The Meaning of It All

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, “How can you live without knowing?” I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

  This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.

  Doubt is clearly a value in the sciences. Whether it is in other fields is an open question and an uncertain matter. I expect in the next lectures to discuss that very point and to try to demonstrate that it is important to doubt and that doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of very great value.

  II. The Uncertainty of Values

  We are all sad when we think of the wondrous potentialities that human beings seem to have and when we contrast these potentialities with the small accomplishments that we have. Again and again people have thought that we could do much better. People in the past had, in the nightmare of their times, dreams for the future, and we of their future have, although many of those dreams have been surpassed, to a large extent the same dreams. The hopes for the future today are in a great measure the same as they were in the past. At some time people thought that the potential that people had was not developed because everyone was ignorant and that education was the solution to the problem, that if all people were educated, we could perhaps all be Voltaires. But it turns out that falsehood and evil can be taught as easily as good. Education is a great power, but it can work either way. I have heard it said that the communication between nations should lead to an understanding and thus a solution to the problem of developing the potentialities of man. But the means of communication can be channeled and choked. What is communicated can be lies as well as truth, propaganda as well as real and valuable information. Communication is a strong force, also, but either for good or evil. The applied sciences, for a while, were thought to free men of material difficulties at least, and there is some good in the record, especially, for example, in medicine. On the other hand, scientists are working now in secret laboratories to develop the diseases that they were so careful to control.

  Everybody dislikes war. Today our dream is that peace will be the solution. Without the expense of armaments, we can do whatever we want. And peace is a great force for good or for evil. How will it be for evil? I do not know. We will see, if we ever get peace. We have, clearly, peace as a great force, as well as material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers. We have more forces of this kind to control today than did the ancients. And maybe we are doing it a little bit better than most of them could do. But what we ought to be able to do seems gigantic compared to our confused accomplishments. Why is this? Why can’t we conquer ourselves? Because we find that even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry with them any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good and bad.

  Throughout all the ages, men have been trying to fathom the meaning of life. They realize that if some direction or some meaning could be given to the whole thing, to our actions, then great human forces would be unleashed. So, very many answers have been given to the question of the meaning of it all. But they have all been of different sorts. And the proponents of one idea have looked with horror at the actions of the believers of another—horror because from a disagreeing point of view all the great potentialities of the race were being channeled into a false and confining blind alley. In fact, it is from the history of the enormous monstrosities that have been created by false belief that philosophers have come to realize the fantastic potentialities and wondrous capacities of human beings.

  The dream is to find the open channel. What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say today to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but also all those things that we have found out up to today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But I think that in admitting this we have probably found the open channel.

  Admitting that we do not know and maintaining perpetually the attitude that we do not know the direction necessarily to go permit a possibility of alteration, of thinking, of new contributions and new discoveries for the problem of developing a way to do what we want ultimately, even when we do not know what we want.

  Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

  So I have developed in a previous talk, and I want to maintain here, that it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. I say that we do not know what is the meaning of life and what are the right moral values, that we have no way to choose them and so on. No discussion can be made of moral values, of the meaning of life and so on, without coming to the great source of systems of morality and descriptions of meaning, which is in the field of religion.

  And so I don’t feel that I could give three lectures on the subject of the impact of scientific ideas on other ideas without frankly and completely discussing the relation of science and religion. I don’t know why I should even have to start to make an excuse for doing this, so I won’t continue to try to make such an excuse. But I would like to begin a discussion of the question of a conflict, if any, between science and religion. I described more or less what I meant by science, and I have to tell you what I mean by religion, which is extremely difficult, because different people mean different things. But in the discussion that I want to talk about here I mean the everyday, ordinary, church-going kind of religion, not the elegant theology that belongs to it, but the way ordinary people believe, in a more or less conventional way, about their religious beliefs.

  I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion, religion more or less defined that way. And in order to bring the question to a position that is easy to discuss, by making the thing very definite, instead of trying to make a very difficult theological study, I would present a problem which I see happens from time to time.

  A young man of a religious family goes to the university, say, and studies science. As a consequence of his study of science, he begins, naturally, to doubt as it is necessary in his studies. So first he begins to doubt, and then he begins to disbelieve, perhaps, in his father’s God. By “God” I mean the kind of personal God, to which one prays, who has something to do with creation, a
s one prays for moral values, perhaps. This phenomenon happens often. It is not an isolated or an imaginary case. In fact, I believe, although I have no direct statistics, that more than half of the scientists do not believe in their father’s God, or in God in a conventional sense. Most scientists do not believe in it. Why? What happens? By answering this question I think that we will point up most clearly the problems of the relation of religion and science.

  Well, why is it? There are three possibilities. The first is that the young man is taught by the scientists, and I have already pointed out, they are atheists, and so their evil is spread from the teacher to the student, perpetually… Thank you for the laughter. If you take this point of view, I believe it shows that you know less of science than I know of religion.

  The second possibility is to suggest that because a little knowledge is dangerous, that the young man just learning a little science thinks he knows it all, and to suggest that when he becomes a little more mature he will understand better all these things. But I don’t think so. I think that there are many mature scientists, or men who consider themselves mature—and if you didn’t know about their religious beliefs ahead of time you would decide that they are mature—who do not believe in God. As a matter of fact, I think that the answer is the exact reverse. It isn’t that he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know it all.

