Much has been written about the conflict between science and religion. And much of it has been very interesting. But when we say such things—that is, that there is a conflict between science and religion—we are actually using a euphemism. There is no conflict between science and religion. What exists, however, are conflicts between practitioners of science and practitioners of religion. In other words, the only places where such conflicts can arise are among (and within) people. No one places a copy of the Koran on a table, places a copy of Newton's Principia across from it, and expects the two books to duke it out. Rather, we deceive ourselves when we talk about a debate or conflict between science and religion. The conflict or debate is actually ours. Given this, it seems appropriate to consider these conflicts as existential conflicts, conflicts about what science and religion ought to mean to individual human beings. And it is the individual wherein science and religion meet at a crossroads that interests Walker Percy.

For Walker Percy, practicing Catholic and nonpracticing physician, the late twentieth century (and in continuity, the twenty‐first) is truly the era of science or of the scientist. “The scientist is the prince and sovereign of the age,” he declares (Percy , 115). In other words, today the scientist has become “the secular saint of the age” (, 115). But what does Percy mean by this?

Percy has looked around himself and discovered that the average human being—or, at least, the average American—is in trouble. It seems to him, as it seemed to Augustine, that we know a great deal about the world around us (knowledge that is today accrued through science) but very little about ourselves. As Percy puts it at the beginning of Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book:

How can you survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self‐help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians?

Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light‐years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life? (, 1)

These are legitimate questions. Percy posits that this chasm between our scientific knowledge of the world and our lack of personal knowledge about ourselves drives many people to try and escape themselves. There are various methods for doing this: travel, drugs, sex, and the ultimate escape, suicide. But in this day and age, there exist two sets of people whose occupations allow them to transcend this existential problem: artists and scientists. Here we are interested in scientists. And according to Percy, the scientist's transcendence of the world is genuine. That is to say, he stands in a posture of objectivity over against the world, a world which he sees as a series of specimens or exemplars, and interactions, energy exchanges, secondary causes—in a word: dyadic events (, 115).

But this transcendence is true only as long as the scientist is practicing science. What happens to the scientist when the existential world intrudes? Well, one manifestation, “which always amazes laymen, is the jealousy and lack of scruple of scientists. Their anxiety to receive credit,” says Percy, “seems more appropriate to used‐car salesmen than to a transcending community” (, 117). Moreover, one of the more distressing consequences occur[s] when the zeal and excitement of the scientific community runs counter to the interests of the world community. The joys of science and the joys of life are not necessarily convergent. As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much (Percy , 117).

Thus, it would seem that in matters of politics, just as in matters of religion, the scientist is an amateur. Hence, it is my contention that when the scientist goes to speak about matters like religion, he or she is no longer speaking from the point of transcendence of science. Rather, a scientist is speaking just as any other human being would, from a point of existential immanence. I have three reasons for this position that I have drawn from Walker Percy: (1) the difference between living in an Umwelt as opposed to a Welt; (2) the difference between a dyadic and a triadic relationship; and (3) the problem of making a human being, who is a subject, the object of scientific examination.

Umwelt versus Welt

Consider the euglena. It is a funny little organism. It is a single cell with a flagellum; it can live in fresh or salt water. It has the dubious distinction of being neither a plant nor an animal. It has chloroplasts that allow it to take nourishment from sunlight, just like a plant, and it can consume food through phagocytosis, rather like an animal. It was for organisms such as these that the kingdom Protista was invented. It has a red spot (or stigma) just near its flagellum that filters out particular wavelengths of sunlight, allowing an organelle beneath the red spot to orient the euglena toward the light in a process known as phototaxis. In other words, the euglena responds to light by moving toward it. It also responds to food particles it runs into by surrounding said particles and consuming them. And the euglena is a very successful organism; there are over 800 species worldwide. From this it would seem that euglena are very adaptable organisms exploiting a wide variety of niches. They are thus very successful organisms in their environments.

And this is precisely what Walker Percy would stress about euglena and other nonhuman animals: they are organisms in an environment, where that environment is called an Umwelt (surrounding world). This is significant. Here, Percy is making a distinction between communication—which animals, including euglenas, can do—and language, which is unique to the human condition. In having language, humans are symbol‐mongers; they are the creators and interpreters of a certain class of signs.

