Science and Spirituality

A Sacred Mode of Inquiry:
Reconciling Science and Spirit

by Rick Charnes

The place where science and spirit meet is among the most powerful and fertile of the world's landscapes. Just as the world's swampy areas where water meets land are the birthplace of many unusual and wonderful creatures, the intersection of science and spirit is an important power-point for humanity, an incubator to much of what may lie ahead for us.

Yet there is such a chasm between the two dimensions, and this rift is inscribed deeply into Western culture. We might even see it as our mind/body split writ large into our epistemological systems. Healing this split -- which itself occupies many dimensions -- might also provide a theoretical ground for Tikkun's current concern to foster a spiritual politics, since politics is a form of scientific endeavor.

One of reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs may be the tendency of mainstream science to distrust reality and experience which can not be empirically repeated and verified. Furthermore, the traditional methodology of science is concern with 'facts' shorn of subjective value, and its subject matter is, of course, 'matter' -- seen in western cultures as dead and without agency or consciousness. Certainly our economy -- based on maximizing profit from the extraction of natural materials from the earth and their subsequent transformation into commodities for market exchange -- reinforces this latter view. Since science has so willingly been deployed to facilitate this process of capital accumulation, it's not unreasonable to assume that institutionally science would develop a blind spot about seeing spiritual value in this 'lower' world that is its subject.

Conversely, many of the world's monotheistic religions were born in struggle against earth-based animist paganism and have focused on the transcendental and the moral arena. Modern religious systems have generally not yet expanded the domain of their systems of moral consideration to include the non-human world. In their search for the world of spirit, they often look heavenward for their deity and away from the physical and visible worlds, the turf they agree to cede to science. Therefore, as with science, religion too has difficulty in honoring the sacredness of matter and biological life. It likewise cannot imagine that the tools of science with its concern for factual proof could provide empirical verification for its spiritual worldview.

Photo by Rick Charnes

Of course many of us collude in this game of separation. We often act in agreement with the notion that matter and facts are inert, spirit and value are alive. Science produces our labor-saving devices, and then our religious observance is reserved for weekends. We 'know' that what science and our senses tell us is true, but sometimes have 'faith' in the unseen. Science applies itself to the domain of the observable and verifiable, while religion lies in the realm of values and meaning. After all, who wants scientists making value judgments? -- that's for parents and theologians. We prefer our facts de-politicized, de-spiritualized and value-free. That'll allow us to isolate them in a segregated place in our mind and culture, and in the meantime we'll do our ethics and our religion elsewhere. After all, doesn't the separation of science and spirituality simply parallel our constitutional separation of church and state?

Yet is it possible that that very separation of fact and value may also be implicated in the bifurcation of spirituality and science?

We all wonder how this schism could have occurred: so many scientists are motivated by the same spiritual 'awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe' that draws us to Tikkun. And many of the newer scientific paradigms such as quantum mechanics confirm the perspective of many of the Eastern religions, seeing matter, energy and intelligence as inevitably intertwined. Is it possible, then, that it is not so much science's methodology that pulls it away from spirit, but rather its tendency to be placed in the service of profit and empire? These latter projects often enclose science within an ideology that forces it to objectify its field of study.

Clearly, one of the most important arenas where we can see this separation played out is in the current political battles over evolution. Though many of us see the ongoing process of evolution as among the most beautiful and spiritually evocative of world events, when scientists present it -- particularly in its popularized form -- as being driven primarily by a process of blind and random mutation, who can fault those attracted to a worldview of creationism in which matter is indeed seen to be guided by spirit?

This perspective of 'creation' is a world in which there is explicit and acknowledged meaning. It's often said that science asks 'how' but cannot ask 'why', which question remains the exclusive domain of religion. Science has been able to offer an analysis of causality but not meaning. Tikkun's most important contribution to the world, on the other hand, is its Politics of Meaning, which engages the subjective element which is always pregnant with the possibility of acting as a bridge between the political and the personal, spiritual and the psychological. Perhaps this focus offers a way to bridge the gap as well between science and spirit, fact and value.

What if we began to understand the work of scientists as including an explicit participation in humanity's search for meaning? Then we could allow ourselves to ask: 'What is the meaning of matter, of biological life, of trees, of the stars?' in a way that it becomes simultaneously a scientific and theological concern. A spiritually receptive scientific methodology could itself revolve around a sacred mode of inquiry into these ultimate issues. That is, we may be able to develop a science that would not only acknowledge the sacredness of its subject matter, but in which the very ways that scientific questions are posed, and the methods used to answer them, would themselves emerge from and reflect a place of sanctity. Such questions could then begin to bridge the gap between spirit and matter, religion and science.