Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian born chemist who made immense contributions to Chemistry and philosophy of science. His research fields included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and gas absorption. His pioneering discoveries developed the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in 1921. After his migration to England in 1933, he also served as aprofessor of social science at the University of Manchester. He was elected to Royal society in 1944. Two of his students and his son John Charles Polanyi won secure Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

His background both in chemistry and the humanities helped him develop a critical view of the superficial claims of natural sciences. He vehemently attacked positivism, a school of philosophy which held that only scientific knowledge is true and anything that is not verifiable is not true.

His famous book Science, Faith and Society (1946) claims that all knowledge claims are based on personal judgements. He argued that the assumptions that underlie positivism “are not only false, they undermine the commitments that motivate our highest achievements.” He advocated a fiduciary post-critical approach that emphasised that “we believe more than we can prove, and know more than we can say.” This is a recognition that knowledge is not a monopoly of the sciences. Rather in every form of knowledge there is an element of faith and personal commitment as well. Innovators have “risked their reputation by committing to a hypothesis.” For example, Copernicus’ observations concerning heliocentrism was not the result of any theory, but of “the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth.”

He rejected the ideas of Alan Turin, who was instrumental in paving way to the first computer, that minds can be reduced to a set of rules and laws. Though the DNA molecule cannot exist without its physical and chemical properties, it cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. Its properties are governed by higher-level ordering principles. Boundary conditions are determined by higher-level realities. The properties of higher-level realities are distinct from the lower levels that they emerge from. Consciousness is a higher-level principle.

Polanyi considers it a moral inversion to reduce the higher-level realities into lower-level realities, though this is the general scientific trend today. Polanyi calls this trend a “a pathology of the modern mind.” Though it may be harmless in sciences, it creates nihilism and meaningless in humanities. Marxism is such an inversion for Polanyi.

He participated in Christian prayer services regularly. He considered worship as search for the knowledge of God. “God cannot be observed, any more than truth or beauty can be observed. He exists in the sense that He is to be worshipped and obeyed, but not otherwise; not as a fact—any more than truth, beauty or justice exist as facts. All these, like God, are things which can be apprehended only in serving them.”