MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 4 March
2006
SCIENCE AND
RELIGION
I returned last week from the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting with my head full of ideas that wouldn't let me sleep. Meetings of the AAAS, the world's largest scientific organization, are always a feast and one of the nice things I've had time to do since retiring in 1999.
This meeting's most popular topic was science and religion, represented by five symposiums (three-hour sessions featuring several experts) devoted to combating creationist pseudoscience, a packed plenary lecture, and a reception called "dialogue on science and religion." The second most prominent topic was global warming, always well covered at AAAS meetings and represented this year by four symposiums. Several other symposiums presented a related theme, the sustainability of human culture on Earth.
Issues such as creationism and global warming are pushing scientists to think far beyond their narrowly-focused research labs; I'd say that it's about time. At the meeting, a deep connection emerged between science, religion, and sustainability issues such as global warming. An enthusiastically-received plenary lecture by biologist Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, made this connection. Speaking on "The History of Nature," she urged us to teach the big historical picture of the evolution of the universe, of Earth, and of life, and urged universities to offer a single team-taught interdisciplinary science course covering all three topics. Without preaching, she conveyed a sense of the societal and spiritual power of these ideas.
The world's current crises boil down to one spiritual crisis and one material crisis. In his Northwest Arkansas Times column a couple of weeks ago, Grady Jim Robinson put his finger on the first crisis when he wrote, "And all this madness is motivated by, what? Psst. Can you spell r-e-l-i-g-i-o-n? That's right. Our post-modern world is addicted all right, not only to oil, but to really bad religion steeped in ignorance and myth."
In his book The Future of Life, biologist Edward O. Wilson describes the second crisis as a dangerous bottleneck of overpopulation and resource depletion through which humankind must pass during the coming century. Global warming alone should be enough to convince anybody that such a bottleneck exists, but other problems include water shortages, deforestation, species extinctions, drained rivers, dried up lakes and seas, ozone depletion, interference with the nitrogen cycle, and more.
These merging crises demand, in my view and I think in the view of many of the scientists attending Ursula Goodenough's lecture, a kind of spiritual revolution. The pieces are in place for a new approach to the spiritual needs of humankind, an approach that avoids supernatural elements entirely and that has nothing to do with belief in the authority of sacred documents or sacred individuals. Everything that one could ask of a healthy (meaning non-superstitious and non-dogmatic) answer to humankind's spiritual needs is available in natural science.
For just one example: Although creation stories are central to every religion, I have yet to hear a creation story that has anything like the mythic power of the mind-blowing picture painted today by the best astrophysical research. I've tried to reveal something of this picture in a few of my columns. George Smoot, leader of the Cosmic Background Explorer group that in 1992 discovered the structural details of the microwave "echo" of the big bang, captured a little of this feeling when he said that the discovery was "like seeing the face of God." The astrophysical picture is subtle, beautiful, worthy of deep reflection, and inspiring. I'm proud to live in a universe in which such things can be true. And it seems actually to be true--"literally" true. In modern science, truth and beauty are re-uniting.
In this naturalistic approach to spirituality, humans matter a great deal, both individually and collectively. Many scientists have noted that the universe is in the process of understanding itself. This might sound like an odd thing to say, but it's quite literally true. There is probably life all over the universe, and every bit of it has some degree of awareness of its own surroundings. In our corner of our galaxy, we humans are the most advanced expression of that awareness, part of an important network of universal consciousness.
Life, and awareness, matter. This proposition needs no justification: It's wonderful to be alive, and it's even more wonderful to experience the happiness that can be (even if it often isn't) available to all of us in this rich technological age. As the Dalai Lama emphasizes in his simple but profound Ethics for the New Millennium, this self-evident proposition is all that's needed as a basis for living, and a basis for a sound morality.
There's an imperative practical need for a naturalistic "religion" of this sort. In view of the sustainability bottleneck, humankind must begin to take nature with the ultimate seriousness she deserves. Until a significant fraction of us develops a feeling for the sacred depths of nature, we will continue to overpopulate, rape, and burn our planet past any hope that she can sustain such delicate creatures as ourselves.
Science and religion are not only compatible, they deeply need each
other. Science is certainly compatible with a
belief in God, perhaps even a "supernatural" (whatever that means)
God, but certainly with a God who acts through nature. But we don't need supernatural religious
values to give us the courage, purpose, and inspiration to live happy and
useful lives. We need only the
real universe and the self-evident knowledge that life is, indeed, worth living.