In elaborating his position, Percy calls upon a variety of sign theorists or semioticians: Peirce, Saussure, Sebeok, von Uexküll, for example, and he insists on calling them semiotists for reasons that are difficult to fathom. But, as Percy says,

I am grateful for the important distinction, clearer in the German language and perhaps for this reason first arrived at by German thinkers, between Welt and Umwelt, or, roughly, world and environment, e.g., von Uexküll's Umwelt as, roughly, the significant environment within which an organism lives, and Heidegger's Welt, the “world” into which the Dasein or self finds itself “thrown.” (, 86n)

In understanding Percy's work and the role it might play in the relationship between science and religion, we must understand what this distinction between Welt and Umwelt means. An organism in an environment, in its Umwelt, is merely another element in that environment. No organism is privileged above another in an Umwelt. No organism transcends its environment. Moreover, the relations between an organism and its environment can be fully described in the terms and concepts of science. We can talk of reactions, energy exchanges, homeostasis, gravity, and so on. In none of these interactions is one part privileged over another. In the gravitational relationship between the Earth and the Moon, one cannot say that either the Moon or the Earth is more important. Likewise, in the chemical reaction that makes salt, no one prioritizes sodium over chlorine.

But our euglena seems slightly more complex. It reacts to stimuli. It moves toward light. Somehow, it responds to the environment. It responds to the environment as if the environment contained valuable information in it. And so it does. The environment of the euglena contains those elements the euglena needs to stay alive. We, looking at this situation, privilege the euglena, probably because we, too, are alive, and thus are rooting for the home team. We say, “The euglena converted light into energy through photosynthesis.” We do not say, “The photon, in a remarkable display of altruism, gave itself up to be turned into energy by the euglena.” We, being alive, privilege the euglena. Even so, as a member of an environment, say a freshwater pond, the euglena is not a privileged organism. It is equal in importance to the bladderwort, the frog, the rushes, and the crayfish.

This interrelatedness of equality is what makes ecosystems both strong and fragile. This is why an intruder into an ecosystem can be so destructive. Until there has been time for the new entity to be equalized and balanced into the ecosystem, our intruder will upset this delicately balanced system. Essentially, the intruder has no “place” in the ecosystem or environment it has invaded, and this affects every member of the ecosystem. However, the interrelatedness of equality means that the euglena and the information it encounters in its environment are on par. Just as sunlight is “food” for the euglena, so, too, is the euglena food for some other organism.

Inasmuch as human beings are organisms in an environment, they are not different from the euglena. Some organisms are food for the human; for other organisms, the human is food. A human being is just another node in the food web. It is just another member of the Umwelt.

However, this is not the case for the relationship of the human being with its Welt. While a “sign‐using organism takes account only of those elements in the environment which are relevant biologically” (Percy [1975] , 202), the human, a symbol‐using organism, does much more than this. Following Heidegger, Percy speaks of a human's being “thrown” into the world. We all arrive in media res—the story has been going on long before we got here, and it will continue long after we have gone. For Percy, the way we cope with this “thrownness” is through language, through the use of symbols. It is not only that objects have significance for us (as light did for the euglena); objects also have meaning.

Consider an apple. For the human organism, it is the sign of something edible, something that will quell hunger pangs. For the human being, however, it can symbolize (mean) the fall from grace of Adam and Eve, the oft‐repeated story of Newton's enlightenment about the nature of gravity, or Thanksgiving at Grandma's when she made her old‐fashioned apple pie. All of these meanings that are associated with an apple, but that do not directly follow from an apple (i.e., Adam and Eve could have eaten a peach, Newton could have been hit on the head by a chestnut, Grandma could have made an excellent pumpkin pie), are symbols. It is the endless number and infinite combinations of symbols that make up a human being's Welt. Thus, the human being is an amphibian, living simultaneously in two domains: its Umwelt and Welt. For Percy, while science can tell us a great deal about our Umwelt, it cannot address those questions that belong to our Welt.

The Dyad and the Triad

The reason that science can inform us about our environment but not about our symbol‐world is that science, according to Percy, can only describe dyadic relationships. It cannot speak of triadic relationships. Thus, for Percy, science and scientists begin skating on thin ice when they try to explain triadic phenomena in dyadic terms. When using the terms dyadic and triadic, Percy is using them as they were put forth at the turn of the twentieth century by American philosopher, pragmaticist, and logician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce believed that there were two kinds of natural phenomena. First there are those events which involve “dyadic relations,” such as obtain in the “physical forces…between pairs of particles.” The other kind of event entails “triadic relations.”

If A throws B away and B hits C in the eye, this event may be understood in terms of two dyadic relations, one between A and B, the other between B and C. But if A gives B to C, a genuine triadic relation exists.

