What Science Cannot Name
On Piano Music, the Sea of Galilee, and the End of Scientism
There is a piano piece by Siddhartha Khosla called “Preparations,” from the soundtrack to the Hulu series Paradise. It runs about four minutes. I want you to stop reading this and go listen to it before you continue.
I mean it. Close this tab, find it, and sit with it. The whole thing. No multitasking.
Listen to “Preparations” by Siddhartha Khosla
Welcome back.
Now tell me: what happened to you?
Not what your auditory cortex processed. Not what frequencies entered your ear canal. Not which neurotransmitters fired in which sequence. I do not want the mechanical account. I want to know what happened to you.
Because something did. If you sat still and let it, something moved. The crescendo near the middle of the piece does not merely increase in volume. It reaches. It pulls you outward, past the edges of yourself, past the cold surface of ordinary experience, into a space that has no name in any neuroscience textbook. You were, for a moment, somewhere else. Somewhere larger.
And here is the question that I cannot stop asking: Where were you?
The Mechanism Is Not the Meaning
I am not a scientist. I am a 67-year-old grandfather on a farm in Oklahoma who has walked with Jesus for nearly fifty years. But I have spent enough time reading and thinking and arguing to know the standard materialist response to what I just described.
It goes something like this: “What you experienced was a dopamine release triggered by predictable harmonic patterns. Your brain evolved to find certain tonal progressions pleasurable because auditory pattern recognition was adaptive for early hominids. The ‘transcendence’ you felt is an electrochemical event. Beautiful, in its way, but ultimately reducible to biology.”
I want to be fair to that account. It is not entirely wrong. There are measurable neurological correlates to the experience of music. Dopamine does fire. The auditory cortex does process tonal patterns. fMRI machines can light up and show you which parts of your brain are active when the crescendo hits.
But here is where scientism, the ideology that insists only measurable phenomena count as real knowledge, runs into the wall it has spent three centuries pretending does not exist.
Describing the mechanism is not the same as accounting for the meaning.
You can map every neuron that fires when a father holds his newborn child. You have not thereby explained love. You can trace every electrical impulse in my brain when I hear “Preparations.” You have not thereby explained why it made my heart swell with each note, or why I felt like being I was being tearfully drawn closer to something holy, or why the word “holy” even occurs to me in the first place.
The mechanism is the how. But the what, the actual experience of being pulled outward and upward toward a reality you cannot see but know is there, that remains untouched by the explanation. Scientism does not refute transcendence. It simply lacks the vocabulary to discuss it. And then, fatally, it mistakes its own silence on the subject for evidence that there is nothing to discuss.
A Man Walking by a Lake
When I listened to “Preparations,” something happened that I did not plan or construct. An image arrived, unbidden, fully formed, as vivid as memory.
Jesus. Walking along the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Alone, but not alone. Speaking quietly with His Father. The morning light on the water. The hills beyond. The world He made sitting in front of Him, doing what it was made to do: existing in the warmth of its Creator’s gaze.
And this music playing underneath it all.
I know what the materialist will say. I know the objection. “You were raised Christian. Of course your brain reaches for that image. It is cultural conditioning, not revelation.”
Fine. Let us take that seriously for a moment. Let us say my cultural formation explains why I reached for that particular image. It does not explain the reaching itself. It does not explain why human beings, across every culture, every era, every continent, every language, have the experience of being drawn outward by beauty toward something beyond the material. The Psalms describe it. The Japanese call it mono no aware. The Greeks built entire philosophical systems around it. Aboriginal Australians sang it into their creation narratives.
This is not a quirk of Western religious conditioning. This is a species-wide phenomenon. Human beings encounter beauty and feel summoned. Summoned by what? Summoned to where?
Scientism has no answer. It cannot even frame the question without stepping outside its own boundaries, because the question is not about mechanism. It is about purpose. It is about direction. When the crescendo swells and something inside you says yes, there it is, that is what I have been longing for, what is the “it” and what is the “there”?
What Scientism Cannot Do
I wrote recently about the intellectual collapse of scientism as a totalizing worldview. This is the companion piece to that argument, because the failure of scientism is not merely philosophical. It is experiential. It is felt in the bones.
Scientism cannot explain why the universe is beautiful rather than merely functional. Natural selection does not require sunsets. Evolution does not need the particular shade of gold that hits an Oklahoma wheat field at 6:47 in the evening in late July. These things exceed any survival calculus. They are, in the strictest Darwinian sense, gratuitous. Unnecessary. Lavish beyond any adaptive requirement.
Scientism cannot explain why beauty produces longing. If aesthetic experience is merely a byproduct of pattern recognition, the appropriate response to a beautiful piece of music should be cognitive satisfaction, the way you feel when you solve a math problem. But that is not what happens. What happens is ache. A reaching. A homesickness for a place you have never been but somehow recognize.
