hundreds of years, in the history of the West, natural science served to reinforce the West's most fundamental assumptions about God and God's relationship to the Universe. And not only God's relationship to the Universe, but also God's relationship to Man. [3]

But has contemporary physics and cosmology delivered science back to this older, historical, cultural role as handservant to theology? This is the question that I will examine in this lecture.

I will examine this question by looking at the framework of Platonic Idealism within which Western theology approached the subject of knowing about God, and then examine the major scientific developments of the past century and a half to show their impact on those assumptions. The scientific developments that I will examine are, of course, Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, for we all are supposed to know the impact that Darwin had on natural theology, but I will also look at Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and Classical Quantum Mechanics as elaborated by Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg.

The thesis I will argue is that all three great theories--natural selection, relativity, and classical quantum mechanics--did not make possible a new natural theology and that they did deny, and continue to deny, the central assumptions of Newtonian natural theology and, consequently, the capability of Newtonian natural theology to support religious doctrines of meaning.

II. Platonic Idealism

A. Socrates' Death Scene

The long history of Western Idealism opened shortly after the death of Socrates in the independent city of Athens in 399 BC and closed over 2200 years later after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the imperial capital of London in 1859. Hellenistic Idealism fundamentally shaped the theology of Christianity and provided the central focus of the West's religious quest. The division of the universe into spirit and matter, the existence of intelligent purpose behind the material world, the existence of an individual spiritual soul and its life after death, the reason for the existence of personal death at all, and the meaning of the individual life: these monumental questions preoccupied Socrates in his last meditations upon philosophy, just as they occupied Charles Darwin in his earliest mediations upon nature.

Plato's account of Socrates' death in the Phaedo announced in evocative dialogue the central doctrines of Greek Idealism, that would guide Christian theology and Western science through the centuries to the generation of Darwin. Plato's vocabulary of Idealism is still recognizable today.

Socrates is conversing with Cebes, and Socrates opens the dialogue

And to which class is the soul more nearly alike and akin, as far as may be inferred from this argument, as well as from the preceding one?

I think. Socrates, that, in the opinion of every one who follows the argument, the soul will be infinitely more like the unchangeable--even the most stupid person will not deny that.

And the body is more like the changing?

Yes.

Yet once more consider the matter in another light: When the soul and the body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. Now, which of these two functions is akin to the divine? And which to the mortal? Does not the divine appear to you to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal to be that which is subject and servant?

True.

And which does the soul resemble?

The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal--there can be no doubt of that. Socrates.

Then reflect, Cebes: of all which has been said is not this the conclusion?--that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and that the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual. and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. Can this, my dear Cebes, be denied?

It cannot. [4]

B. Purpose of Platonic Death

Within this Platonic framework, death is not an accidental or meaningless termination of life. Death is the consummation of life, bringing liberation of the immortal soul, freeing it from the corporeal body to ascend to complete knowledge of the divine and rational world of the Ideals. In the Platonic doctrine, death is not a terrible event to be feared, but the beginning of new stage of the Soul's passage back to the Divine to be prepared for and welcomed.

Finally, death is the purpose of life: life is lived toward death, with each person trying to free the soul of as much concern with the sensory and material world as possible, trying to purify it and hence quicken its journey in the afterlife to join the company of the Gods whose knowledge is the perfect knowledge of truth and beauty. Here is how Plato put the matter:

Each pleasure and pain [of the body during its life] is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body. until she [i.e., the soul] becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure [from the body at the time of death] to the world [Hades] below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple.

And this ... is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave [in order that their souls at death may be pure and free to ascend to the contemplation of divinity]…

[The soul of a philosopher] will not ask philosophy to release her[self] in order that when released she may deliver herself up again to the thralldom of pleasure and pains, doing a work only to be outdone again, weaving instead of unraveling here Penelope's web. But she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine (which is not a matter of opinion), and thence deriving nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death she hopes to go to her own kindred and to that which is like her, and to be freed from human ills. Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing. [5]

C. Platonic Idealism

Although Plato expressed his philosophical doctrines throughout his many writings, his account of Socrates' death captured the imagination of the West and became a familiar literary classic. We can discern the chief themes of Idealism in its imagery.

