“The Spirituality of Science” is sort of a tricky topic. “Science” is well-defined--it’s the process of learning by experiment and observation, and the body of knowledge acquired that way--but “spirituality” is harder to nail down. So to help decide what to say, I asked some of my imaginary friends on the internet what the word means to them:



These are different answers, but if there’s a common thread, it’s this: spirituality is the recognition of truth that’s bigger than you are.

Science, too, is concerned with truths that are bigger than humans, and science too is done in the company of a multitude of others, scattered across time and space. And it is absolutely possible to experience a “spiritual” sense of awe when you participate in this ancient, communal search for truth. While scientists as a whole tend to be a prosy lot, more than a few have waxed eloquent on this subject. For example, in his famous essay Religion and Science, Albert Einstein described what he called “cosmic religious feeling” like so:

And Carl Sagan had this to say in his excellent (and highly recommended) book, The Demon-Haunted World:

Clearly, “sciencing” can be a spiritual experience.

But if that’s true, then why are science and spirituality so often perceived to be in tension with each other? Part of this is because spirituality gets tied up with religion, and science and religion do indeed engage each other in turf wars from time to time. The problem is that both are, to some extent, different ways of doing the same thing; namely, finding truth. This opens the door to competition and, in fact, science and religion don’t always agree. A pastor preaches the Earth is 6,000 years old, radiometric dating says it’s 4.5 billion. A prophet says that humans have immortal souls, a biologist says they’re just bags of chemicals. These contradictory claims can’t all be true, so something’s gotta give. But what?

In many ways, the situation resembles what happens in nature when two species compete for the same resource. Ecological competition has only two possible outcomes. One is extinction. Species A is the fundamentally superior competitor, so sooner or later, species B dies out or is driven off. And I’m sure we could all come up with examples of times science and religion have tried to make each other extinct. But there’s another way to resolve competition: evolution. The competitors can change their anatomy or, more to the point, their behavior, in ways that prevent conflict. You eat the fruit that falls to the ground, I’ll eat what’s still in the trees. You hunt at night, I’ll hunt during the day. You grow in sandy soil, I’ll stick to the loamy stuff.

This was the sort of solution the late, great Stephen Jay Gould advocated in his book Rock of Ages. Gould’s argument was that science and religion occupy what he called “non-overlapping magisteria.” To his way of thinking, science is concerned with what the universe is made of and how it works, while religion and spirituality are concerned with ethics and values, including questions of ultimate meaning. Science provides the raw material for spiritual thinking, while spirituality can guide scientific inquiry and our decisions about what to do with the things we learn. Einstein had the same demarcations in mind when he made his famous statement that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." And while Gould’s idea has its detractors, particularly in the details, it’s hard to argue with his overall concept. Indeed, the modern world demands some sort of synthesis if a person is to avoid nihilistic paralysis on the one hand, and blinkered barbarity on the other.

But to achieve this sort of harmony, extremists on both sides have to give up some of their entrenched positions. Spiritual leaders need to come to grips with the plain reality that their holy books are flawed, and are not always literal truth. Hard empiricists need to appreciate the limits of their mode of inquiry, and admit that subjective human experience can be meaningful--perhaps ultimately meaningful--despite and independent of whatever physical processes may underlie it. And so forth.

Done properly, science and spirituality operate in different domains and perform complementary functions. Science anchors you in reality, while spirituality allows you to transcend it. Each informs the other, and each makes up a crucial part of the human experience of life. Chop either off, and what’s left behind is both less than human and less than alive; like one of Tolkien’s wraiths. But unite them, and the door is open to becoming a full person who fully lives.

To his way of thinking, science is concerned with what the universe is made of and how it works, while religion and spirituality are concerned with ethics and values, including questions of ultimate meaning.

A prophet says that humans have immortal souls, a biologist says they’re just bags of chemicals.