When we think about science and religion, we often see the two in conflict. Science says the world and its creatures arose over billions of years by way of natural processes; and some religions–not all–argue that the world was made in seven days by a being whom we should therefore revere.
You can see this dichotomy in a piece by the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich in in the most recent Sunday Review in The New York Times. "My atheism is hard core…a stance I perpetuated by opting, initially, for a career in science," she begins. Science is not an expression of atheism, just as it is not an expression of religion. Even smart people like Ehrenreich can become confused about that.
One person who didn't become confused about science and spirituality–and who showed there is a place for them to coexist–was the naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen, who died Saturday at 86. He wrote about nature, about animals, wild places, evolution, and our ancestry. And he was a Zen priest.
But it's not his practice of Zen that interests me; it's the his descriptions of the natural world that are suffused with a spiritual sense of wonder. In a profile of Matthiessen in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Jeff Himmelman quotes this line from Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard: "In the longing that starts one on the path is a kind of homesickness, and some way, on this journey, I have started home." This appears in a book about Matthiessen's search for the elusive snow leopard in the Himalayas, in the company of George Schaller, probably the most distinguished field biologist of the 20th century, and a man so tough that few could hope to keep up with him. Matthiessen was one of those.
Himmelman writes that Matthiessen found "happiness in reverence of the natural world and in a hard-won, if fleeting, acceptance of his own uncertain place in it."
That same reverence of the world pops up in Neil deGrasse Tyson's rebooted Cosmos. In the second episode, he says, "Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science. In my view, it’s also a soaring spiritual experience." I lifted the quote from a blog post at Scientific American by David Warmflash, who's identified as a physician and astrobiologist. In his post, he goes even further: "We are the cosmos getting to know itself," he writes. And science is "the most spiritual idea that the cosmos has ever conceived."
And Sagan himself felt much the same way. "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality," he wrote in The Demon-Haunted World. Even the title reflects a respect for a spiritual view of the cosmos.
Those who want to write about science risk losing something important if they discard their sense of wonder in their efforts to combat false religious claims. Matthiessen, Tyson, and Sagan remind us that it's possible to be a scientist and, at the same time, a spirited and spiritual observer of the natural world.
Our writing will be all the better for it.
-Paul Raeburn
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