The processes and content (and discontent) of science is my principal source of spiritual stimulation.
This site, an endless essay, (and attendant links) has given rise to my virtual Wunderkammer,
Enspired Resources and Websites, and the epiphenomenally emergent
“I have made this letter so long only because
I have not had the leisure to make it shorter”
(attributed to Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, XVI.)
Science and the Spirit
Neil Greenberg
This site houses an evolving essay — as in all evolutionary processes it is not possible to predict where it will lead although sometimes one particular direction or another seems evident. Here I collate and try to integrate evidence for and against my sense that science and religion not only share common origins in the human spirit –but common goals.
“. . . I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind.
If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . .
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
(C.D. Lewis, The Poetic Image in Rico, 1983:29)
SCIENCE and RELIGION appear to be warring over the “truth,” treating it more like a possession than a process. As a teacher I have found that some “truths” are stepping stones to others and whether particulars or generalities they are also often stepping stones to each other. As a scientist I’m frequently concerned with the validity of data and beliefs. Seeking fulfillment –spiritual growth– in a community of like-minded colleagues I reflect frequently on how much of what I feel and believe is discovered or is invented and how and why some of those feelings and beliefs make me feel very, very good.
Frequently, argument is evaded by regarding science and religion as alternative perspectives or ways of knowing. BUT from what I believe about the workings of the mind, it seems more likely to me that they are really integral part of each other. They are not simply complementary alternatives — each with a piece of the truth, needing to be fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle– they are reciprocally related to one another such that as they alternate back and forth in their view, they influence each other in ways that progressively enlarges and enhances understanding. These reciprocating influences of WHY and WHAT blend our perceptions together so completely that by the time we realize what is being perceived they have become inextricable parts of each other.
“The senses cannot think. The understanding cannot see.” said Immanuel Kant (in CPR) and “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” said Albert Einstein (1941), but sometimes these domains are wholly unaware of each other: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of,” wrote Pascal (in Pensées, 1670; see Pascal Note)
Because we are biological beings, it could not be otherwise, Mind-Heart-Mind -Heart-Mind . . . in progressive spiraling around each other, connected by bridges of insight when “the chemistry is right,” recalling the twin threads of DNA, the constituent nucleotides of which are connected by complementary base pairs of mutual molecular need. Their war –such as it is— is little more than the war we frequently wage with ourselves (“my heart says one thing and my mind another!” recalling Pascal). But thought is little if anything without action, and the point at which one acts reflects the point at which this process of enlarging understanding is intercepted. Like most great and potentially dangerous forces of nature we have taken pains to institutionalize our impulses –including those dominated by our spiritual as well as our scientific sides. If there is a war, it is between these artificial institutions, and as in all wars, one side apotheosizes their point of view while vilifying or demonizing the other.
These exaggerations can be –and have been– pathological (many pathologies are exaggerations of otherwise normal functions) and at its most hurtful when the two sides lose sight of their most important common denominators — their origins and goals. At this point they are alienated from each other. AND when that war is within ourselves, we become alienated from ourselves. Less whole. And more needing of religion in its ancient sense or re – ligare — to bind back together that which has been rent apart. (In 1992, Pope John Paul II absolved Galileo of his sins. In October 1996, the 80 member Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) held its 60th anniversary meeting on the theme “Evolution and the Origins Of Life.” Although a certain conciliation with Darwin was evident in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, it was John Paul who took the occasion of the October PAS meeting to declare that while the soul is undeniably of divine origin, the theory of natural selection was “more than just a hypothesis.”) Pope John Paul II comments on Darwin’s theory
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Some of the most eloquent interactions between mind and spirit are found in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the relationship between science and poetry was seen in two ways. Those who were alarmed by the new scientific empiricism held that science and poetry were polar opposites of the human spirit, making incommensurate and conflicting demands on our sensibilities and talents.
[perhaps because science claims knowledge of details of the world that lay beyond ordinary sensory experience or even common sense, it seemed to be challenging the validity of what it could not detect–including the human heart and spirit]
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities.
(Edgar Allan Poe, “To Science”)
“The real antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.”
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
here was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalog of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine–
Unweave a rainbow
(Keats)
Opposing this duelist view were the unitarians, who argued that science and poetry were merely different aspects of a single creative process whose manifestations were joined in an uneasy yet vital coexistence. (Hoare, Michael Rand. 1987. Alone Together. (essay review) The Sciences Jan/Feb 1987; 27(1):52-58 (p.54).) This is the view I wish to develop.