  The third possibility of explanation of the phenomenon is that the young man perhaps doesn’t understand science correctly, that science cannot disprove God, and that a belief in science and religion is consistent. I agree that science cannot disprove the existence of God. I absolutely agree. I also agree that a belief in science and religion is consistent. I know many scientists who believe in God. It is not my purpose to disprove anything. There are very many scientists who do believe in God, in a conventional way too, perhaps, I do not know exactly how they believe in God. But their belief in God and their action in science is thoroughly consistent. It is consistent, but it is difficult. And what I would like to discuss here is why it is hard to attain this consistency and perhaps whether it is worthwhile to attempt to attain the consistency

  There are two sources of difficulty that the young man we are imagining would have, I think, when he studies science. The first is that he learns to doubt, that it is necessary to doubt, that it is valuable to doubt. So, he begins to question everything. The question that might have been before, “Is there a God or isn’t there a God” changes to the question “How sure am I that there is a God? “ He now has a new and subtle problem that is different than it was before. He has to determine how sure he is, where on the scale between absolute certainty and absolute certainty on the other side he can put his belief, because he knows that he has to have his knowledge in an unsure condition and he cannot be absolutely certain anymore. He has to make up his mind. Is it 50-50 or is it 97 percent? This sounds like a very small difference, but it is an extremely important and subtle difference. Of course it is true that the man does not usually start by doubting directly the existence of God. He usually starts by doubting some other details of the belief, such as the belief in an afterlife, or some of the details of Christ’s life, or something like this. But in order to make this question as sharp as possible, to be frank with it, I will simplify it and will come right directly to the question of this problem about whether there is a God or not.

  The result of this self-study or thinking, or whatever it is, often ends with a conclusion that is very close to certainty that there is a God. And it often ends, on the other hand, with the claim that it is almost certainly wrong to believe that there is a God.

  Now the second difficulty that the student has when he studies science, and which is, in a measure, a kind of conflict between science and religion, because it is a human difficulty that happens when you are educated two ways. Although we may argue theologically and on a high-class philosophical level that there is no conflict, it is still true that the young man who comes from a religious family gets into some argument with himself and his friends when he studies science, so there is some kind of a conflict.

  Well, the second origin of a type of conflict is associated with the facts, or, more carefully, the partial facts that he learns in the science. For example, he learns about the size of the universe. The size of the universe is very impressive, with us on a tiny particle that whirls around the sun. That’s one sun among a hundred thousand million suns in this galaxy, itself among a billion galaxies. And again, he learns about the close biological relationship of man to the animals and of one form of life to another and that man is a latecomer in a long and vast, evolving drama. Can the rest be just a scaffolding for His creation? And yet again there are the atoms, of which all appears to be constructed following immutable laws. Nothing can escape it. The stars are made of the same stuff, the animals are made of the same stuff—but in some such complexity as to mysteriously appear alive.

  It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing—atoms with curiosity—that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

  Some will tell me that I have just described a religious experience. Very well, you may call it what you will. Then, in that language I would say that the young man’s religious experience is of such a kind that he finds the religion of his church inadequate to describe, to encompass that kind of experience. The God of the church isn’t big enough.

  Perhaps. Everyone has different opinions. Suppose, however, our student does come to the view that individual prayer is not heard. I am not trying to disprove the existence of God. I am only trying to give you some understanding of the origin of the difficulties that people have who are educated from two different points of view. It is not possible to disprove the existence of God, as far as I know. But is true that it is difficult to take two different points of view that come from different directions. So let us suppose that this particular student is particularly difficult and does come to the conclusion that individual prayer is not heard. Then what happens? Then the doubting machinery, his doubts, are turned on ethical problems. Because, as he was educated, his religious views had it that the ethical and moral values were the word of God. Now if God maybe isn’t there, maybe the ethical and moral values are wrong. And what is very inter- esting is that they have survived almost intact. There may have been a period when a few of the moral views and the ethical positions of his religion seemed wrong, he had to think about them, and many of them he returned to.

  But my atheistic scientific colleagues, which does not include all scientists—I cannot tell by their behavior, because of course I am on the same side, that they are particularly different from the religious ones, and it seems that their moral feelings and their understandings of other people and their humanity and so on apply to the believers as well as the disbelievers. It seems to me that there is a kind of independence between the ethical and moral views and the theory of the machinery of the universe.

  Science makes, indeed, an impact on many ideas associated with religion, but I do not believe it affects, in any very strong way, the moral conduct and ethical views. Religion has many aspects. It answers all kinds of questions. I would, however, like to emphasize three aspects.

  The first is that it tells what things are and where they ca
me from and what man is and what God is and what properties God has and so on. I’d like, for the purposes of this discussion, to call those the metaphysical aspects of religion.

  And then it says how to behave. I don’t mean in the terms of ceremonies or rituals or things like that, but I mean how to behave in general, in a moral way. This we could call the ethical aspect of religion.

  And finally, people are weak. It takes more than the right conscience to produce right behavior. And even though you may feel you know what you are supposed to do, you all know that you don’t do things the way you would like yourself to do them. And one of the powerful aspects of religion is its inspirational aspects. Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspiration to the arts and to many other activities of human beings.

  Now these three aspects of religion are very closely interconnected, in the religion’s view. First of all, it usually goes something like this: that the moral values are the word of God. Being the word of God connects the ethical and metaphysical aspects of religion. And finally, that also inspires the inspiration, because if you are working for God and obeying God’s will, you are in some way connected to the universe, your actions have a meaning in the greater world, and that is an inspiring aspect. So these three aspects are very well integrated and interconnected. The difficulty is that science occasionally conflicts with the first two categories, that is with the ethical and with the metaphysical aspects of religion.