Plato informed his audience that the universe was comprised of two parts, the forms and the exemplars. The world of the forms or ideals was immaterial and rational, the world of the exemplars was the familiar material world of which our senses give us knowledge. The ideals were fixed and unchanging (“fixed” being a favorite adjective of Plato in the Republic to describe ideals); the material world continually changed. This is Plato's doctrine of “dualism” familiar to all educated persons.

This doctrine of dualism frames Plato's other doctrines of the soul, the purpose of life, the meaning of death, and the role of knowledge. it is from the soul's knowledge of ideals that the personal immortality of the soul is inferred by Socrates in the Phaedo. Here is how Plato reasoned. The soul has knowledge of perfection, such as knowledge of geometrically perfect circles. Since no such perfection exists in the material world, then the soul could not have obtained this knowledge from studying nature. Rather, when the soul learns, for example, about perfect circles from studying astronomical motions of stars, it is simply remembering or recollecting knowledge of perfection. If the soul could not have obtained knowledge of perfection from within human life, what is it remembering? It must be remembering knowledge obtained from prior to entering human life. The soul therefore existed prior to the biological life of the individual person. And through further inference, Socrates and Plato reason that the soul, having lived before an individual human life, must continue to exist after the death of the individual human life.

These are familiar doctrines in the Christian intellectual heritage of our culture. These doctrines are also part, if a somewhat less familiar part, of the scientific heritage of the West. Seventeenth century science, from the sixteenth century through the Newtonian synthesis at the end of the seventeenth century, served as handservant to much--if not all--of the message of Platonic Idealism. Science from Copernicus to Newton was the search for the perfect forms or laws, and so strengthened the Platonic and Christian doctrines of death and the meaning of life. [6]

III. Nature Is Without Purpose

A. Darwin's Scene of Death

In contrast to Plato's poetry, here is the charged intensity of the Mathusian vocabulary with which Darwin in the Origin of Species telegraphed to a new world a starkly different doctrine of law of nature and reason for death, natural selection:

Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage. however slight, over others, would have the best change of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the lease degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. [7]

Darwin's scientific theory, indeed, his largest vision of science, self-consciously denied Classical Idealism. For Plato. the existence of ordered, rational, and purposive Ideals was the source of the doctrines of dualism, death, life, and the pursuit of knowledge for Darwin, the existence of randomness or accidentalness was the deliberate undoing of Plato's doctrines. In one stroke, Darwin chopped the new world of the nineteenth century away from the West's classical heritage of Idealism.

B. Randomness in Darwinism

In examining this passage from The Origin, I would like to point to the phrasing of the origin of variation as particularly full of meaning for Western concepts of death. Darwin wrote that favorable variations “should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations.” What he did not mean by the word “sometimes” is clear: he did not mean that variations arise without material causation, or outside of natural law. He did mean that, from the perspective of the individual biological organism and from the perspective of the direction of evolution. the appearance of the favorable structural variation enabling survival was merely a matter of chance, or random. The appearance of favorable variation is not purposeful, is unanalyzable from a framework of intentionality or design. Here Darwin destroyed the teleology that had guided Western biology since Plato.

The necessity of death existed only, in Darwin's theory, in the inexorable working of natural selection. An unfavorable variation having been given by chance to an individual, that individual must die. The result is that the favored individual reproduces, and its line of progeny become better fitted to the environment.

C. Darwinian Theory of Death

A few biologists soon noticed that there was a peculiar implication lurking inside the Darwinian theory of death. If death was necessary so that Natural Selection could work, perhaps death was itself not an essential accompaniment of life. Could not death have been an accidental, but favorable, variation selected naturally, just as any other favorable variation appearing in the reproductive chain? This possibility occurred to a number of daring Darwinians, whose speculations provide a minor theme in the history of Darwinian evolutionary theory from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s.

