The discoveries of modern science – their range, rapidity, and power – have amazed the entire world. Blaise Pascal saw man as a creature marooned between two infinities of space, large and small; yet scientific inquiry seems to press against each one at once, searching beyond the cell into regions of the sub-atomic, while, at the same time, expanding man’s gaze to glimpse the farthest stars. Such prodigies of knowledge pale only before the wonders of their application: technology has given us so much – everything from life-saving medical treatments to the most trivial conveniences which soon feel so essential.

But the very prestige which science rightly enjoys creates quite dangerous perils – perils which we, as the recent witnesses of the 20th-century’s horrors, know only too well: the same German chemist who revolutionized modern food production was also an infamous pioneer of chemical warfare; the world’s greatest physicists produced the world’s worst weapon, the nuclear bomb. These troubling paradoxes should, therefore, make us suspect of any research untethered to good objectives – and objective goods; the communists’ slogan, “Forward!” always begs the question: “Where?”

When asked if the North Pole belonged to Canada, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau said he would take the advice of scientists. This recent rejoinder from the Liberal leader illustrates the problems which scientific progress creates in average minds: the advances of science inspire a hope which they cannot possibly fulfill. The professionals who have formed themselves into communities of empirical inquiry do indeed live out a very high calling – yet their hesitant, skeptical, and doggedly fact-driven minds resist offering the very answers which the public seems to expect.

Scientists cannot give what they do not have, and the facts about the world which they discover can never supplant the wisdom, the values, and the central truths which come to us from longer traditions of much deeper knowledge – traditions, in fact, which created the conditions for the enterprise of modern science itself. Science, then, is the child of a more ambitious human quest, and cannot pretend to answer to the longings of the heart; nor can it ignore the profound moral intuitions which are offended by the misguided steps of its sometimes so-called progress. Instead, in the aridity of rationalism that emerges when a mere method of human knowing is turned into the horizon of human life, souls die of thirst in the shallows of senses – a fatal vacuum which is also the breeding ground for the clinical inhumanity which is science without morals. Thus, to the science that has discovered what we had never dreamed, we must now teach the truths of the heart which, though often ignored, are never forgotten.