The New Science and Spirituality Reader

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This ground-breaking collection of essays is not what it appears. Fortunately, it is much more. On the surface, the hot button topic of science versus religion has grown cooler recently, once a small band of vociferous atheists had their moment in the spotlight. Another book arguing that science and religion should be allies instead of foes would help to heal a public rift. Yet what rift really exists, and how much does it matter? In their private lives, scientists attend church more often than the average responder to polls. Five hundred years after the rise of science and the gradual waning of religion, there's not much spice left in the debate.

What remains is far more fascinating. In a way that few people realize, science has reached a wall that it cannot break through. After rationality seemed to render religion more or less useless as a way to explain how nature works, scientists wound up with nothing less than a mystic's universe. In this universe, the entire cosmos emerged from a complete void. Something gave rise to time and space, yet it exists beyond time and space. Something has organized creation with such precision that the slightest tremor in the governing laws of nature would mean that the Big Bang was a Big Flop. As little as one part in a billion of mass- energy in the first instant of the cosmos (by instant I mean a tenth of a second followed by forty-three zeroes) would have caused an implosion back into the realm of "dark" matter and energy. As it is, 95 percent of the infant universe did collapse back into that unknown realm.

Something is doing far more even than this. It allowed the conditions for consciousness to arise. It set in motion an evolutionary unfolding that began with hydrogen atoms 13.7 billion years ago and arrived at the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe. Something balanced the forces of creation and destruction in so deli- cate a fashion that a hyper-intricate molecule like DNA, which would dry up and blow away if exposed to sunlight on a hot summer day, has remained intact for more than two billion years.

In the face of these facts, science has come to a crossroads-and not just science. Each of us must consider what it means to live inside an illusion, because that is what the physical universe is. The atom, which serves as the basis for all matter, has no physical properties. It is com- posed of energy patterns emerging from invisible fields, and those fields exist primarily in a virtual state-meaning that they aren't even present in the physical universe.

Or to encapsulate the present state of our knowledge: What's the matter? Nothing. Literally nothing.

Living in an illusion poses only two choices: either you face the fact that reality must be redefined or you turn away and try to for- get that ordinary existence is based on nothingness. That's a strong choice, and workaday science can be forgiven for ignoring the illusion. After all, thousands of researchers and technicians go to their laboratories like anyone else going to work. They run experiments without regard for the illusory nature of life, which can be set aside as metaphysics. Such an attitude has reached the end of its viability. however.

A deep gulf separates science and spirituality today. This is an unfortunate development: in classical times the dominant culture encompassed both rational and spiritual elements, as it still does in some Eastern and traditional societies to this day. The mechanistic, materialistic, and rational view of a nonliving, clockwork universe that was born out of the Enlightenment helped humanity to free itself from superstition and to achieve incredible scientific breakthroughs. While we do acknowledge this, we must also recognize, and accept, that this paradigm no longer serves human evolution. In modern society, in fact, the gulf between science and spirituality has given rise to what is akin to a "dialogue of the deaf, or perhaps rather what English physicist and novelist C. P. Snow called "the two cultures": the culture of the scientists and the culture of the humanists. The scientists often consider the ideas and worldviews of the humanists' armchair philosophy and mere wishful thinking, while the humanists are prone to believing that they have access to a dimension of reality about which scientists have nothing to say. These dialectical positions have hardened into a veritable tug-of-war where neither side is willing to cede an inch or even listen to the other.

This situation fragments the contemporary world and produces animosity and tension, culminating at its worst in fundamentalism and violence. And it gives us blindfolds that prevent us from seeing a wider, fuller picture, a reality sourced in the best insights of science as well as spirituality.

What we need to consider is that there is no evolution, no shift, without an element of spirituality. We cannot have a shift that is purely rational, nor can we do it also purely by intuition and spirituality. It is necessary to foster an alliance between science and the great traditions of spiritual wisdom. Humanity is not only a collective of rational beings; inherent to us also is the element of gnosis, of the inner connection to a deep source of nourishment and, for many, guidance. If we can bring these two aspects together we can form a broader, more integral understanding of the world around us. With a combination of science and spirituality we can move beyond a purely sense-driven perceptior of our environment into a more expansive perception of how we are connected to a world, a universe, at a deeper, more fundamental level.