Feeling Science, Thinking Religion

Donovan Schaefer

On a warm autumn evening at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, a group of scientists, theologians, and philosophers sat down for a candle-lit dinner to discuss the relationship between science and religion. Our speaker was physicist Andrew Briggs, and his topic was “Theory in Science and Faith.” But instead of starting with God, Prof. Briggs began with science; and not science as an institution, as truth, or even as a set of ideas, but as an experience. “I confess,” he told us,

“that my engagement with a scientific problem produces an extraordinary cycle of effects in me: until I have understood something to my satisfaction, or solved a problem—or even got an experiment to work—I go through a physical pain which can be both intense and prolonged. The reward is that when I come out at the other end, the pleasure is commensurately intense.”

Rather than being a product of detached rational exploration, Prof. Briggs offered a sense of science as driven by feeling.

A closer look at the history of science reveals fascinating echoes of this claim. In a 1930 article on the alliance between science and religion, Einstein observed a symmetry between the two phenomena not because of their conceptual parallels, but their shared foundations in a particularly vivid emotion: “cosmic religious feeling,” the prerogative of “religious geniuses” of all times and places, but also “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” In her profile of Barbara McClintock, historian Evelyn Fox Keller says the groundbreaking geneticist has a “feeling for the organism”—an antenna for the profound delight of knowing and studying even as mundane an organism as maize. “Good science,” Keller writes, “cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist.” Nor is it only science—in the sense we now hear that word, as the natural sciences—that is driven forward by feeling. David Hume asserted that philosophy was “the ruling Passion of my Life and the Great Source of my Enjoyments.” I suspect that most humanities scholars—historians, literary critics, anthropologists, theologians—feel this same joy pulsing through their work.

My book Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin, sets out to explore how thinkers from a range of fields have sought to disrupt the thinking/feeling binary—and the implications of this disruption for the study of science, scholarship, religion, atheism, and secularism. My argument, in a nutshell, is that thinking feels—that there is no study, no learning, no reasoning process without emotion—even in domains that we might imagine to be devoid of feeling like math, science, or secular rationality.

Although their work is rarely read in this light, an ensemble of canonical European philosophers have all pointed to similar conclusions. Hume declared that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Nietzsche wrote in Joyful Wisdom that “[t]he course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us.” William James wrote of the “sentiment of rationality”—composed alternately of a feeling of peace and contentment when pieces of information click together and a visceral frustration when they’re left dispersed. “Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact,” he writes, “is like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound into melodic or harmonic order.”

In the 20th century, the grounding of science in feeling has been advanced, most prominently, by Michael Polanyi, who modeled science as driven forward by what he called “intellectual passions.” These intellectual passions, he insisted, “are no mere psychological by-product, but have a logical function which contributes an indispensable element to science.” Ultimately, Polanyi believed we can only be seized by a conclusion that feels right to us. This even operates in rarefied fields like mathematics. “It is on account of its intellectual beauty,” he proposed, “that the mathematician feels compelled to accept mathematics as true.” Paul Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method plugs in here, too; he proposes that the creation of a correct idea is not a function of an abstract, mechanical method, but “is guided rather by a vague urge, by a ‘passion,’” one which “gives rise to specific behavior which in turn creates the circumstances and the ideas necessary for analyzing and explaining the process, for making it ‘rational.’”

In recent decades, some of the most profound meditations on scientific emotions have been formulated by feminist philosophers of science. Alison Jaggar, for instance, contends that the entire western tradition has misread Plato, whom she interprets as arguing for a picture of reason as guided by emotions, rather than oppositional to them: “Without horses, after all,” she muses, “the skill of the charioteer would be worthless.” Feminist philosopher of religion Kimerer LaMothe provides a survey of the emotional itinerary of the study of religion itself:

“A tingle of awe in response to a text or ritual or event impels us to learn more. A wrinkle of confusion troubles us to revisit a mark that remains and ask new questions, gather more data, consult other experts. A surge of excitement pushes us on as pieces of our research start falling into shapes of understanding we have learned to recognize. A sense of ease lets us know that our interpretations are objective or empathetic enough, or will be well received.”

This sense of science as defined—in its internal operation—by feeling can be distinguished from a superficially similar attitude taken by, for instance, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has sought to dispel the claim that science is oblivious to feeling by pointing to its spectacular discoveries. “If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science,” he muses in The God Delusion, “mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven’s Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart’s opera The Expanding Universe.” The joy of science, in this view, lies in the treasures it unearths through its discoveries.

But the sense of science we’re talking about runs deeper. It suggests that the doing of science—the roots of the tree and not just its fruits—are suffused with feeling. Dawkins—perhaps due to an over-investment in the pristinity of scientific reason as a purifying force—succumbs to what Jaggar calls “the myth of dispassionate investigation.” She notes that the insistence on the part of already structurally advantaged people that they have absolved themselves of emotion (while others are still in the mire) “frequently results in their being more influenced by emotion rather than less.” Stephen Jay Gould, in his research into the history of scientific racism, makes much the same point: “It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality,” he suggests, “for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.”