Many yearned for, believed in an underlying unity — “The science of Goethe and the Romantics, called nature philosophy, was visionary and global; their aim was to create nothing less than grand unified syntheses of physical and spiritual realities.
Goethe even went so far as to insist that “truth, like divinity, is never to be known directly”–that it would always elude experiment and analysis (Hoare 1987:56).
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IS THERE EVIDENCE for the view of the Romantic Nature Philosophers?
Could the two old adversaries –spirit and reason– be, in fact, siblings? I think so, if we believe they have a common origin.
And is there a chance for reconciliation? I think so, if we believe they have common goals.
There are three threads I’ve picked up:
One of common origins –the roots of each preserved in language;
One of common experience –feelings shared; and
One of common goals –human NEEDS met.
EXHIBIT 1: COMMON ORIGINS: Clues from the archaeology of meaning
WORDS are NOT trivial: As Aldous Huxley put it, they “are the instruments of thought; they form the channel along which thought flows; they are the moulds in which thought is shaped. It has been said that A MIND, ONCE STRETCHED BY AN IDEA (like a heart, once stretched by love) WILL NEVER REGAIN ITS FORMER SHAPE: Am Ende hangen wir ab von den creaturen die wir machten (“in the end we are dependent upon the creatures we have made” – Faust.) In his essay, “The Poet,” Emerson regarded words as “Fossil Poetry” –inventions to express something that could not be otherwise communicated. They are the ARTIFACTS of a CREATIVE PROCESS — they are WORKS OF ART, and can be appreciated as such.
There are two words that figure prominently in both feelings about the spirit and thinking about reason: They are fused in what some feel is the oxymoronic term “THEOLOGY.” “The science of things divine” . . . from Gk. theos, god, and logos, doctrine. THEOS, of course, refers to god and is still represented in the idea of ENTHUSIASM, inspired or possessed, from en theos, composed of en (to be in the power of) and theos, (god). This is interesting, but my first inkling of the spiritual power of words was my exploration of the second part of “THEOLOGY“ — LOGOS, which is “WORD” in its Greek form,:
This is part of its story: About the time the Kingdom of Judah was coming to an end and the Jews were being carried off into Babylonian exile, a new way of looking of the world was emerging along the western coast of Asia Minor: In the commercial-crossroads city of Miletus, about 600 BC, Thales of Miletus (who devised the first abstract geometry, studied electric and magnetic phenomena, brought Babylonian astronomy to the Greeks) believed that rather than a random, chaotic, erratic universe at the mercy of capricious gods that could be swayed by human prayer, there are “laws of nature:” fixed rules which create an order in the universe. Thales believed that the universe was rational and that its laws were knowable and valid everywhere. The Greeks –often regarded as the originators of science– regard Thales as the father of science. About a generation later, in the nearby city of EPHESUS (about a day from Miletus) one of THALES’ followers, HERACLITUS of Ephesus, used the term “LOGOS“ to represent the rational principle according to which the world was created. As the term, logos, came to be used by Greek philosophers it represented not only an abstract principle, but a personification of the principle –a rational, creative god in its own right. (see Logos note)
This creative rationality of LOGOS was the view of John when he was writing his gospel in Ephesus: In this same city that HERACLITUS used the Greek word LOGOS to refer to the rational structure of knowledge, St. John wrote “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The WORD as used by John was, however, LOGOS, and in Greek these words were almost a mantra: “an arcane han ho logos.” The first four words as represented in the Latin bible —In principio erat verbum— were long regarded as the most sacred single verse in the Bible
So logos was first the universal and eternal law of nature, the cornerstone of science, and then the universal and eternal one God –universal and eternal deified.
A SECOND WORD that appears at both the heart of scientific and spiritual thinking refers to Vision (“do you see what I mean, do you see the light”). “THEO” refers to a deity, but “THEA” — is related more to sight than to god, and in particular, a unique kind of vision — it is at the heart of the Greek theoria: from “a view (from within a temple) of the Divine mysteries,” it gradually shifted to meaning “a state of fervent religious contemplation” — then, “as the Pythagoreans channeled religious fervor into intellectual fervor, ritual ecstasy into the ecstasy of discovery, Theoria gradually changed into “theory” in the modern sense (Koestler. The Sleepwalkers, p37.) — As the root of the word “theory,” theoria appeals to the scientific part of my Unitarian disposition because the essence of science is creative theorizing and testing.
And for a scientist –as for an ecstatic Orphic priest— to theorize is find yourself at THE BOUNDARY between the known and the unknown. Many researchers find themselves drawing on spiritual reserves precisely at this time of pulling away from the herd, being alone with a new vision of your little part of reality, and finding a way to test your idea ands persuade others to join you.
