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Science and the Sacred Telescopes, Microscopes, and Hierophanies

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Science and the Sacred Telescopes, Microscopes, and Hierophanies Chapter 3 Science and the Sacred Telescopes, Microscopes, and Hierophanies The sacred is equivalent to a power and in the last analysis to reality. The sacred is saturated with Being. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey For an instant I thought of Wre; the next, I knew that the Wre was within myself. R. M. Bucke, quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience It’s the fourth day of a weeklong conference on star formation. More than one hundred Wfty astronomers from around the world are packed into a lecture hall on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Outside the day is blinding in its perfection. If you face west you can see the PaciWc Ocean. Face east, and you stare into a redwood forest. The sunlight is sharp in the cloudless sky. It would all be won- derful if any of us actually went outside to admire it. While the day is warm and bright and graced with a mild paciWc 57 UUC-Frank-1st_pps.inddC-Frank-1st_pps.indd 5577 66/8/2008/8/2008 111:00:421:00:42 AAMM 58 / The Map breeze, we are hunkered down in a stuVy room with the lights turned oV. For the past four days we have all but lived in the dark lecture hall as one PowerPoint slide after another clicks by. The paradox of the beautiful day outside and the darkened room inside is not lost on us. It has been a long week, and our brains are entering the oatmeal phase particular to conferences. We have sat through a multitude of talks with a multitude of equations and graphs with squiggly lines superposed on squiggly lines. Now it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, and you can feel the mental exhaustion settling in. We’re losing our focus. The current speaker Wnishes his presentation and a new one comes to the podium. After a moment of Wddling with the computer projector, an image appears on the large screen overhead. A collective and barely perceptible gasp crosses the room. Suddenly we are awake again. The Hubble space telescope image of a vast interstellar cloud hangs before us in bright hues of cobalt, scarlet, and jade. The cloud appears scalloped. Concentric rims of bright gas form terraces and towers that radiate from the center. A bright young star dominates the image and the cloud itself. Just a few hundred thousand years ago this massive sun was born from within the cloud. Now powerful winds and torrents of radiation stream oV the young star. Gusts of plasma and ultraviolet radiation reach across light-years, tearing the cloud apart, sculpting it into the variegated chaos we see before us. The image is stunning in its beauty and implied power. With this vision of cosmic birth and destruction we all, collectively, catch our breath. In an instant we are returned to the inspiration that brought us all to this job in the Wrst place. In the face of this image we are all kids again, standing under the night sky as it leans down hard on us and asks, “What am I?” . What happened to my colleagues and me in the instant the Hubble image Xashed on the screen? Was it simply a moment of intellectual excitement? Was it our reason excited by the possibility of new scien- tiWc insights and new intellectual conquests? Was it the excitement of UUC-Frank-1st_pps.inddC-Frank-1st_pps.indd 5588 66/8/2008/8/2008 111:00:421:00:42 AAMM Science and the Sacred / 59 our passion for astronomy and a rapid renewal of our lifelong interest in all things celestial? Was the experience related only to the life of the mind and the process of scientiWc activity? Scientists are not the only ones who catch their collective breath before these pictures. Hubble space telescope images have found their way into thousands of magazines, TV documentaries, and even grunge rock CD covers. There is something unique and powerful about these pictures, with their astonishing scale and detail. I have seen and felt moments like the one at the Santa Cruz star formation conference repeated many times among nonscientists when I give popular talks. The momentary hush and the gasp that follows are involuntary. There is an experience that is drawn out of these images, these fruits of sci- ence, that many people in the audience recognize as “spiritual” even if scientists would not call it such. I know this because they tell me so afterward. “It made me feel so small and yet part of something so much bigger,” a woman holding the hand of her Wve-year-old once said to me after a talk I gave on extrasolar planets. On another occasion, after a presentation on cosmology, a large, older man with a gruV manner approached me and said, “I have to tell you, I’m not religious, but some of those images make you feel like you’re staring at God.” The world can reveal itself to us in many ways. Some we recognize as lying within the domain of spiritual experience; some, outside that domain. Science is seen, especially by scientists, as lying in the latter camp. This is the root of the problem when it comes to renewing per- spectives on science and spiritual endeavor. We are born into a culture where the longing for spiritual understanding stands in opposition to the search for truths of the physical world. When intelligent and sensi- tive people speak of their experience of the world’s sacred character their language can only be directed toward the interior domains of spiritual life. There is no language for seeing their experience of the physical world, the domains of science, as part of a lived sense of their own spiritual dimensions. There is no language that allows people to see what happens in science as part of the continuum of human experi- UUC-Frank-1st_pps.inddC-Frank-1st_pps.indd 5599 66/8/2008/8/2008 111:00:421:00:42 AAMM 60 / The Map ence that makes life and Being sacred to us. This, to my mind, is a tragedy and a failure of both our imaginations and our memory. There is, I believe, another way to understand science and its relation to spiri- tual endeavor, a way that can draw them into an active, vibrant parallel without forcing jealous comparisons of their claims or results. We have already seen that the history of science and religion is more complex than simple stories of warfare. In spite of dangers from various camps in the Catholic (and Protestant) Church many Renaissance sci- entists had their own deeply spiritual or religious reasons for pursuing their investigations. The language of warfare between science and reli- gion became fully formed only during the early part of the twentieth century. Now it is the only language we expect. We have also seen that the battle lines are almost always drawn around results — what science says versus what religion says. Rarely do we see public discussion about other ways of taking on the issue. How about asking what religion calls to in individuals? Or better yet, what people experience when they have “religious” experiences? The emphasis on comparisons of Scriptures and doctrine on one side and scientiWc results on the other relentlessly narrows the discussion. There are other ways of looking at science, and there are other ways of looking at religion. The Wrst thing most people think about when they hear the term science and religion is a battle between science and the Judeo-Christian God. The God they imagine tends to be willful. “He” is the one people pray to and the one who intervenes on their behalf. Starting the con- versation from this point poses a real problem for many scientists, and I count myself among them. We scientists Wnd it diY cult to reconcile the absolute and timeless laws of science with a personal God who seems to step into and out of the picture. There is also an obvious problem with this take on science and religion: speciWc ideas about God vary among speciWc religions. The conception of Deity in Hinduism is vastly diVer- ent from that held by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And of course Buddhists do not even have a conception of God as such. Religion in the science and religion debate cannot just be about God because religions UUC-Frank-1st_pps.inddC-Frank-1st_pps.indd 6600 66/8/2008/8/2008 111:00:421:00:42 AAMM Science and the Sacred / 61 do not all think about he/she/it in the same away and some do not think about he/she/it at all. Let me be clear on this point. Obviously, God is central to many people’s thinking about religion. But the content of religion is not only about concepts of the Deity. What I want to explore is an aspect of religion that cuts across human culture and millennia of cultural evolu- tion. It does not diminish belief to see that the imperatives of religious feeling have other facets. In that spirit can we speak of religion and, more to the point, of science and religion without a focus on the con- cept of and a belief in God? The answer is yes, absolutely. Some of the most vibrant thinking about religion even within the Judeo-Christian tradition has done just this. What matters to these thinkers are not academic ideas about God but something more primal and original: religious experience.
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