Dyadic events are, presumably, those energy exchanges conventionally studied by the natural sciences: subatomic particles colliding, chemical reactions…. Triadic events, on the other hand, characteristically involve symbols and symbol users. Moreover, a genuine triadic relation cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations. (Percy [1975] , 161–62)

It is the last part of this quote that is so important for our current discussion: “a genuine triadic relation cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations.” But what, precisely, is a triadic relation? Consider the example above: “A throws B away and B hits C in the eye.” In this case, Mark (A) throws a ball (B), and this ball (B) hits John (C) in the head. This series of events can be broken down into two dyadic relations. One: Mark throws the ball. Two: The ball hits John. In other words, while Mark throws the ball and hits John, it is quite possible for Mark to throw the ball apart from his actually hitting John. However, the relations that obtain where “A gives B to C” or Mark gives a ball to John are different. There is no way to break this interaction into dyads, because as soon as Mark gives the ball, John receives it. As a matter of fact, if John does not receive the ball, then Mark has yet to give it. All three of these elements are inextricably linked to each other. They form a triad. But it is not this type of triadicity that fundamentally interests Percy. His interest in triadicity lies with the human phenomenon of language, especially the human capacity to name things, for it is naming which makes us human.

Consider Helen Keller, whom Percy discusses at length. He is interested in what happened to her in the well‐house when she discovered the nature of language. In the summer of 1887, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Keller was walking to the well‐house with her teacher, Anne Sullivan. When they arrived at the well‐house, Ms. Sullivan placed one of Helen's hands in the stream of running water. Into the other hand, Ms. Sullivan spelled “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” using a finger alphabet. At some point, Helen realized that “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” meant water, the substance running over her hand. Heretofore, “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” had signified “get me a glass of water.” It had been a command. It was simply one element of a dyadic relation. Signing “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” was merely a means to an end. In other words, Helen signs “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” —> Helen gets water.

But after her experience in the well‐house, Helen Keller knew that “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” meant/stood for/represented/symbolized a thing—the cool, wet substance running over her hand. In other words, Helen (A) came to know that “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” (B) is/means water (C). This is a triadic relationship. Helen can no longer spell out “w‐a‐t‐e‐r” without knowing that it is water, even if all she wants is a drink. She has become a symbol‐user. She has become fully human. Previously, she had been a very successful organism in her environment. She could navigate the Umwelt of her home. But she did not have a Welt. Only after the well‐house incident did Helen Keller have a world. And she had that world because she had acquired language. As Percy writes,

what is important to note about the triadic event [of language] is that it is there for all to see, that in fact it occurs hundreds of times daily—whenever we talk or listen to somebody talking—that its elements are open to inspection to everyone, including natural scientists, and that it cannot be reduced to a complexus of dyadic events…even though millions of dyadic events also occur: light waves, excitation of nerve endings, electrical impulses to neurones [sic], muscle contractions, and so on.

For once one concedes the reality of the triadic event, one is brought face to face with the nature of its elements. A child points to a flower and says “flower.”… But what is the entity….which links the…two?… Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term “coupler” as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word “is.”

Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one choses to call it—interpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever—it, the third element, is not material. (1991, 286–87)

Another way to look at this is to note that while the processes of thought and language are material (excitation of nerve endings, electrical impulses to neurons, release of neurotransmitters, and so on), the content of thought and language is not. Percy goes on to say that

Peirce's insistence on both the reality and the nonmateriality of the third element—whatever one chooses to call it, interpretant, mind, coupler—is of critical importance to natural science because its claim to reality is grounded not on this or that theology or metaphysic [sic] but on empirical observation and the necessities of scientific logic. (1991, 287)

Evidence of this is not simply the fact that humans have language, but that they have languages. Photosynthesis is ubiquitous. Gravity is ubiquitous. DNA is ubiquitous. And while human language is ubiquitous, languages, however, are not. Languages are specific and local. One speaks Cantonese or Twi or Sami; one does not speak language. Moreover, along with language comes culture. Language produces culture, and culture produces language. They are products of each other.

Consider the word “sick,” as in the statement “He's sick!” For most of us that statement would imply that the person in question has an illness of some sort and possibly should be seen by a physician. However, to those thirty years of age and younger, the statement can mean that the person in question is awesome or great or cool. Youth culture has produced a new meaning for an old world, and only those who are part of that culture would recognize it. This is also true for science. Consider the following: “A diffeomorphism is a map between manifolds which is differentiable and has a differentiable inverse” (Weisstein –2016). A person unfamiliar with differential geometry, while recognizing such words as “manifolds,” “differentiable,” and “inverse,” has no idea what those words actually mean in this context, much less what the statement itself means, because they are not part of the culture of mathematics. Another thing to consider about this statement is that it is an abstract statement about an abstract entity. In other words, this entity is both real and nonmaterial just like Walker Percy's coupler “is” is. This statement is, in fact, language about pure symbols, the ultimate in triadicity.

