Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide

by Chris Mooney

We hear a lot these days about the "conflict" between science and religion — the atheists and the fundamentalists, it seems, are constantly blasting one another. But what's rarely noted is that even as science-religion warriors clash by night, in the morning they'll see the battlefield has shifted beneath them.

Across the Western world — including the United States — 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.

This is a fundamental change, and it strongly undermines the old conflict story about science and religion. For once you start talking about science and spirituality, the dynamic shifts dramatically.

Common ground

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.

Finally healing

So no wonder that other New Atheists have made statements very similar to Dawkins'. For instance, Tufts University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has remarked, "I have times when I am just transported with awe and joy and a sense of peace and wonder at, whether it's music or art or just a child playing or some other wonderful thing off of my sailboat, being amazed at the beauty of the ocean. I think that people make the mistake of thinking that spirituality, in that sense, has anything to do with either religious doctrines or with immateriality or the supernatural."

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).