We err when we suppose that, "Science is not just omnicomptetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking."  Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher who died a few years ago, appreciated science.

    As should we all.  But Midgley understood science's limitations very well.  She knew that when a society elevates science, a discipline that does not seek to know what is moral or what the world means, but simply how the world works, to a position of unquestioned rational and moral authority, it loses its sense of what is possible.  It loses its sense of what is possible for beings like us who are moral and believing animals to learn in a vast and often bewildering world.

    And in so doing, science misses the larger point.  Unless the world is regarded as something more than "what is," we have no basis to know what it means.

    There is rationality, and there is morality.  And neither can be understood without the other.