This BOUNDARY always calls to mind what has become for me one of the most powerful metaphors for the yoking of the growth of scientific understanding with the growth of a spiritual sensibility: Imagine a great sphere filled –illuminated from within– with our knowledge –floating in an endless dark space. The surface of this sphere is the boundary between the known and the unknown. As this sphere grows from the increase in knowledge within, so also grows its boundary with mystery. Regard this idea in concert with your recollection of Einstein’s well-known reflection on the mysterious: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
EXHIBIT 2: COMMON EXPERIENCE: reports from the front lines.
“Science that deals with the divine” must necessarily deal with a part of experience that is inaccessible to public scrutiny, it must be unvalidated, uncertain, cannot be measured- It is known only as an external shadow of an internal experience. Our confidence in its reality is a combination of some inkling of it within ourselves and the cumulative reports of many who have experienced it directly –however, here is a place where language is an utter failure:
Countless words (see Mandell Note) have been used to describe or define this experience it and the state it engenders. But these words are used less to describe than to indicate the direction from which the event may be approached. Some words and phrases seem to overlap, others are unique.
IS Dostoevski’s “eternal harmony” the same as Maslow’s “peak experience” or the Zen Buddhist’s “satori” or the yogi’s “samadhi”? Is it Buddha’s “awakening” the same as Jung’s “individuation?” Is the “luminosity” of the Tibetan Book of the Dead the same as the Quaker’s “inner light” or Jacob Boehme’s “light which is the heart of God” or the “living flame” of Saint John of the Cross? Is Saint Paul’s “peace that passeth understanding” the same as Thomas Merton’s “transcendental unconscious”? Could Blake’s “divine intuition” be linked to Gurdjieff’s “objective consciousness” or Brother Lawrence’s “unclouded vision” or Arthur Deikman’s “deautomatization”? How are Arthur Clarke’s “overmind” and Emerson’s “Oversoul” related? Could Colin Wilson’s “intensity experience,” Eliade’s “shamanic ecstasy,” and Saint Teresa’s “ecstasy” be the same as the LSD explorer’s “moment of truth” or Meyerhoff’s peyote-induced “mystic vision,” Or how about what Julian Silverman (writing of acute schizophrenia) called “the oceanic fusion of higher and lower referential processes”? Might all these be a manifestation of one part or another of the neurophysiological “drive-arrest-release sequence in biogenic amine inhibitory systems, releasing temporal lobe limbic, hippocampal-septal hypersynchrony that lasts for long periods of afterdischarge?”
Such experiences are not unknown to scientists: Is Archimedes’ “Eureka!“ the same as Freud’s oceanic “Aha!” Or the “spontaneous restructuring“ of reality described by Gestalt psychologists (See Gestalt Note). “. . . nothing holds me; I will indulge my sacred fury!” shouted Kepler when announcing his discovery of the Third Law (Polanyi 1958). The chemist / philosopher Polanyi speaking from personal experience: “The personal participation of the knower in the knowledge he believes himself to possess takes place within a flow of passion. We recognize intellectual beauty as a guide to discovery and as a mark of truth” (1958:300).
We seem motivated to find ourselves at the same time as we seek our place in –and union with– creation, the Kosmos : I am in the most personal sympathy with C. P. Snow’s exclamation: “It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and finding it had become for a moment a part of the truth I sought…” (C..P. Snow in The Search cited by Judson). Byron said ‘I live not in myself, but I become a portion of that around me.’ (Taylor p115) This experience, sometimes termed an ‘intensity experience’ (and with others, collected in Marghanita Laski’s (1961) book Ecstasy, Cresset Press, London). In such cases what these scientists may have experienced is much (or all) of the “mystic” fusion and altered ego boundaries of a spiritual seeker finding what is sought. (Recalling Elie Wiesel’s Night, Moshe was leading young Elie to that transcendent moment where “questions and answers become one.“)
Scientific passion serves also as a guide in the assessment of what is of higher and what of lesser interest; what is great in science, and what is relatively slight. And the passion is generally comensurrate with the depth of one’s sense of mystery and the urgency, the “rage” to know, as Judson put it. “Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery” (Claude Bernard). Is this the “endemic ecstasy” of primal unity? (Neitzche 1876). Is this normal ? One literary scholar compared the schizophrenic’s loss of self to the ecstatic surrender of self (“the delights of self-scattering”) found in the writings Rimbaud , Lautreamont, Genet, and Artaud, and which he contrasts with traditional literature, where the self exists as “an ordered and ordering presence.” In the former cases, he tells us, the coherence and boundedness of identity are burst asunder by the heterogeneity of desublimated pre-oedipal desire, with its polymorphous yearnings and its urges toward fusion with the desired object (Bersani 1976 in Sass 1992:218-219). Wow! The poetry of jargon! (but all words are “fossil poetry” -Emerson). The intensity experience of a mystic or scientist might hinge, then, on a romantic fusion with something apparently outside one’s identity, with a dissolution of ego boundaries, or both –likely there is a more-or-less intense ebb and tide of identity with the corporeal world in which one could even be distanced from one’s body, or even mental processes that are centered at other neural sites within one’s brain. When the portals of consciousness are opened wider, as much may escape as enter.