The first biologist to provide a Darwinian theory of death was August Weismann, a German biologist who was one of the strongest supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution and of natural selection. in an address of 1881, Weismann proposed that death did not arise in evolutionary history until the appearance of multi-cellular organisms and sexual reproduction. Undoubtedly. the first microbic cellular organisms did not reproduce sexually, but reproduced by simple fission, that is, by simple replication of their genetic material to offspring that would be genetically identical to themselves. The chance appearance of sexual methods of reproduction would vastly increase the capacity of a line of organisms to adapt to a changing environment. Variation is introduced by the reproductive process itself, through recombination of genes, when reproduction is by sexually differentiated organisms. [8]

Adaptation and survival of a line of reproduction is made more probable still, when those offspring resulting from sexual reproduction are destroyed by selection, who are ill-adapted to an environment or who would produce fewer offspring. Their removal from the reproductive peal raises the probability that favorable variations will find reproduction. Putting the matter differently, death of the individual from random causes is “of the most trifling importance,” to quote Ronald Fisher in 1929, in maintaining the variance of a population in comparison to the power of natural selection's suppression of the unfavorable variation. [9]

From the natural selection point of view, therefore, according to Weismann. death of the biological reproducing individual did not appear contemporaneously with life or replication. Death of the individual appeared subsequently to sexual reproduction, and appeared at that time accidentally. As soon as a reproductive line whose maladapted individuals died, was selected over a reproductive line whose maladapted individuals did not die, death of the individual became a concomitant feature of the adaptive process of sexually reproducing species.

Weismann suggested that a further adaptive advantage, regarding death, occurred when the death of the individual organism became a result of internal biochemical processes that came into play when the reproductive cycle had been completed. This internally sponsored death, or “natural death,” would remove individuals from the reproductive pool more rapidly than waiting for external circumstances or accident to remove them. Weismann pointed to the stage at which unicellular organisms evolved to multicellular organisms as that moment in evolutionary history when this set of coincidences fastened death upon the phenomena of life. [10]

Weismann's natural selection theory of “death” was loudly rejected by many scientists, one of whom (Raymond Pearl) later denounced it . [11] It was perverse, not because it made the origin of death accidental, but because it made necessary the continuance of death as a phenomenon of life. Far more popular among biologists was the notion that, although death may have appeared accidentally in the history of evolution, its persistence is also accidental. Indeed, by the 1920s, some biologists were confidently asserting that “death” was merely the result of the difficulty among multicellular organisms of maintaining the integration of the cells working against all adversity. Death was, therefore, even for sexually reproducing multicellular organisms, accidental. [12]

Accidental death was an inherently optimistic line of theory, for it asserted that there was no theoretical limit to the ability of science to delay the death of the individual organism. Increasing scientific knowledge should produce techniques for biochemical repair of cells and for protection of the organism against external agencies of disease and injury. This hope was buttressed by the optimistic interpretation of certain biochemical experiments. By the early 1920s, biologists had successfully kept cultures of unicellular organisms, e.g., paramecium, alive without genetic reorganization and without natural death for 600 to 800 generations (by fission). [13] In this sense, immortality of the biological individual was theoretically possible.

In Weismann's theory, on the other hand, immortality of the biological individual was not theoretically possible. If an individual organism managed to live a very long time after its reproductive cycle was completed, this would so interfere with the process of selection that the species' adaptation would slow down, if not cease. Slowing the species' adaptation might imperil the species' existence completely.

D. Death in the Synthetic Theory of Evolution

No doubt, this debate over the theory of death seems antiquated to us now. By the late 1930s, biologists had largely abandoned the issues that debate raised. Why? Because the focus of evolutionary theory shifted after 1929. In the following dozen years, the theory of evolution and the concept of natural selection were recast in terms of statistical genetic theory. Although natural selection acted upon individuals, it was the heritable genetic variance, as carried by the population of interbreeding individuals and maintained by selection, that was of interest to the evolutionary theorist. Within a decade, evolutionary disputation about the theory of death shifted from the death of the individual organism to mortality rates in the population. The terms of the older debate about individual death were abandoned. [14]

The shift to a genetic theory of natural selection not only shifted interest away from the kind of questions Weismann asked, but the new form of statistical analysis also changed the answers given. For instance, in his 1929 classic monograph on selection, Ronald Fisher made a point of demonstrating that longevity of life following the end of the reproductive cycle was far less a selective factor in adaptation than death of individuals before and during the reproductive years. [15] From the statistical point of view, the existence of mortality was less important in evolutionary theory than the age structure of mortality in a reproducing population. [16]

