Can spirituality bridge the divide between Science and Religion?
Writing in USA Today, Chris Mooney argues that it can.
Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide
. . . traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in "spirituality." What's more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith.
Nowadays, unlike in prior centuries, spirituality and religion are no longer thought to exist in a one-to-one relationship.
. . .
The old science-religion story goes like this: The so-called New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, uncompromisingly blast faith, even as religiously driven "intelligent design" proponents repeatedly undermine science. And while most of us don't fit into either of these camps, the extremes also target those in the middle. The New Atheists aim considerable fire toward moderate religious believers who are also top scientists, such as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Meanwhile, people like Collins get regular flack from the "intelligent design" crowd as well.
In this schematic, the battle lines may appear drawn, the conflict inescapable. But once spirituality enters the picture, there seems to be common ground after all.
Spirituality is something everyone can have — even atheists. In its most expansive sense, it could simply be taken to refer to any individual's particular quest to discover that which is held sacred.
That needn't be a deity or supernatural entity. As the French sociologist Emile Durkheim noted in 1915: "By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called Gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred."
We can all find our own sacred things — and we can all have our own life-altering spiritual experiences. These are not necessarily tied to any creed, doctrine, or belief; they grip us on an emotional level, rather than a cognitive or rational one. That feeling of awe and wonder, that sense of a deep unity with the universe or cosmos — such intuitions might lead to a traditional religious outlook on the world, or they might not.
Dawkins, the most prominent atheist of them all, has certainly felt spiritual uplift. Indeed, he has written an entire book, Unweaving the Rainbow, about the wonder that comes with learning how things really work. And in a recent interview with Al-Jazeera, Dawkins said that "spirituality can mean something that I'm very sympathetic to, which is, a sort of sense of wonder at the beauty of the universe, the complexity of life, the magnitude of space, the magnitude of geological time. All those things create a sort of frisson in the breast, which you could call spirituality."
"But," Dawkins quickly added, "I would be very concerned that it shouldn't be confused with supernaturalism."
It doesn't have to be. Spirituality in the sense described above does not run afoul of any of Dawkins' atheistic values or arguments. It does not require science and faith to be logically compatible, for instance. Nor does it require that we believe in anything we cannot prove. Spirituality simply doesn't operate on that level. It's about emotions and experiences, not premises or postulates.
. . .
Sam Harris, author of the best-selling 2004 book The End of Faith, is another thinker commonly associated with the New Atheists. And he, too, embraces a secular form of spirituality. Harris is particularly interested in meditation and its effects on the brain, and has called for "a discourse on ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourses of physics, biology, and chemistry are."
A focus on spirituality, then, might be the route to finally healing one of the most divisive rifts in Western society — over the relationship between science and religion. We'll still have our evolution battles, to be sure; and the Catholic Church won't soon give up on its wrongheaded resistance to contraception. The problems won't immediately vanish. But each time they emerge, more and more of us will scratch our heads, wondering why.
Chris Mooney is a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast and author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-09-13-column13_ST_N.htm
Jason Rosenhouse, responds to Mooney, as follows:
. . .
As I see it there are three main grounds of conflict between science and religion. The first is that science sometimes uncovers facts about the world that conflict with long established religious dogmas. For example, science says the Earth is billions of years old, some religious traditions say it is more like ten thousand. If you are willing to abandon, or at least heavily revise, the dogmas then you can avoid this particular conflict. If only more people were willing to go this route!
The second is harder to define precisely, but it is actually the most serious issue in my view. It is that science reveals a view of the universe that is vastly different from what traditional religion teaches. For example, science says we are the product of billions of years of cruel and wasteful evolution by natural selection (aided by periodical mass extinctions, of course), and that humans play no special role in this process. Religion teaches that we are created in the image of a God who loves us. The heroic synthesizing efforts of philosophers and theologians notwithstanding, it is very hard to see these views as two sides of the same coin.
The third is the conflict between faith and reason. In principle there is no contradiction in relying on reason and evidence in pondering questions about nature, while relying on faith and revelation for nonempirical questions. In practice, however, I think it is very difficult for a scientist to find faith appealing. There is a reason that conservative religious belief is all but nonexistent among scientists, while nonbelief and liberal theology are the norms.
How on Earth does redefining “spirituality” relate, in even the slightest way, to any of these issues?
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2010/09/redefining_spirituality.php