EXHIBIT 3: COMMON GOALS: NEEDS
The great paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson once said, “The one thing that (scientists) do not and must not tolerate is disorder. The whole aim of theoretical science is to carry to the highest possible and conscious degree the perceptual reduction of chaos that began in so lowly and (in all probability) unconscious a way with the origin of life.” (1961)
A fundamental need served by both science and faith is The need for HARMONY, for ORDER. Einstein, writing of religious feeling, found it in the “. . . rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law . . .” (in Ideas and Opinions); to Thomas Aquinas this law was “. . .Reason, existing in the mind of God and governing the whole universe” (quoted by Fritjof Capra). William James wrote, “. . . the religious life consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (1902) This recalls the medieval ideal of harmony according to Joseph Campbell: “accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order and the good of the individual.” (1972). It is order and consistency that is at the heart of learning and reliable knowledge. It is central to our being and not surprising that we have devised such great institutions to serve this need.
ENVOI
There are many other powerful connections between religion and science beyond those explored here: they study each other. We have learned much about the biological advantages to individuals that possess a spiritual faith (see adaptation note) and a sense of belonging to a community of like believers; and the advantages that accrue to whole populations that are bound or integrated by a religious organization. We have come to understand much about the biology of peak experiences individuals may experience –how changes in the nervous system in concert with our hormones can be both cause and consequence of certain kinds of powerful experiences, particularly when they are tinted by mystery or ambiguity.
I hope I have encouraged confidence in the view that science and spirit are NOT merely complementary –alternative valid perceptions of the world– but in fact part of each other. I alluded earlier to one of the roots of the term “religion” — re-ligare, to re-ligate; to restore the ties that bind, to tie one to the other and make it whole. If the parts of our psyches that need to be restored to each other are science and spirit, religion may be the healing idea. Perhaps an idea whose time has come, but for each of us, one by one. Paraphrasing Walt Whitman,
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who
shall be complete.
the earth remains jagged and broken to him or her
who remains jagged and broken
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. notes:
Pascal Note: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of,” (Pensées, 1670, sect. 4, no. 277: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”)
Keats Note: Lamia: II, 229-237: Keats contrasted the truth of beauty and the life of the imagination with the cold dissecting hand of science. According to Ifor Evans (1954, Literature and Science) he had Newton in mind when he wrote these lines.
Logos Note: Logos means order permeating the universe; KOSMEO means to “order” or “arrange” so that Kosmos means the “universe” because it is perfectly “arranged:” Thus, cosmopolitan means world citizen. (Funk, WO); Also, “order” or “good arrangement” –the opposite of CHAOS— cosmic rays were so named (in 1925) because they seemed to come from all over, not just one place (also, cosmetics relate to “good arrangement”) (Asimov, WM).) When the Jews after the Exile worked to justify Jewish thought in Greek terms, they used the term “Wisdom” to represent the Greek “Logos” except that it also encompassed a transcendent, inner spiritual element. And “Wisdom” as an attribute of Yahweh is used often in the Bible in that sense (Proverbs 8:22, 8:23, Ecclesiasticus 24:9, Wisdom of Solomon 1:6, 7:22, Luke 11:49).) Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path (Psalms 99:105).)
Theoria Note. “Pythagoras gave a new meaning to theoria; he reinterpreted it as the passionless contemplation of rational unchanging truth, and converted the way of life into a ‘pursuit of wisdom’; (philosophia). The way of life is still also a way of death; but now it means death to the emotions and lusts of this vile body, and a release of the intellect to soar into the untroubled empyrean of theory.” (F.M. Cornford 1912/1957. From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation Harper, N.Y.) Cornford emphasizes that Pythagorian theoria (especially contemplation of the heavens) should not be confounded with Ionian theoria, meaning curiosity — this is what led Solon to travel the world as a spectator.
