A letter to Parabola
Awakening - Parabola's Spring 2005 Issue
I must be out of my mind! I realised rather late in my life that since childhood spirituality and science have worked hand in hand in my neck of the wood. What surprises me most is that I might be part of a very small circle of people with this line of thinking.
It desperately took me all those years to phrase this 1) to make it understood by others, 2) because I now feel confident enough to publicly put forward this idea without fear of being rebuffed, not that I wouldn't be, except it doesn't matter anymore.
Taking a stand on things has never been easy, for at best we create antagonism. Yet through history progress has many times been achieved by people taking stands. This does not mean I pretend to hold the truth to everything...
There are many reasons that lead me to writing this today. At least two are directly linked to Parabola. Last fall I noticed on your site the announcement of an incoming issue on Science & Religion. Then you backed off. The subject is quite important these days, I would even say crucial. During the XXth century and especially for the last 20 years or so, bridges have been built by both sides of this large void separating those two apparently irreconciliable territories and one can't treat this lightly.
I for one got entangled in another topic that is much talked about these days: science & ethics. It is one of the most difficult subject matter to apprehend and I decided I wasn't ready to tackle it, for there are too many angles for which much knowledge is needed. It was a big failure. I entered the subject matter convinced of my straightforward moralistic approach ready to condemn many a practice within the scientific world mainly concerning everything dealing with living beings. I found myself against a wall because I would have had to take a stand. As I was digging deeper and deeper into the subject matter - meeting with about 10 ethicists along the way - I found myself in the position of no position. Any personal opinion at this point would have been seen as ridiculous, for I could not substantiate, put meat on this skeleton I had erected as my moralistic standpoint.
It was at that time I met two women who would put me on my toes. The first one is Anne Dambricourt, paleoanthropologist at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. I had the occasion of listening to an hour-long interview she gave on France Culture few months earlier. I met her in my hometown, Montreal, were she came as a guest speaker linked to the Templeton Foundation for a workshop organised by CTNS, the Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences of Berkeley. We spend most of the 5 days together, reflecting, talking a lot about sciences and religion. The other woman was also at this workshop. She is well-known in those circles in the US. Stacey Ake struck me as a very sharp-minded individual with two PhDs, one in philosophy and the other one in biology! Not that I am necessary impressed by degrees. It is rather the line of thinking she conveys that interests me. We spend a couple hours talking about ethics... At the time she was editor at Metanexus. They both forced me to retreat (without telling me so, of course).
I spent quite a bit of time licking my wounds. The retreat has really gone so far as moving out of the city and its countless cultural activities and mundanity of which I was a good member, to a seclusive area in the bush, in the silence of it all with the stars as background. I will stay here as long as it needs to get to the bottom of this! This being the bridges to built between sciences and religions... I might as well say that I am going to devote the rest of my life to it!
Going back to where I started this "essay" on spirituality and science working hand in hand in my mind. I am rather simplistic but does it have to be complicated. It is complex in its ramifications, and yet it needs a basis on which it can stand. Spiritualities as much as sciences are constructions of the human spirit, as far as we know. No one has come forward from the outer world to tell us which is right and which is wrong and we much depend on ourselves up to now to make this determination.
There is about only one thing undeniable: the universe has been there well before we came to be and it does not need us to stay there! The rest is speculative but should put us at our place. Am I being reasonable here or disappointing...
Our interpretation of it all since the beginning of the species has been a good try to say the least. Furthermore there should always be a clean separation between science and spirituality, for their respective angle of research and questioning is quite apart most of the time. On the one hand simply put, science asks "how" and on the other hand spirituality wonders "why". But that does not mean there is no possible dialogue between the two. They complete each other. In a natural manner a child is asking "why". In adulthood we come to ask "how". The link between the spiritual world or the invisible world and the scientific or material world is there. During childhood, in normal condition, we have the leisure to ask "why", for we do not have to take care much of the material world for our survival. It is done for us. But in adulthood we have to face "reality". Our dreamworld is vanishing. Yet always in normal child-rearing conditions it will always stay there as a beacon of hope.
The universe does not need us to be there... Science has come very late in the universe. It has not build it and has still to explain much of it. It can explain the Big Bang, how it happened, but not why it happened. What or who triggered it. Sciences are only tools, great tools that is. But they probably will never explain the "whys", only the "hows". It is very important to know the "hows" for it helps us tremendously in avoiding the pain of not knowing. "What you don't know can't hurt you", the saying goes. This is obviously a very dangerous and lazy way to be.
Since the universe does not need us to be there and science will probably never tell us "why" it's there, lets assume that we still need to know "why"... That line of questioning is as old as the "how". We have intuitively known that we can't explain the two lines of questioning with the same parameters. Science has always excluded any explanation that cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is its privilege.
Spirituality as we know it involves a certain degree of intuitive belief that we can't prove scientifically. Yet we need such an anchor or a basis on which to build our encounter with the universe and "go from there". It can be something transmitted from generation to generation or it can be learned from others later on if we find ourselves unable to accept what has been transmitted to us through family, parents, etc. In any case, we build our set of beliefs from our own capacities, would they be social, intellectual or otherwise. We all have a set of believes from atheism to fanatism of all sorts.
We are more and more "civilized" and living in big cities where we hardly know that milk comes from cows or goats, that water comes from either the ocean or lakes and rivers far away, that stars are not lamposts at every street corners. The quest for meaning in this small universe within the big one is more difficult than it would have been when the Great Prophets were having their own quest in the middle of nature. The blackout of August 2003 came as a revelation for a great number of people living in the megalopolis along the Eastern seaboard, remembering the world up there by just looking up. For a moment all the technology brought by science was meaningless to the onlooker, the star-gazer oblivious to everything else, at awe realising the immensity of the sky and one's place in it. That night the crime rate went down dramatically.