Finally, the synthetic theory of evolution brought back the fundamental theoretical position of Darwin's concept of accidental variation. Years of statistical analysis of mutations served, by the late 1930s, to demonstrate that the mutations of the genetic material were random with respect to the direction of evolution. Selection determined the direction of evolution through the preservation or suppression of mutations. Mutation rates were too low to drive evolution by themselves. [17]

IV. The Universe Is Not Mind

A. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity

After Darwin, the next great blow to the Western tradition of Greek Idealism by natural science was delivered by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. The Special Theory destroyed the concept of absolute simultaneity, which had been a central assumption of Newtonian physics. Destruction of absolute simultaneity had wide cultural significance, beyond the profound revisions it made in physical theory, because simultaneity is a central feature of conscious experience. Einstein's restriction of the concept of simultaneity therefore required revision of philosophical treatment of ordinary experience. [18]

In the normal person, consciousness has a unitary quality, which each of us, on a daily basis, undoubtedly takes for granted. In a profound train of epistemological reasoning, Einstein demonstrated that this unitary quality to consciousness is, however, the product of the rapidity of the physiological processes of the human sensory system and brain compared to the slower pace of biological events in the Darwinian environment. We naturally assume that the physical universe shares this unitary quality of our consciousness. When we experiment with the physical processes of the universe on cosmic scale and at velocities close to that of light, however, Einstein said, we discover this unitary quality of consciousness is not shared by the physical universe. From the perspective of Einsteinian relativity, human consciousness has a unitary quality because the physiological processes are slow compared to the speed of light, although rapid biologically. [19]

No doubt this analysis seems abstract. It would take an involved discussion of Einstein's work to demonstrate this analysis to you, but we can get an idea of what Einstein meant quickly in the following way. Certainly we would all agree that the conscious experience of each of us occurs at the identical moment, the sole “now.” It would seem bizarre if I were to say, “part of my experience is happening now, and part of my experience is happening then.” So it should seem bizarre to us that Einstein's Special Relativity means that there is no single “now” shared by the entire universe; put differently, there is no perspective of a single consciousness for the entire universe. All simultaneities are local. [20]

Having shattered the Newtonian unity of the physical universe, Einstein revealed at once what philosophical assumptions Newton had hidden, two hundred years earlier, in his physics. Newton's physical universe had the unitary features of a consciousness, because Newton believed the universe was, as if it were, so he guardedly put it, God Himself. Space was as if it were God's sensorium and gravity was as if it were God's active willing. By contrast, in the Special Theory, Einstein's physical universe was the conception of a man who was an atheist at heart, who did not approach the analysis of the physical universe in the belief that he would discover the features of a deity's mind.

The epistemological conclusion to be drawn from this, and which Einstein indeed drew, is that the physical universe is not like human consciousness. The experience of human consciousness does not correspond, in a naive sense, to the physical universe, and so naive experience cannot be a guide to the Universe.

B. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

The third great blow to the Western tradition of Greek Idealism was delivered by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1916. This blow concerned another anthropomorphic quality of Newtonian nature: “forces.” Newton's physics was a force-physics, in which masses were organized into motion by gravitational forces. In Newton, gravitational force had a peculiar physical status. Einstein's Special Theory and General Theory destroyed the peculiar physical status of force, making the apparent effects of force on matter due to the complexities of measurement in a world in which absolute motion does not exist.

In a brilliant analysis, Einstein showed the phenomena of inertial force were equivalent to the phenomena of gravitational force. Einstein called this the “Principle of Equivalence,” and he illustrated it, as in his 1938 textbook coauthored with Leopold Infeld, with now familiar example of elevators. [21] So doing this. Einstein instantly revealed to us also what Newton's concept of force had been. For Newton, gravitational force was in straightforward analogy to the human experience of force. What is the human experience of force? The human experience of force is of muscular exertion against resisting masses, perceived consciously as a willing of exertion. And this is precisely what Newton thought gravitational force was. Gravitational force was God's active willing in the universe.