Mystery Note: I first heard of the metaphor of the expanding circle of knowledge from Irwin Chargoff. Good science adds to our awareness of ignorance by raising more questions that it answers. “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” (Lewis Thomas; cited by Ferris 1988:383). The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance–the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. (Karl Popper in “Conjectures and Refutations” 1968:28; cited by Ferris, 1988:383) Every bit of new knowledge raises up even more new mystery, makes one’s need for faith even greater (Einstein). Einstein’s (1941) quote echoing Kant was in “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium” ch. 13)
Mandell Note: Arnold J. Mandell’s (1980) “Toward a Psychobiology of Transcendence: God in the Brain” (in JM & RJ Davidson’s The Psychobiology of Consciousness, N.Y., Plenum Press) is a good starting point for an exploration of the biology of religious experience.
Archimedes Note: (287-212 BCE) was probably the greatest scientist until Newton.. He was an aristocrat taught in Alexandria by a student of Euclid. Was said to be excited beyond belief when he discovered, whilst bathing, the principle of buoyancy –he could compare volume to weight and thereby infer density).
Gestalt Note: See Robert W. Weisberg’s discussion of “the ‘Aha!’ Myth” in Creativity: Genius and other Myths Freeman, San Francisco, 1986).
Adaptation Note: see Daniel Dennett‘s essay review of Walter Burkert’s Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions ( in The Sciences, Jan/Feb 1997, pp. 39-45), Roy A. Rappaport‘s (1971) article, “The Sacred in Human Evolution” (in: Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 2, pp. 23-44) and Lionel Tiger‘s essay review of Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner’s book, The Biology of Religion. (in The Sciences, Mar/Apr 1985, pp. 61-63). On 30 Jan 1997, Frank Miele of SKEPTIC expanded the list of references relating religion in evolution in a HBE-L posting: Alexander, R. The Biology of Moral Systems. (NY: Aldine, 1987). esp. Ch. 4 – “Applying the Biological View of Morality;” Anders, T. The Evolution of Evil (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1994); Mithen, S. The Prehistory of the Mind – The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science (NY: Thames & Hudson, 1996) esp. Ch. 9, “The Big Bang of Human Culture: the Origins of Art & Religion;” Oubre, A. Instinct and Revelation – Reflections on the Origins of Numinous Perception (Gordon & Breech, 1996); Reynolds, V. “The Socioecology of Religion,” Ch. 12 in Maxwell, M. The Sociobiological Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991); Wilson, E.O. On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978) esp. Ch. 8, “Religion.” While they do not deal with evolution per se, it might be interesting to some students to apply evolutionary reasoning to the information described in: Campbell, J. The Masks of God (4 vols) (NY: Viking, 1968); Carus, P. The Prehistory of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1980 – reprint of 1900 edition); Russell, J. B. The Prince of Darkness – Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ Press, 1988). (A summary of Russell’s 4 previous book on the subject). see HEALING FAITH, HEALING SCIENCE, assorted comments on the adaptive significance of faith and religion as biological traits.
Religion Note: We are social animals and we (and our beliefs) are largely socially constructed, socialized by countless experiences within our cultural contexts — religions are societies in which experiences are sought to socialize our spirit and put its immense motive force — derived from the need to self-actualize — in each other’s service, implementing the altruistic agenda of inclusive fitness –a kind of enlightened self-interest in which it appears that “we are never more fully ourselves than when in the company of others” . |
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. LINKS RELATED TO “SCIENCE and the SPIRIT”
A progress report on this project was presented at the Westside Unitarian Universalist Church of Knoxville, Tennessee, on 8 December, 1996: The War Between Science and Religion: Sibling Rivalry and Reconciliation. Another presentation in a similar spirit, Secular Spirituality, was presented at Westside by Tom Innes, visiting from Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (also of Knoxville).
Several week later: Comments by the Pope alluded to can be viewed at The London Times internet edition of Oct. 25, 1996 (“Pope places some faith in Darwin’s theory“)
Other websites related to these topics include excerpts and multiple reviews of George Johnson’s FIRE IN THE MIND: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, and his essay reviews of Robert Wright’s THREE SCIENTISTS AND THEIR GODS: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, and Frank J. Tipler’s THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. See also Richard Dawkin’s view of the biology of religion: Do we need God to be good?
WHAT happens when SCIENCE and BELIEFS COLLIDE? Science reporter Janet Raloff observed that A large and growing share of the population rejects aspects of science
Adaptationism: Is religion a behavioral pattern that can be viewed much like other biological traits as contributing more or less to fitness in the individuals and populations that manifest it? I attempt to collate the evidence in “Healing Faith, Healing Religion“ . |
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Technical notes for webpage development:
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Dec 15, 2005
