When Spirituality Meets Science

What happens when spirituality meets science? 

In her brand-new book, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life, Columbia University professor of clinical psychology Lisa Miller describes why we need to move from an external form of “religion” to a more personally appropriated “spirituality.” 

She offers this working definition of spirituality, which certainly incorporates Christian spiritual life: 

“It includes a deeply felt and perceived connection with a higher power or a sacred world—a sense of engagement and relationship, such as asking God or Source for guidance in times of struggle.”

As one specific example, Dr. Miller found that spirituality often emerges from depression. 

“And for those who were highly spiritual and had gone through major depression in the past, the protective benefit of spirituality against a recurrence of depression was… a striking 90 percent.” 

More broadly, the kind of spirituality she’s researched leads us to experience a profound connection to the world around us and to a fully alive “awakened brain.”

That sounds pretty good to me. And, if you want to read more, this piece is excerpted from a longer piece on the Science for the Church website. Let me know what you think! 

Reflections on the Challenges to the Concept of Beauty as a Nexus for Science, Philosophy, Theology, and Art

I’ve been there. I’ve been in the jazz combo, grasping for beauty, sitting and drumming while the upright bass thumps, driving the rhythm to my side, just to the left of my hi-hat. As my right hand rides the rhythm on the cymbal, the tenor sax soars and dips, improvising around the chord changes, my left hand and foot on the kick drum, alongside the piano, “comping” the soloist. 

And for some moments—and sometimes longer—it is truly magical: we find a right relationship among the rhythms and chords. We feel the groove. We improv. And beauty emerges. The beauty arises from the music while it is played. Beauty has movement and narrative. Beauty has a story. It is known by its dynamism. It is hypnotic and inspiring, luring us on. Somewhere in the process we find a truth.

And without beauty, what is the worth of truth? Augustine, with his voluntarist twinges, has convinced me that rationality, and its ability to grasp truth, must be accompanied by affections of the will, which is motivated by beauty. Playing jazz drums reminds me that it is when the combo actually finds that moment of rightness—where we groove and improv together—that I am lured to continue.

In fact, I'm convinced that beauty understood as rightness and telos, as reality fitting together—is a kind of beauty that can be grasped in science, philosophy, theology, and art. The beauty is a lure for theologians, philosophers, scientists, and artists.

I've presented previously, beauty stands at the nexus of these disciplines. But here—lest these initial musings make beauty sound irresistible in its allure and unmistakable and simplistic—l'll outline a few challenges to beauty. 

The first is the natural world itself. On many occasions, I walked through one of my

favorite sights, Upper Bidwell Park in Chico, California, struck by this realization: natural beauty doesn’t take us into account. In fact, nature frankly disregards us. 

Taking a walk on a misty, windy morning through Upper Bidwell Park’s rugged, bumpy, and austere lava rock, I felt like Jonathan Edwards as I encountered both Nature and Nature’s God where contemplation led him 

“... into a kind of vision… of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapped and swallowed up in God.” 

As I reflected on the natural world, I felt that I was understanding a bit more about God. God for Edwards is not a cozy Friend, but a transcendent and terrible Lord. Even more, I felt a bit like Simone Weil because I was most taken by the austerity of Nature’s beauty. It didn’t take me into account at all. And that fact was particularly alluring. This fact would give lie to the idea that beautiful things exist merely to please us in an unambiguous way. Beauty in fact may be stern and displeasing. When we come to beauty, we will do well to dispense with all types of sentimentality.

Just as challenging is the philosophical context. Though his work is well over a hundred years old, Friedrich Nietzsche laid down the gauntlet for Christian theologians to discuss beauty. He challenged the notion that Christians, following Jesus, care a wit about beauty. Beauty ought to be connected with power and nobility. We, he opines, care about notions of weaknesses and assign those to goodness. His complaints about the Christian notions of beauty and goodness swing into the twentieth century like a large, formidable door. As he put it,

"It was the Jew [Jesus] who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the gods and maintain, with furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that “only the poor, the powerless, are good; on the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!" Friedrich Nietzsche

Nonetheless, as the century progressed, it was not Christianity, but secular thought that disentangled beauty from art. While strolling contently through at an exhibit in the stunning Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in spring 2004, I came across a still life by the provocative twentieth century artist, Marcel Duchamp. The attached comment by The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, is bombastic but not idiosyncratic. He wrote in July 1969,

"Art is not usually edible, but it is known to satisfy certain hungers. In the last century, it was thought that Beauty, that vitamin concentrate, was what we were after. More recently, Duchamp taught us that art is simply habit-forming, like salted peanuts, and that Beauty all along was the glutton’s alibi…. Nothing about art has ever been honest except our hunger for it." Peter Schjeldahl

Like Schjeldahl, the twentieth century generally impugns the notion that art and beauty belong together. Beauty in fact becomes merely a lure for purchasing art.

