We are all people of faith, whether we realise it or not

A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers.

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Yet Ayer’s ideas survive today in mutated form and influence other subjects besides philosophy. Though partly infected by relativism, the humanities have witnessed a growing impulse to redescribe everything in material and supposedly objective terms. The move is reductive. It involves restricting us to a world of causes rather than reasons, sounds rather than music.

The defects of a scientistic or positivist approach emerged in a public debate between Richard Dawkins and John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, in 1992. If you search the universe for certain kinds of connection, those are the only ones you will find, Habgood warned. Everything else slips through the net. Religion is a case in point. God does not appear in the scientific account of nature because the objectives and methods of science shut out anything – any hint of purpose or intention or feeling or value – which might point to a Creator. That is not a criticism of science. It is a description of what science is, and the key to what makes it so successful in studying those aspects of reality in which purpose, feeling, value and so on are not of central importance.

Habgood’s argument applies across the piste. An array of discourses – not just those concerned with spirituality – purport to shed light on truths that elude scientific treatment, but this should not render them suspect by definition.