It desperately took me all those years to phrase this 1) to make it understood by others, 2) because I now feel confident enough to publicly put forward this idea without fear of being rebuffed, not that I wouldn't be, except it doesn't matter anymore.
Taking a stand on things has never been easy, for at best we create antagonism. Yet through history progress has many times been achieved by people taking stands. This does not mean I pretend to hold the truth to everything...
There are many reasons that lead me to writing this today. At least two are directly linked to Parabola. Last fall I noticed on your site the announcement of an incoming issue on Science & Religion. Then you backed off. The subject is quite important these days, I would even say crucial. During the XXth century and especially for the last 20 years or so, bridges have been built by both sides of this large void separating those two apparently irreconciliable territories and one can't treat this lightly.
I for one got entangled in another topic that is much talked about these days: science & ethics. It is one of the most difficult subject matter to apprehend and I decided I wasn't ready to tackle it, for there are too many angles for which much knowledge is needed. It was a big failure. I entered the subject matter convinced of my straightforward moralistic approach ready to condemn many a practice within the scientific world mainly concerning everything dealing with living beings. I found myself against a wall because I would have had to take a stand. As I was digging deeper and deeper into the subject matter - meeting with about 10 ethicists along the way - I found myself in the position of no position. Any personal opinion at this point would have been seen as ridiculous, for I could not substantiate, put meat on this skeleton I had erected as my moralistic standpoint.
It was at that time I met two women who would put me on my toes. The first one is Anne Dambricourt, paleoanthropologist at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. I had the occasion of listening to an hour-long interview she gave on France Culture few months earlier. I met her in my hometown, Montreal, were she came as a guest speaker linked to the Templeton Foundation for a workshop organised by CTNS, the Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences of Berkeley. We spend most of the 5 days together, reflecting, talking a lot about sciences and religion. The other woman was also at this workshop. She is well-known in those circles in the US. Stacey Ake struck me as a very sharp-minded individual with two PhDs, one in philosophy and the other one in biology! Not that I am necessary impressed by degrees. It is rather the line of thinking she conveys that interests me. We spend a couple hours talking about ethics... At the time she was editor at Metanexus. They both forced me to retreat (without telling me so, of course).
I spent quite a bit of time licking my wounds. The retreat has really gone so far as moving out of the city and its countless cultural activities and mundanity of which I was a good member, to a seclusive area in the bush, in the silence of it all with the stars as background. I will stay here as long as it needs to get to the bottom of this! This being the bridges to built between sciences and religions... I might as well say that I am going to devote the rest of my life to it!
Going back to where I started this "essay" on spirituality and science working hand in hand in my mind. I am rather simplistic but does it have to be complicated. It is complex in its ramifications, and yet it needs a basis on which it can stand. Spiritualities as much as sciences are constructions of the human spirit, as far as we know. No one has come forward from the outer world to tell us which is right and which is wrong and we much depend on ourselves up to now to make this determination.
There is about only one thing undeniable: the universe has been there well before we came to be and it does not need us to stay there! The rest is speculative but should put us at our place. Am I being reasonable here or disappointing...
Our interpretation of it all since the beginning of the species has been a good try to say the least. Furthermore there should always be a clean separation between science and spirituality, for their respective angle of research and questioning is quite apart most of the time. On the one hand simply put, science asks "how" and on the other hand spirituality wonders "why". But that does not mean there is no possible dialogue between the two. They complete each other. In a natural manner a child is asking "why". In adulthood we come to ask "how". The link between the spiritual world or the invisible world and the scientific or material world is there. During childhood, in normal condition, we have the leisure to ask "why", for we do not have to take care much of the material world for our survival. It is done for us. But in adulthood we have to face "reality". Our dreamworld is vanishing. Yet always in normal child-rearing conditions it will always stay there as a beacon of hope.
The universe does not need us to be there... Science has come very late in the universe. It has not build it and has still to explain much of it. It can explain the Big Bang, how it happened, but not why it happened. What or who triggered it. Sciences are only tools, great tools that is. But they probably will never explain the "whys", only the "hows". It is very important to know the "hows" for it helps us tremendously in avoiding the pain of not knowing. "What you don't know can't hurt you", the saying goes. This is obviously a very dangerous and lazy way to be.
Since the universe does not need us to be there and science will probably never tell us "why" it's there, lets assume that we still need to know "why"... That line of questioning is as old as the "how". We have intuitively known that we can't explain the two lines of questioning with the same parameters. Science has always excluded any explanation that cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is its privilege.
Spirituality as we know it involves a certain degree of intuitive belief that we can't prove scientifically. Yet we need such an anchor or a basis on which to build our encounter with the universe and "go from there". It can be something transmitted from generation to generation or it can be learned from others later on if we find ourselves unable to accept what has been transmitted to us through family, parents, etc. In any case, we build our set of beliefs from our own capacities, would they be social, intellectual or otherwise. We all have a set of believes from atheism to fanatism of all sorts.
We are more and more "civilized" and living in big cities where we hardly know that milk comes from cows or goats, that water comes from either the ocean or lakes and rivers far away, that stars are not lamposts at every street corners. The quest for meaning in this small universe within the big one is more difficult than it would have been when the Great Prophets were having their own quest in the middle of nature. The blackout of August 2003 came as a revelation for a great number of people living in the megalopolis along the Eastern seaboard, remembering the world up there by just looking up. For a moment all the technology brought by science was meaningless to the onlooker, the star-gazer oblivious to everything else, at awe realising the immensity of the sky and one's place in it. That night the crime rate went down dramatically.
posted by Marc Bédard Pelchat at
08:15
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