While science, too, has its cultures and, hence, its specific and local languages, when we speak of things scientific we speak of products that are general and generalizable and, hence, universal. We assume, for instance, that the relationship between two objects that we call gravity obtains in all situations everywhere; thus it is universal. An exception to this (your car keys flying upwards when you drop them) would cause us to reevaluate everything in search of a new universal. According to Percy,

There is a secret about the scientific method which every scientist knows and takes as a matter of course, but which the layman does not know. The layman's ignorance would not matter if it were not the case that the spirit of the age had been informed by the triumphant spirit of science. As it is, the layman's ignorance can be fatal, not for the scientist but for the layman. The secret is this: Science cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals. The layman thinks that only science can utter the true word about anything, individuals included. But the layman is an individual. So science cannot say a single word to him or about him except as he resembles others. (Percy [1975] , 22)

For the human being, it is the existence of triadicity and his or her symbol‐world, his or her Welt, that underpins Percy's claim. For example, scientists can tell me the average or “normal” side effects of a medication, but they cannot tell me how I, individually, will react to the medication. Scientists can make statements about what the average American is doing at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, but they can make no such claim about what I, particularly, might be doing. The claims of science consist of statements about generals (most birds fly) and universals (f = ma), but it cannot speak to the individual and particular.

An excellent example of this problem is the problem of pain. We cannot quantify pain. We can make pseudomeasures of pain (“on a scale of 1 to 10, how strong is your pain?”), but we cannot actually understand what it means when a person says, “my finger hurts.” There is no dyadic way to estimate pain. Blood sugar we can estimate dyadically or protein content in a person's urine but not pain, and for the following reasons: (1) We cannot feel that individual's pain directly, and (2) we must rely on metaphors and similes (“it is a burning pain” or “it feels like heavy pins and needles”) in order to understand. We must rely on the person's triadic communication to convey to us the nature of their pain. We rely on symbols; we rely on words. It is this aspect that makes evaluating the pain an animal is in so difficult. They cannot tell us in words (symbols) how they feel.

Is it any wonder, then, that science cannot quantify religious experience?

Subject as Object

There is a problem in English with the words subject and object; they can be used almost interchangeably, as in “The object I held in my hand was the subject of my study.” We know from experience and context that the item in the person's hand is both the subject and object mentioned in the sentence. So, how do we distinguish them? For the purposes of this essay, I would like to use simple, grammatical definitions. A subject is something (or someone) who does something while an object is something (or someone) that has something done to it.

Furthermore, when we use the term subjectivity, we usually mean the unique and individual perspective of a subject, namely a human being, or the simple experience of being an individual human being. But the term objectivity causes some consternation. It is often presented as a value‐free understanding of the world, the strange belief that a subject, with a particular and individual perspective, can understand the world in some way separate from his or her own experience of the world. Given this, it seems odd when scientists speak of their objectivity. Percy himself asks, “Having achieved the transcending objective stance of science, has [the scientist] also transcended the mortal condition?” ([1975] , 108). The answer, of course, is no.

The entire spectacular history of modern science seemed to bear out [scientists’] unspoken assumption that there was indeed something to be known out there [in the world] and it was worth the effort to try to find out what it was. Yet the natural scientists, with all their understanding of interactions, energy exchanges, stimuli, and responses, could not seem to utter a single word about what men did and what they themselves were doing: observing and recording, telling and listening, uttering sentences and hearing sentences, writing papers and reading papers, delivering lectures, listening to the six o'clock news, writing a letter to one's daughter in college. (Percy [1975] , 34)

In other words, science could address the situations of human organisms in an Umwelt, undergoing dyadic relations, but science could not address the experience of a human being in a Welt, an individual in a world of triadic relations. It seems that scientists (subjects) had a hard time understanding objects (their fellow human beings) because those human beings were also subjects. For Percy, this led to a kind of incoherence in science, especially the human sciences:

There are…incoherences in [the] sciences of man. Sociology and cultural anthropology have to do with groups and cultures, with people; this is to say, human organisms. But sociology deals with such things as self, roles; anthropology with such things as sorcery, rites. But how do you get from organism to roles and rites? (, 276)

This, for Percy, is the elephant in the room, the great unspoken or unremarked problem: how do you get from descriptions of the human being as organism (physiology, anatomy) to descriptions of the human being as an individual that takes on roles and engages in rites? How do you transition from the dyadic description of a human being to a triadic description of a human being engaging in triadic behavior?

