Recently, but not for the first time, I found myself struggling to articulate why something as useful and reliable as science could sometimes be a dangerous distraction from the real answers to important questions—and why, as a visible and explicit process, science often requires too much bandwidth for effective communication. Then I came across this passage from Francisco José Ayala's 2007 Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion:
Science is a way of knowing, but it is not the only way. Knowledge also derives from other sources, such as common sense, artistic and religious experience, and philosophical reflection.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, the great French writer Albert Camus asserted that we learn more about ourselves and the world from a relaxed evening's perception of the starry heavens and the scents of grass than from science's reductive ways.
The anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote: "The world without Shakespeare's insights is a lesser world, our griefs shut more inarticulately in upon themselves. We grow mute at the thought—just as an element seems to disappear from sunlight without Van Gogh."
Astonishing to me is the assertion made by some scientists and others that there is no valid knowledge outside science. I respond with a witticism that I once heard from a friend: "In matters of values, meaning, and purpose, science has all the answers, except the interesting ones."