With the theories of relativity, Einstein de-anthropomorphized nature, so to speak. He demonstrated that the physical universe did not have the qualities of consciousness; there was no physical equivalent of simultaneity for the universe as a whole; there was no equivalent of willful exertion in physical nature. We believed in error that nature had these qualities, because before Einstein experimental technique had not progressed adequately to demonstrate the physical effects of velocities close to the speed of light, or physical effects acting at distances on the atomic scale or cosmic scale.

The belief that nature had anthropomorphic qualities was prevalent in Western culture, because Western philosophy and theology had been dominated by Greek Idealism. [22] So here we see that Einstein's physics was culturally indebted to Darwin, as well as to certain peculiarities of his own biography. By destroying the natural theology of design and showing that biological nature was not organized by divine purpose, Darwin made possible scientific conceptualization of nature without God. And we know that Einstein was personally indebted to this achievement of Darwin, because Einstein's entire epistemological analysis, e.g., of how the mind constructs the simultaneity of consciousness, was Darwinian in context.

C. Classical Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927

The fourth major development in the natural science of the last one hundred years that I want to examine is classical quantum mechanics, the probabilistic theory of the atom, built upon the Uncertainty Principle and the Quantum of Action between 1925 and 1927. This revolution fundamentally rejected the Newtonian concept of matter, replacing it with a mathematically formal definition of matter at the atomic level.

The Newtonian concept of the atom was of a subvisible. impenetrable, material object, occupying space. Newton assumed that moving atoms could continuously be located in terms of spatial and time coordinates. These ontological assumptions of the Newtonian atom were identical to the ontological principles of macroscopic objects. For classical science, the time-space description of the sensory world could be directly transposed to the microscopic world of atoms.

In classical quantum mechanics, however, the atom was not an “object,” in the sense that macroscopic objects were objects. The atom of classical quantum mechanics was more of an “event,” and quantum physicists abandoned the effort to describe atomic events in terms of mechanical space-time pictures. The motion of an atomic particle from one point to another would be described in terms of probability theory and the effort to describe the position and motion of the particle at each moment of its travel is, indeed, impossible. [23] This can be put in the words of Max Born, who told Einstein in the 1920s that there was no physical meaning that could be ascribed to the concept of an atomic particle moving in a continuous path of motion from one location to another location.

Within a few years of the construction of classical quantum mechanics, philosophical formalization of the revolution in physics had begun. One of the first items to be understood concerned the macroscopic Newtonian world. Niels Bohr grasped that Newtonian concepts were dependent upon sensory functions that had evolved in man within a Darwinian environment. The perceived solidity, permanence, and continuity of motion of macroscopic objects, among their many qualities, were evolved qualities of experience dependent upon naturally selected physiological processes. Such qualities have, no doubt, been functionally useful for men as predators, hunting game on the open plain, but bear no similar usefulness in the submicroscopic hunt for quarks.

For Niels Bohr and other architects of classical quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics was profoundly a theory of meaning. The theory strictly limited what information obtained in atomic research could possibly mean. Bohr wrote, “[the Uncertainty Principle] not only set[s] a limit to the extent of the information obtainable by measurements, but ... also set[s] a limit to the meaning which we may attribute to such information.” [24] One consequence of this doctrine was that words, such as “description,” “time,” “space,” “force,” “particle,” “object,” and “mass,” that had meanings in terms of ordinary human experience, did not carry those meanings in atomic physics. Heisenberg suggested, for instance, that we talk about “stationary matter waves,” instead of particles, as less misleading. [25]

Despite cautions from the creators of quantum mechanics, popularizers of contemporary Big Bang Theory use words, such as particle, in verbal formulations as if their meaning in cosmological theory were the same or analogous to their meaning in ordinary language; but they are not. To be informed, as we are by one writer, that the neutrino is “a ghostly spinning elementary particle,” is simply to be misinformed, without letting us know that we are being misinformed. [26] A neutrino is not like a tiny subvisible grain of sand, spinning like a top. A neutrino is a “particle;” that is, a particle in quotation marks to indicate that it is not a particle. Quantum mechanics cannot be popularized.

