#john macmurray

I'm inclined to think that the worst feature of modern life is its failure to believe in beauty. If we want to make the world better, the main thing we have to do is make it more beautiful.

“Work exists for a lot of reasons. God worked. He created the earth and the cosmos. We work to participate in the God life, to imitate God. That's also why we take a Sabbath. Work is one of the ways we engage in life, one of the ways we participate. It's important. The Bible says that whatever we do, whatever work we do, we do it unto the Lord, to please Him. [. . .] If you work for yourself, you are going to be let down, or you are going to work too much because you're trying to redeem yourself or something, or you are going to be lazy. God is the only motivation I have found where the law of diminishing returns doesn't apply. I get joy in knowing him, and he makes sense of my life, my family, my money, my work. And work is just a tool. It is the means to a good end, not the end itself.”

The value of science is a utility value, not intrinsic as that of religion is. Science is in fact systematic information, nothing more; and information is for use. That is why it is general. When you want to use something, you don't want to know it, only about it, what in general it can do. And you will notice that scientific knowledge is always about how things behave, rather than about the things themselves. It is not really important for science to know whether electrons exist or not, so long as things that do exist behave as if they were composed of electrons.

Science is important as a means to something that isn't science, ultimately to practical activity. The real value of science, and it is immense, lies in the values that it enables us to secure, or to create, in the transformation of human life that it makes possible. Science is essentially and necessarily the servant of life, not its master. And the really important point is that science in itself cannot determine its proper use. That is a matter of value and of emotion. The pride and prejudice of science, which makes it such a real danger to civilization at the present moment, lies in this; that scientific results can be and will be used for the satisfaction of thoroughly unscientific human passions and desires. And because science cannot determine values or practical ideals, a scientific age is always a materialistic age – not because science is materialist, for it isn't ever, but because a scientific age is an age whose emotions are left uncivilized and barbarous. The civilizing of the emotions is the business of art and religion – of religion particularly, and science cannot do it, because it must be free from emotion or cease to be science.

...science, though it may know everything in general, can know nothing in particular, and reality is always something in particular. It follows that science is not knowledge of reality. Is that startling? It is a commonplace of much philosophy, from Plato to the present day. But in our own time it has been stated by scientists – Professor Eddington, for example. And if we will only put aside the prejudice that science is par excellence the knowledge of reality it is really quite obvious at every turn. For instance, science is descriptive, not explanatory. It can say a lot about real things in general terms, but there it stops. Or again, science is always seeking objectivity and never finding it. The scientific attitude, faced with a fact, always refers it to something else, some other fact. Again, that is its business. The essential thing for science about anything real – an object or an event – is that it is in terms of something else, and that again in terms of something else. There is absolutely nothing for science in the wide universe that is in terms of itself. So science is condemned to chase reality, as it were, round an endless rope, and cannot ever find anything on which to rest. As a result, no scientific statement can ever be final. Its 'truths' exist provisionally and its whole business upon them is to revise them continually. Or, to put it otherwise, science is not itself objective; its business is to invent expressions for the description of reality, and to perfect these expressions.

I need you in order to be myself.

Communion is the keyword of religion