And there are more reasons to stop now: There is the argument from neo-Darwinian science that beauty exists merely a by-product of what creates fitness for survival. To this contention, I propose that pursuing beauty is central and definitive and that it solves the problem of good more effectively than a pure survival of the fittest. Just as there is the problem of theodicy, there exists the less discussed, but no less tenacious, problem of good: Why is there good in the world? The classic atheistic evolutionary perspective subordinates the elements of good and beauty to the ability to survive. Thus, for example, beauty in human beings must always relate to survival through fertility, strength, etc. But why then the purely creative elements of colored leaves in fall, the spectrum of the rainbow, the sound of the whales’ call? Hardcore evolutionary science must see this as a by-product. Instead, my research program sets beauty at the core of reality.

Is that enough?

For these reasons and more, many think that beauty seems like it's a far cry from being a viable candidate for bringing together theology, philosophy, science, and art. But, as I wrote above, I think it's a viable nexus. More on that next week.

Let’s Follow Leonardo and His Renaissance Blend

I’m preparing for my fall humanities class at Chico State (HUMN 222), and one of the best parts is rediscovering the breadth of insight in the thought leaders of western culture since the Renaissance. One of those is Leonardo Davinci (1452-1519), whom I’ve discovered partly through reading Walter Issacson’s biography, but certainly also through looking at Leonardo’s brilliant works of art like The Mona Lisaand The Last Supper. (And, by the way, please don’t be through off in understanding that latter painting by taking Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code seriously—that is truly a work of fictional speculation, not of art history, let alone religious insight.)

I’ve been struck by the way Leonardo expertly blended what we think of as science and the humanities… or at least what we call “science” since in his day it would have been natural philosophy. Much of this he collected in the 13,000 pages of writing in his assorted notebooks, some of which contain proto-helicopters and a near discovery—through his extensive studies of anatomy—of the circulation of blood about a century and a half before William Harvey’s definitive work in 1628. 

Natural philosophy—that is, at its root looking at the natural world though a love of wisdom—is descriptive because nature was the source of Leonardo’s inspiration. He is quoted, 

“Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.” Leonardo Da Vinci

Nature offered insight into peerless paintings like the Mona Lisa, which emerged from a lifelong study of optics, psychology, and artistic technique.

Most of this blog (at least in the past few years) has been focused on topics in science and religion. And though Leonardo demonstrated a sensitivity to the subtleties of Jesus’s betrayal by Judas in The Last Supper, most commentators take Leonard to be relatively uncommitted to any particular religion… or perhaps religion at all. Today science has become much more complex and those who practice science often need highly specialized skills. (I’m thinking of a friend who does research at CERN).

Still, I think Leonardo has something to offer us today: a curiosity unbounded by the boundaries of discipline, but instead relentless pursuing nature and its wisdom. Why do most of have to niche ourselves in artistic, humanistic, or scientific pursuits? Let’s follow Leonardo.

Might I add that we can follow the creation back to the Creator and find in both numerous topics worthy of our wonder? 

Paranoia, Politics, and Science (A Meditation on July 4th)

I'm beginning to work on a review of Antony Alumkal's Paranoid Science, and given the book's title, the word paranoid is key. In fact, Alumka's book builds on a speech (which later appeared in a magazine article) that addresses the growth of paranoia in American politics.

Consider this citation and try to figure out the era in which the article is written. (I've

suppressed one word with [x] to remove an easy clue.)

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the [x] movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

The writer, an eminent historian (I'll throw in that clue), a few paragraphs later offers this insight for the paranoia:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high. 

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. 

Alumkal argues in his book that the Christian Right has a paranoid resistance to science. I'll have more to say about that in future posts, but for today, I have two questions:

1. Do you see a paranoid response from the political right to mainstream science?
2. Who do you think the author of this piece is? Was it, for example, written about the rise of Trump and the influence of the Christian Right/white evangelicals in 2016?

I won't answer the first--that's for you to comment--but to the second, the [x] above was for "Goldwater" (or Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for US President in 1964). Does that help?  The author is Columbia Professor of American History Richard Hofstadter, speaking first at Oxford University and then publishing a piece for Harper's in November 1964 "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

A coda: Hofstadter's closing line is brilliantly phrased, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

The Science of Christmas Present 2018 Edition

I just graded about 30 essays from my science and religion class on the question, What do science and religion bring to the Camp Fire?  