Finally, it is important to remind ourselves that quantum mechanics' fundamental concepts have not been abandoned in contemporary cosmology and the Big Bang Theory. To the contrary, Planck's Quantum of Action and the Uncertainty Principle are fundamental to the conceptualization of the first moment of time, the moment after the Big Bang at which time and space came into existence.

V. The Meaning of Life

As I have reviewed the great scientific revolutions of the past century, I may seemed to have wandered far from the themes with which I opened this lecture. Actually I have not.

What we have seen in this review of the great scientific revolutions was the destruction of the ancient Greek philosophy of Idealism. Greek teleological concepts of purpose, design, and intention were removed from Western scientific theories of nature and replaced by a cluster of new concepts: accident, randomness, and probability. This constituted a de-anthropomorphization of nature so radical that one can say that biological and physical nature do not share the structure or qualities of our self-awareness. Charles Darwin's conceptualization of biological nature as based on random events, in such a way that order is selected out of disorder, has been forcefully extended to physical nature. The Darwinian setting of natural selection even provided the framework within which Einstein and the quantum fathers analyzed the epistemology of acquiring knowledge.

We can express this radical revolution in our understanding of nature in different terms. We can say that we do not and cannot understand nature in the same way that we understand our experience of nature. Nature is not intelligible in the same way that our daily experience is intelligible. We do not know about nature in the same way we know about our own experience. We know about our own experience through our own purposes, or through the purposes of other persons that we accept as our own. We cannot know nature at all through a concept of purpose as immanent in nature.

Radicalization of scientific theory has had profound consequences for Western concepts of death and the meaning of life. Recall that the primary philosophical base for Western theological expression of these concepts was Greek Idealism. This philosophical base was focussed on teleological concepts. Teleological concepts were the basis for knowledge, not only of ourselves, but also for knowledge of nature and of God. For God too was intelligible in terms of purpose. In Plato's philosophy, as in the Phaedo, life was analyzed in terms of purposes: of the purposes of us, the purpose of life and how we ought to conduct ourselves, the purpose of death, and purposes of afterlife. Things, processes, events, have reason and rationality, and the reason and rationality lay in divine intentionality expressed through them.

When Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Born, and Heisenberg destroyed Greek Idealism in science, they destroyed the notion that nature was rational in terms of purpose. They destroyed the possibility of natural theology, which too is based upon teleological concepts. So doing, they destroyed any possibility of rationally knowing a deity through knowledge of nature. President Reagan is in error; scientists cannot find God lurking inside the atom, or lighting the fuse to the Big Bang, or chirping in a tangled bank along an English road. Contemporary science cannot be the handservant of theology.

In sum, where has the radicalization of Western science of the past century left Western man? Modern science has ironically integrated man as part of nature, in a way that classical Newtonian science did not. In Darwinian evolution, man has evolved by the same laws as other organisms and does not stand apart; in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, physical observations must specify the observer's frame of reference; in Heisenberg's and Bohr's quantum mechanics, efforts to observe atomic phenomena changes the phenomena being observed. It is ironic, therefore, that contemporary science has at the same time isolated man apart from nature, in a way that man was not isolated from nature in the tradition of Greek Idealism, including Newtonian science. In Greek Idealism, man was enmeshed in a large scheme of purpose and intentionality in nature and in spirit. In contemporary science, man stands alone as having purposes. In Greek Idealism and in Newtonian science, the life of man, the passage of his soul, and his death derived meaning from the larger architecture of intention and purpose imposed upon the universe by a Deity. In contemporary science, mankind's purposes are mankind's alone; they are not derived from nature. And so humankind's meaning is made by humankind alone. The life of the individual person and the death of the individual person in the Darwinian. relativistic, probabilistic cosmos have only as much meaning as that person can give them by imposing purpose on them. The Big Bang Cosmology takes us no closer to “The Old One.” Contemporary Western science leaves us with the two basic philosophical choices already provided by the twentieth century to think through the meaning of life in a manner consistent with the lessons of natural science: pragmatism and existentialism.