The Story of Science and SpiritIssue #26, Summer 1997, p 6
Some years ago, in a retreat setting, I narrated a rather sweeping presentation on the sacred dimensions of the scientific story of the universe. I also gave more intimate accounts of the stories individual rocks can tell us. During that weekend, a woman told me how excited she was to meet a scientist who would talk about the sacred dimensions of science, implying it was a rare find. She shared with me the inspiring image that she had always thought of biology lab as "going to church." It was clear she had not dared share this image with her biology teacher. Indeed, no student had ever said this to me about my geology labs or classes. How do we give students permission to do so? At the time of this retreat, inspired by the writings and teachings of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, as well as by my own quest to integrate my scientific and spiritual sides, I had begun to explore the sacred dimensions of science. I found myself doing so principally alone or in groups where I was the only (professional) scientist. There is abundant literature on the topic, and myriad theologians, philosophers and scientists have explored the issues. But most of us scientists these days, particularly in public schools, feel constrained to limit these discussions, to keep them out of our classrooms, out of our workplace. Indeed, the U.S. courts have ruled that science and religion be kept separate in the classroom. So, how and where in this modern age do we discuss
science and religion? Not many places. A couple of years ago, I was relieved
to be discovered by the Science and Spirituality group (sciSpi), a wonderful
assemblage of folks, principally scientists, who were seeking a place to
discuss spiritual dimensions of science. In our December 1996 meeting,
triggered by Brian Swimme's book, The Universe is a Green Dragon,
we
In my closing lecture, as usual, I reviewed the current environmental crisis in humanity's little blip of geologic history. After thanking them for their papers, I plunged into the issues of science and meaning, as they relate to the current pathology -- the separation of science and spirit. I made the following points: We have forgotten who we are. We need a creation myth, and the scientific creation story is of mythical proportions, uniting everyone: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Native American...bird, rock, star, bacteria. We have lost our sense of the sacred (not necessarily as individuals, but surely as a society). All religions include a sense of the sacredness of nature; science does not deny sacredness, although these days, it rarely explicitly addresses it. We have become disconnected from the Earth. Science and religion both teach us we are connected, but we are too busy, much of the time, to remember. The Earth is not fragile, but it is precious. Dom Bede Griffiths, in his book, Universal
Wisdom, noted the pathology of separating science from spirit: "The westem
mind has concentrated its attention on the material world, to understand
its working by science...But all this has been done at the cost of...using
up the resources on which human life depends ....
Just as we don't discuss the sacred dimensions of science in the classroom, we rarely hear about science in our churches. My dream is that, while recognizing that science is not "truth" and that religious beliefs are diverse, we can integrate these two very fundamental aspects of our existence -- science and spirituality. ###
Jody Bourgeois, a Professor of Geology at the University of Washington,
teaches geology and the history of geology. Reprinted from Earth
Letter, 1305 NE 47th St., Seattle, WA 98105, with permission.
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