The respected Cambridge physicist Brian Pippard (1920-2008) wrote an article for the Times Literary Supplement in May 1986 titled "God and the Physical Scientist." In it he noted that the "classic dichotomy of Mind and Matter remains as absolute as ever, and much of the controversy between religion and science could have been avoided if both sides agreed on this." Scientists, however, "have thoughtlessly extended their arguments into the mental and spiritual domains," where they lack jurisdiction to weigh in on matters.

Professor Pippard believed, like others before him, that if God does exist, it must be within a realm that is unintelligible to the scientific model of the universe -- a realm, that is, of no-where and no-when. Here are a few excerpts from his article:

I am a physicist and an agnostic, neither believing nor disbelieving in a supreme being, lacking indeed any personal experience which might allow me to attach a meaning to the idea. To make this state of ignorance an excuse or even an incentive to attack the beliefs of others, as some do, seems to me indefensible. It is as if a tone-deaf man were to deride the pretensions of those who find in music an expression of realities which lie beyond the power of words. When the scientist can explain convincingly to a musician the origin and mechanism of musical feeling he may care to try his hand at religious belief. The true believer, however, need not fear -- his citadel is impregnable to scientific assault because it occupies territory which is closed to science...

Whatever the ultimate reality is that underlies the sensory impressions we interpret as material objects, and explain in terms of fundamental particles and mathematical equations, it has so far eluded imagination; we must not expect to discover or deny God by comparing any model we have managed to construct for ourselves with a futile preconception of what it ought to have been.

All the same, the search for evidence of God's existence in the material world is not lightly abandoned. Why does the universe exist at all, if it was not created? The evidence that it all started with a Big Bang hangs together pretty well, better than any other hypothesis. The trouble is that we can talk about the beginning but not of a time before the beginning; nor, when we imagine the start as an inconceivably hot fireball, are we allowed to picture it situated somewhere in space. Space and time as we know them are aspects of the universe itself, not, as Newton supposed, a divine absolute framework and a divine clock within which our universe came into being at God's command. It is hard enough to imagine space and time as linked in the way demanded by relativity theory, let alone anything that transcends these primary concepts. No human meaning can be attached to the idea of God "outside the universe" nor, in a timeless nowhere, to words like "act of creation" or "God's purpose."

To labor the point once again, our notion of the universe is part of the model we have built, and if we are to find God it will not be by looking within the model, or outside it, but in the no-place and no-time where we cannot look, the reality beyond our grasp. I think the majority of scientists accept that no explicit revelation of God's presence is to be expected in the faultless mechanics of the lifeless material world.

A friend of George Santayana's once confided to the philosopher that he had long been burdened by the suspicion that life may not be worthwhile after all. He asked Santayana to consider life from "the viewpoint of the grave." This is what Santayana wrote in reply:

What you call the point of view of the grave is what I should call the point of view of the easy chair. [That is, the point of view of detached philosophic contemplation.] From that the universal joke is indeed very funny. But a man in his grave is not only apathetic, but also invulnerable. That is what you forget. Your dead man is not merely amused, he is also brave, and if his having nothing to gain makes him impartial his having nothing to lose makes him free. "Is it worth while after all?" you ask. What a simple-hearted question. Of course it isn't worth while. Do you suppose when God made up his mind to create this world after his own image, he thought it was worth while? I wouldn't make such an imputation on his intelligence. Do you suppose he existed there in his uncaused loneliness because it was worth while? Did Nothing ask God before God existed, whether he thought it would be worth while to try life for a while? or did Nothing have to decide the question? Do you suppose the slow, painful, nasty, bloody process, by which things in this world grow, is worth having for the sake of the perfection of a moment? Did you come into the world because you thought it worth while? No more do you stay in it because you do. The idea of demanding that things should be worth doing is a human impertinence.

Santayana's friend broaches the subject again in a later letter, and Santayana has this to say:

The world may have little in it that is good: granted. But that little is really and inalienably good. Its value cannot be destroyed because of the surrounding evil.

These passages (and title) are taken from an essay Lionel Trilling once wrote about Santayana, "That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think." In it Trilling notes that while Santayana's thinking is apt to strike us moderns as cold and remote, and his preference for solitude and detachment one even philosophers might find difficult to share, his philosophy does not at all lead to a devaluation of life; quite the opposite, in fact. As Trilling writes, 

Whatever his materialism leads Santayana to, it does not lead him to a radical relativism pointing to an ultimate nihilism. It does not lead him to a devaluation of life, to the devaluation of anything that might be valued. On the contrary -- it is the basis of his intense valuation. Here indeed, we might almost say, it is one intention of his materialism, that it should lead to a high valuation of what might be valued at all. If we are in a balloon over an abyss, let us at least value the balloon. If night is all around, then what light we have is precious. If there is no life to be seen in the great emptiness, our companions are to be cherished; so are we ourselves.

First a childhood, limitless and without
renunciation or goals. O unselfconscious joy.
Then suddenly terror, barriers, schools, drudgery,
and collapse into temptation and loss.

Defiance. The one bent becomes the bender,
and thrusts upon others that which it suffered.
Loved, feared, rescuer, fighter, winner
and conqueror, blow by blow.

And then alone in cold, light, open space,
yet still deep within the mature erected form,
a gasping for the clear air of the first one, the old one...

Then God leaps out from behind his hiding place.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke (found at "Uncollected Poems")

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"It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me," writes Albert Camus. "A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock." ...more...

With what justification can someone speak of meaning or truth anymore when so much modern experience is self-parodying, insignificant, hollow, contradictory, disjunctive, hyper- and virtually real? Where does the "truth-seeking," meaning-seeking, serious self fit into the mix? Does it have anywhere to go, or is it, as Nietzsche put it, homesick in this nihilistic world?...more...

"Something in us wishes to remain a child," Carl Jung once observed, "to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will; to do nothing, or else indulge our own craving for pleasure or power."...more...

"The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that, apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, it is not humanly interesting," Lewis Mumford once wrote. "The contents of modern man's daydreams too closely resemble those of Bloom in Ulysses, filled with the dead tags of newspaper editorials, the undigested vomit of advertising slogans, greasy crumbs of irrelevant information, and the choking dust of purposeless activity." ...more...

Is the depressed state a "disease in the head" that needs to be killed by prescription drugs? What if a person agreed with Arthur Schopenhauer that life is vain, "a business that does not cover its expenses"? Or what if, with R.D. Laing, one concluded that the character of modern life is false, and the consequence of holding such a view was being depressed on occasion? Would Prozac be the right medicine for this "problem"? ..more..