Connecting science to feeling pulls science down from the pedestal that it was placed on by its misguided defenders who mistake it for the operation of ineffable reason. Science is returned to full communion with all kinds of other practices of knowledge-production—different in degree rather than kind from all our ordinary ways of grasping for a better understanding of the world. Our ordinary ways of fumbling for truth are just the less organized—perhaps less disciplined—cousins of formal science. They’re all just different modes of feeling our way along.

But locating science in feeling also doesn’t subvert science’s power to explore, advance, and improve. It’s because we are the kinds of creatures that can feel our way to better understandings of the world that science works at all. James affirms “when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think.” As Polanyi insisted, scientific emotions make scientific discovery possible. Polanyi explains Copernicus’ revolution, for instance, in terms of a contest of different forms of pleasure—with pleasure in revealing the true patterns of the universe ultimately prevailing. Contra Dawkins’ fears, the emotional aspect of scientific rationality doesn’t mean it collapses; instead, the emotional aspect of science is what gives it its power to guide us to deeper and more elaborate understandings of the world.

The disruption of the thinking/feeling binary has extensive implications for the study of science and religion, as I explore throughout Wild Experiment. Here, I will focus on two specific consequences. First, as we’ve seen, taking science off the artificial pedestal created for it by a certain kind of rigid rationalist reveals its continuity with other modes of knowledge production. Science and religion, as thinkers like John Polkinghorne, Alister McGrath, Mary Midgley, and Peter Harrison have suggested, are not methodological antonyms; both are (among other things) communal, organized, disciplined forms of knowledge-production—and for both, knowledge-production and feeling are inextricably intertwined.

Harrison’s recent work is particularly illuminating, here. In Territories of Science and Religion, he looks at the histories of the Latinate terms scientia and religio and observes that in the middle ages, both were embedded within the frame of virtues. Rather than fixed and discrete bodies of knowledge—a post-Protestant innovation that seems to reflect, in both cases, the new axis of declarative faith—both scientia and religio were practical styles of developing selves. Rethinking the scientific process as an orchestration of feelings directly connects with this sense of science as “mental disposition,” specifying that it is not just our intellectual method, but our emotional architecture that is being refashioned through scientific training.

So there’s overlap between “science” and “religion” as methods. They’re both ways of thinking our way through a situation. But we think by feeling our way along. And this, I suggest, is why identical arguments yield such vastly different persuasive outcomes for different people: even though the ideas are the same, the way those bodies feel about those ideas are sharply different. As James writes, “in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.” In other words, we need to be in gear, emotionally, before we can believe. Different affective dispositions form the necessary preconditions of the gamut of beliefs.

Arguments for or against the existence of God (let alone about the nature or moral consequences of God) are vibrantly persuasive for some, but are often totally inert to those on the other side. James considers this as an effect of how we feel about different concepts as they’re offered to us. “Why does the Aesthetik of every German philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?” he asks. Elsewhere he notes that “a philosophy fit in this respect for Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet.” Each contraption of theological ideas comes along with a feeling tone, and this tone is what resonates—or creates screeching dissonance—with belief. Theologian Simeon Zahl has this in mind when he writes that “in a given concrete instance, the event of being persuaded of a theological idea or position is rarely, if ever, a pristine ‘rational’ process,” adding that “‘experience’ is constantly playing a significant role in theological reasoning and in theological persuasion.”

Arguments may make appeals to common situations we all face. But ultimately, they fall on a landscape of persuasion that is configured by our emotional substrate. My suspicion is that the deep, complex braids of emotion wrapping up words like “God” or “puja” or “mosque” do much to define how people respond to the associated concepts. Do these words elicit memories of joy in shared music, the warmth of freely given acceptance, and comfort offered in moments of brokenness and despair—or do they call to mind terror, shame, and pain? The profound parameters of conviction are established here, upstream of the logical structure of the arguments themselves. Ideas can change us, but they do their work at the interface of thinking and feeling, not in the superlunary zone of pure reason.

Einstein, Albert. “Religion and Science.” New York Times Magazine. November 9, 1930: 1-4.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: Owl Books, 1993, 198.

In: Ayer, Alfred. Hume: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 2.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Selby-Bigge, L.A., ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1960, 415.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 10: The Joyful Wisdom. Levy, Oscar, ed. Common, Thomas, trans. Edinburg, UK: T.N. Foulis, 1910, 157.

James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York, NY: Longmans Green & Co., 1907, 65.

Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London, UK: Routledge, 1962, 142.

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 201.

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. 3rd ed. London, UK: Verso Books, 1993, 17.

Jaggar, Alison M. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In: Jaggar, Alison M. and Susan R. Bordo, ed. Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989: 145-171, 145.

LaMothe, Kimerer. “What Bodies Know About Religion and the Study of It.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.3 (September 2008): 573-601, 589.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2008, 111. See also: Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998.

Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge,” 155.

Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge,” 158.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, 36.

James, Will to Believe, 17.

Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 2.

Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 15.

Harrison, Territories, 69.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York, NY: Collier Books, 1961, 74.

James, Will to Believe, 69.

Ibid., 88.

Zahl, Simeon. The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 14.