C.S. Lewis named this Sehnsucht. He borrowed the German because English did not have a word precise enough. It is the inconsolable longing that beauty awakens, the sense that the beautiful thing is not the destination but a signpost pointing beyond itself to something you cannot yet see.
And scientism cannot explain why that longing feels like it means something. Because meaning is not a category that fits inside the materialist framework. Meaning implies intention. Intention implies a mind behind the arrangement. And once you admit that the universe might be arranged by a mind, you have left scientism behind entirely.
The Ancient Claim
The Christian tradition has never been embarrassed by beauty. It has always known what to do with it.
The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they reveal knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)
For a 1st-century Jew shaped by this tradition, the beauty of the world was not a puzzle to be solved. It was a communication to be received. Creation speaks. It has something to say. And what it says, endlessly, in every sunset and every thunderstorm and every piano crescendo that makes your chest ache, is: Someone is here. Someone made this. And He made it for you.
Paul, writing to the church in Rome, put it even more bluntly: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20).
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say creation suggests God. He does not say creation hints at God. He says creation makes God’s invisible qualities clearly seen. The Greek is kathoratai, from kathorao: to perceive clearly, to see distinctly. This is not ambiguity. This is a claim that the created order is, by design, a revelation.
When a piano plays and something in you rises, you are not experiencing a neurochemical accident. You are receiving a message.
The Bet
The Inevitable End
I want to close with something honest. Something that might cost me some of my more cautious readers.
The end of scientism was inevitable.
We took a seventy-year journey with it. It had powerful advocates, brilliant minds, entire universities and research programs and publishing houses built on the premise that measurable phenomena are the only real phenomena. And to be fair, the journey was not without fruit. Science, the method, has given us antibiotics and satellites and a map of the human genome. I am not ungrateful.
But scientism, the ideology that says the method is the *whole story*, was always destined to break against the same rock. Because there are dimensions of being human that cannot be explained by any material process, and never will be. Not because we have not yet developed sophisticated enough instruments. Not because the research is incomplete. But because these dimensions do not originate within creation. They originate beyond it.
This is what the Christian tradition means by Imago Dei. The image of God stamped into the fabric of every human soul. The capacity to be seized by beauty. The longing for the eternal. The ache that has no earthly cure. The ability to hear a piano crescendo and know, with a certainty deeper than argument, that you are being addressed by something that transcends every molecule in the room.
These things are not evolutionary byproducts. They are not neurological glitches. They are the fingerprints of a Creator on His image-bearers. They transcend creation because they were designed by the Creator Himself, and no analysis of created things will ever fully account for them. You cannot explain the signature by studying only the ink on the canvas.
And here is the deepest reason scientism was always doomed: the created can never ascend to the Creator, no matter the desire. This is the lesson of Eden. It is the lesson of Babel. It is the lesson of every philosophical system and every technological ambition that has ever tried to close the gap between the human and the divine from below. The gap does not close from below. It never has. It never will.
It closes from above. By a Creator who descends.
That is the story of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Not humanity reaching upward, but God reaching down. The Incarnation is not a rescue plan bolted onto an otherwise self-sufficient creation. It is the point of the whole design. The reason the ache exists is that we were made for a relationship that only God can initiate, and He has.
The generation now coming of age knows the ache in their bones, even if they do not have the theological vocabulary to say it. We Boomers failed to hand down the legacy of faith. And because we failed, they are the most anxious, most medicated, most spiritually starved generation in American history. And they were raised inside the house that scientism built: a house with no windows.
But there is a promise older than their despair, and it speaks directly to their condition.
“You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)
That verse was written to Jewish exiles in Babylon, a people torn from everything familiar and deposited in a culture that worshiped other gods and operated by other rules. They were surrounded by a system that had no place for Yahweh. And into that displacement, God did not say “figure it out.” He did not say “the answers are within you.” He said: seek Me, and you will find Me. The condition is not intellectual sophistication. It is not theological credentials. It is wholeheartedness. A turning of the entire self toward the One who made it.
That is the key to the future for a generation drowning in information and starving for meaning. The meaning they are searching for is not an idea to be discovered. It is a Person to be found. And He has made Himself findable. Not through microscopes. Not through algorithms. Not through the accumulation of data. But through the ancient, simple, terrifying act of seeking Him with everything you have. The promise is not “seek and you might find.” The promise is “seek and you *will* find.” The God of creation has bound Himself to that commitment.
What they need is not more data. What they need is someone to tell them the truth: that the longing they feel when they hear something beautiful is not a malfunction. It is not a chemical accident. It is the most reliable instrument they possess. It is the homing signal of a soul that was made for God, and the promise of Jeremiah 29:13 says the signal leads somewhere real.
It is the sound of a world that was made by Someone, for something. And the Someone is still speaking.
Go listen to “Preparations” again. And this time, when the crescendo pulls you outward, do not resist it. Follow it. See where it leads.
I think you already know.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.