A World of Molecules

On a TV talk show, a hippie-looking doctor from California is defending the use of herbal and other “alternative” medicines. At the beginning, I’m skeptical. But the guy debating him, another doctor who edits the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, keeps insisting with growing impatience: “We live in a world of molecules!” There is nothing mysterious about herbs. If there is a substance in a plant that may be medically useful, we can extract it, put it in a pill, and test it on sick people. If it cures them, it’s medicine. If not, it’s not. If it’s real, we can detect it. We live in a world of molecules!

On the whole, the hippie doctor was not impressed with this observation, and neither am I. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the slogan “We live in a world of molecules” strikes me as a shorthand way of proffering a philosophy. In this view, molecules (or more broadly, what we see through microscopes; what scientists in lab coats study) are the objective facts which essentially define the world. Molecules are the primary units of meaning which in turn, and on their own, as it were, reveal the larger meaning and potentiality of things. Many societies have thought that we live in a world of spirits. Some people today think that we live in an information age, in which computers are the basic engines that shape us. This guy says it’s molecules, and I’m not buying. 

In the first place, long before anyone knew anything about molecules, the Greeks had concluded that knowledge consists less of sense impressions than of the inferences we make about them. All human knowing contains normative and speculative dimensions. Interpretation is an unavoidable component of cognition itself. It is impossible, therefore, to understand anything purely in terms of the sensate data impinging upon my sight, touch, hearing, smell, balance, and taste. If I kick a chair, I am quite incapable of separating that experience from my inferences and judgements (most of which I acquired on faith from others) about kicking and about the nature and purpose of chairs. That goes for you and me, and that goes for arrogant doctors making all kinds of assumptions about, say, molecules. In this sense, the only world available to us is a world of persons. 

If in any philosophically serious sense we actually lived in a “world of molecules,” in which knowing could be separated from the consciousness of the knower, then (as Thomas Kohler has put it) the only meaningful distinctions would be between those who’ve had a look at the facts and those who haven’t. Disagreements would be solved by disseminating information. I can hardly imagine a more untrue thing to believe about the world.

Yet many people apparently believe it. I am constantly struck, for example, by how many social scientists claim that their own work consists merely of reporting “findings” - we live in a world of data! - then go on to imply that any opposing points of view stem from ideology, not science. Sorry, not even close. Certainly fair-mindedness, respect for empirical evidence, and the desire for objectivity are essential traits for anyone wishing to engage in serious intellectual work. Facts, including molecular facts, demand recognition. But it wastes everyone’s time to pretend that Professor Smith’s findings about divorce or day care have nothing to do with Professor Smith’s own consciousness and way of judging the world.

Perhaps what I am ultimately describing and defending is the religious impulse, or at least a way of conceiving reality that is compatible with that impulse. To me, such a world view is both realistic and adventurous. For example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her wonderful book on Augustine, has little patience for “rationalistic triumphalism,” largely because Elshtain is so acutely aware, as was Augustine, of “the noetic effects of sin” - that is, the fact that our personal shortcomings inevitably influence our thinking.

Or to take an example from the adventurous side of this sensibility, I suspect that a belief in things unseen, or in things that can only be guessed at, is quite close to the belief that some things may properly be judged too beautiful to be untrue. Stratford Caldecott, reflecting on C.S. Lewis’s mythical writings about Narnia, insists that there are some truths that “only the imagination may grasp.” A myth, in this sense, is an imaginative story that tells of a deep desire. But the existence of the desire may point toward the independent existence of that which is desired. Even if we have never seen water, the fact that ducks seem to be made for swimming suggests that, somewhere, water might actually exist. The fact that humans seem to be made to search for transcendence - to find a way to overcome death through infinite love - suggests that, somewhere, the object of the search might actually exist.

At a minimum, say Caldecott and Lewis, we should act as if the land of our heart’s desire actually exists. As Lewis puts it: “I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” In this spirit, Caldecott calls religious faith “a categorical refusal to act as though the world were less important, less interesting, less meaningful, than we are capable of conceiving. It may be more; it will not be less.” 

I still don’t know much about the medicinal effects of herbs. And I believe in molecules. But “a world of molecules”? No. Or at least I’m going to live as if that’s not so, even if it is.

Sources: David Melling, Understanding Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 132. Thomas C. Kohler, “The Integrity of Unrestricted Desire: Community, Values, and the Problem of Personhood,” in Edward Lehman (ed.), Autonomy and Order: A Communitarian Anthology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming). Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), xii. Stratford Caldecott, “Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp: Myth and ‘Real Life,’” in David Mills (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Guide: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998).

First published Summer 1999.