This is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because science, an undertaking that elucidates dyadic relationships, is not sufficiently equipped to elucidate triadic relationships. Any attempt to do so leads, according to Percy, to incoherence, an incoherence that arises “when the natural sciences, so spectacularly successful in addressing the rest of the cosmos, address man himself. I am speaking of such sciences as psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, developmental anthropology, sociology” (, 273). Here, I, the author, would add neuroscience.

Neuroscience is the contemporary attempt to bridge the gap between the dyadic and the triadic, between neurotransmitter levels (dyadic) and human behavior (triadic), between biology (dyadic) and psychology (possibly triadic). But consider what we study in a freshman psychology class: “neurones [sic], signals, synapses, transmitter substance, central nervous system, brain, mind, personality, self, consciousness, and later such items as ego, superego, archetypes.” (Percy , 273)

The words early in the list refer to things and events which can be seen or measured, like neurones [sic], which are cells one can see through a microscope, or signals, which are transmissions of electrical energy, which one can measure, along a nerve fiber. The later words, like “self,” “ego,” “consciousness,” refer to items that cannot be seen as things or measured as energy exchanges. They can only be described by some such words as “mental” or “mind.” (Percy , 273–74)

We have all read books that purport to show us how anything “mental” can be reduced to some kind of brain activity. Now, everything a human being does or experiences is correlated to brain activity. The question is whether it can be reduced to brain activity. Is “mind” nothing but the brain in action? In our age of science, the first answer that comes to the fore is “Yes, mind can be reduced to brain activity. In fact, it is nothing more or other than brain activity.” And here, Walker Percy would vehemently disagree. He would posit that science and scientists cannot say such a thing because they do not come equipped to do so. To stretch the dyadic process of science into the triadic realm of things such as mind and language is scientism. As he himself says, what he opposes “is the imperial decree of scientism (not of science) to discredit other ways of knowing” (, 194). Science is expert at examining and elucidating dyadic entities and operations: photosynthesis, chemical bonds, black holes, and so on. However, it overreaches itself when it attempts to reduce the triadic to the dyadic and moreover undermines its own integrity by positing the dyadic explanation as a complete explanation of a triadic event. As Percy remarks, “my purpose here is not to challenge science in the name of humanism. Scientists are used to and understandably unimpressed by such challenges. No, my purpose is rather to challenge science, as it is presently practiced by some scientists, in the name of science” (, 272).

It is a concern for the integrity of science that moves Percy to write what he writes. He is neither an antievolutionist nor a religious radical. He is certainly not antiscience. But he is concerned that science is losing its way as science. Furthermore, I think he would add that part of certain people's strong reactions against science result from scientists overstepping the boundaries of their sciences. The first example of this that comes to mind is, of course, Richard Dawkins. He may be qualified to talk about biology, but he is in no way, shape, or form qualified to talk about religion qua scientist. He is, however, qualified to talk about it inasmuch as any private citizen is qualified to talk about religion.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to show three ways in which the thought of Walker Percy, Catholic, physician, and novelist (although we did not talk about his novels here) is relevant to religion and science. The first of Percy's contributions was his distinction between Umwelt and Welt. The upshot of this idea is that while the natural sciences are qualified to talk about a human being as an organism in an environment (Umwelt), the natural sciences are not equipped to deal with a human being as a symbol‐user in a world of symbols (Welt).

The reason for this limitation on the part of natural science was its inability to describe events in any terms other than dyadic ones, such as cause and effect. According to Percy (and Peirce), as a result of language (especially the capacity of naming) humans engage the world through symbols, thus creating a triadic relationship among human, event, and name. A fairly simple example of this is the statement, “that is bread.” The dyadic response to the presentation of bread is to eat it. The triadic response to the presence of bread is to name it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Percy, this failure to understand the difference between dyadic and triadic behavior in human beings causes extremely grave problems for the human sciences (psychology, anthropology, and so on) because the scientists in these fields, who are triadic creatures or subjects, are trying to study and understand other triadic creatures (human beings) as if they were objects and thus reducible to dyadic interpretation when, in fact, the human being can only be understood triadically. Thus, one might picture the conflicts that arise between practitioners of science and practitioners of religion as a conflict between triadic creatures that are trying to explain the world dyadically (i.e., scientists) and triadic creatures that are trying to explain the world triadicaly (such as a practitioner of religion). Perhaps by acknowledging these conflicting perspectives, a new discussion about or between “science” and “religion” can begin, because then we will really be talking about human existence.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Justin R. Warren for his help in writing this article.