Can we create a model of spirituality that includes science and rational thought? Do we have to leave religion behind to make sense of the modern scientific world? If we are to find some semblance of meaning in the modern world of scientific materialism, must we resort to pseudo-scientific energetics and claim that spirituality is actually physics? 
Perhaps we need do away with both science and religion so that we may find an ancient Eden, a new paradigm, that is long forgotten and just around the corner, somewhere in the womb of Gaia. . . These are important questions among the spiritually inclined in the modern western world. We are faced with competing worldviews that seem incompatible and inconsistent.
The glaring truths of science threaten to stomp out the light of religion. The religious claim science has nothing to offer in the search for Real Truth. Science swings back with the accusation that all religion is fairy tales, offering nothing of truth at all, “real” or otherwise! Then religion calls science blasphemy and the mud-slinging begins in earnest. . It just goes on and on. . .
The desperate attempt to transcend these world views and create meaning in the age of scientific materialism has resulted in various cultural movements including the many branches of so-called New Age spirituality. Our search for meaning has lead some to embrace science as a type of religion, it has spawned many pseudo-scientific hybrid teachings and caused others to abandon science and religion all together, as yet another wrong turn, or rather, further degeneration of the original, “Patriarchal” wrong turn, which they claim, lead us into the trap of science in the first place. . .
Here, I should mention, it is critically important to recognize the value of a worldview so lofty that it can even begin to be concerned with these questions.
Let’s be honest and recognize that even if these questions are interesting and important, they are pressing questions, only in the world of western culture. Believe me, almost no one in developing countries could possibly care less about how to reconcile spiritual realizations with cutting edge scientific discoveries; or about ecology, or starving people half way around the world for that matter. These are the kinds of all-inclusive, multicultural, holistic, sensitive social movements, that just aren’t found in developing countries. Don’t get me wrong! There are good people EVERYWHERE and lots of them! But people who don’t have their basic needs met are just generally not concerned with high-minded global affairs like climate change. They want stability, food, shelter and safety. It is only in industrialized societies where people have access to both education and convenience that we begin to see the emergence of a global perspective in any culturally significant way.
With that in mind, we have to cut science and the modern world a little slack. It may be overbearing at times and intellectually demanding, but science is an important part of the very foundation of our globally sensitive worldview. For example, industrialization was an imperative step forward that allowed untold multitudes of people to cease the struggle for physical survival and move up the ladder of Maslow’s Hierarchy towards self actualization. It also began the first large scale assault on the very ecosystem that supports us, but even that, in turn, gave rise to the first generation of people in history who have ever cared enough about others to recognize a kind of global responsibility in the first place.
So Science and the modern world is not all bad. . .
On the other hand, science will never tell us whether a certain outcome is good or bad. Science cannot offer meaning. It only renders facts. For example, science can tell us that it is a fact that a bullet between the eyes will kill someone. Science can measure the extent of the trauma, record the body’s lack of vital signs, figure out the size and velocity of the projectile and approximate the time of death. What science cannot tell you about, is the rightness or wrongness of that action. Even the social sciences, which can tell us what kinds of conditions are likely to culminate in a fascist dictatorship, can not tell us if that is a negative outcome or not. There is some interior, unmeasurable, non-quantifiable relationship to truth which makes that call. Human consciousness, (and perhaps divinity) guide those distinctions, and it has traditionally been the place of the worlds wisdom traditions to offer a sense of objective validity to this kind of subjective meaning. . .
I’ll have more on the religion side of this discussion next week, but if the idea of finding a path that includes both science and spirituality is lighting a fire in you somewhere I would suggest, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, by Ken Wilber as an important, and fairly quick (200 pages) piece of reading! I can’t recommend this book highly enough!
To share the words of one well known author. . .
“Ken Wilber is one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness in this century. I regard him as my mentor. He is a source of inspiration and insight to all of us. Read everything he writes — it will change your life.”
–Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Until next week. . .
Take Care of each other. . .
and don’t let the man get you down !
!~.^!
Michael Sunspirit!