The more thoughtful students noted that science and technology bring answers and that religion brings compassion. One student wrote something like this:

“We have science to thank for things like phosphate-based fire retardants, which helps slow the fire, and technology to spread the word of evacuation orders, but religion also plays a part in providing comfort and emotional support to people in these times. Religion and science can come together and integrate especially in times of need and this was exemplified in the aftermath of the Campfire.”

This offers one rejoinder to the off-stated contention that religion has no place in a scientific age, a world of facts and concrete proofs. Sometimes this leads into a discussion about the virginal conception of Jesus, or the nature of the "star" of Bethlehem (which might be a comet). Those specific topics have answers. But of course a raw assertion that no scientifically-minded person can believe in Christ is way too simplistic because we know many Christians who are also firmly convinced of the power of science--in other words, believing in the goodness of science doesn't obviate an ability to believe that there's a Creator in and through all of it.

In fact believing in the power of science actually leads to why we can trust science. As Albert Einstein once quipped,

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." Einstein.

And once that truth sinks into our brains, we might say it this way instead: The deep science of Christmas in fact is that this God has created this world, given it meaning, and come into this world in Jesus. 

Among other things, that divine miracle is replicated in our ability to make sense of the world God has made. As C. S. Lewis put it in his 1945 book Miracles, 

“The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer's cortex and his understanding that there might be a still unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarily more startling. We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any man, dwells within his natural organism.” C.S. Lewis

And once we take in this miraculous act of our Creator, we realize that there's even one deeper: that this God can transform our lives. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote,

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.” Kierkegaard

In fact, faith in Christ leads us to believe in a God who created this world in love and who can create us a response of compassion.

As far as I can tell, this is my final post for 2018, and so let me close with this: May this be the best kind of Christmas, filled with the conviction that God has come in Christ and that reality is still seen in lives of compassion and grace.

The Crooked Path of Nature

This is a bit of an advanced look at my new book, Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults, through a brief excerpt.

In the process of advocating for our listening to scientists because they describe creation and that helps us better grasp our Creator, I write this...

Through that listening we find praise and wonder and mystery. Scientists have also taught me honesty and a somewhat recalcitrant commitment to avoid easy answers by pondering intricacies we would have never guessed. (This may be why, in fact, some believers resist science—because scientists resist easy answers.) 

“Consider what God has done,” Ecclesiastes 7:13 says. “Who can straighten what he has made crooked?” 

Sometimes the works of God in the ways of nature are not as straightforward as we would like, even though science has figured out numerous things ancient thinkers and New Testament writers didn’t know. Nevertheless, through all this beauty, awesome display, and puzzling natural reality, we still somehow discover the “eternal power and divine nature” of our Creator (Romans 1:20). It strikes me that affirming the “eternal power and divine nature” offers both a wide place for scientific discovery and a respectful silence and patience for future answers. I believe that scientists ultimately lead us to admit our limits and declare the majesty of God, echoing what Paul exclaimed ten chapters later: 

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33).

On Creation, Beauty, and Science

I just finished up a manuscript for InterVarsity Press, Mere Science and Christian Faith. There's a round of editing to come before it appears in early 2018. Until that happens, here's an adapted excerpt on creation, beauty, and science.

We are created to relate to the creation around us. The thrill of scientists is that the natural world is exciting to discover. And that begins the process of science. There we almost spontaneously praise our Creator. Jeff Hardin, zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, summarized it so well at a recent BioLogos science and Christian faith conference: “Why be a scientist? Worship.” In this very sense, the Psalmist was acting as a natural scientist when he exclaimed,

What a wildly wonderful world, God!    You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,    made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.
Psalm 104:24, The Message

      

The study of nature is the beginning of science and thus the calling for scientists. But it’s really for all believers. Back again to the psalms, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1, NIV). Many of us have become dulled to nature’s divine speech, and scientists help tune our ears to the mystery of a starlight night, the sophisticated order of our bodies, and the glorious structures of physical systems. In a graduate seminar on theology and science, I listened to a Berkeley biochemist describe for us non-scientists the formations of polymers. (Full disclosure: Until that moment, I had never carefully observed polymers.) He showed us a magnified picture and in the midst of a careful description, he just couldn’t help himself with a surprising re-discovery of something he already knew: “Look how beautiful these are!” After forty years of university teaching, his wonder and excitement was still fresh.

This is wonder based on beauty. When we grasp beauty in nature, we are drawn to the Source of beauty. And the nature of beauty is that it draws us in. I was reminded by David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite that in Eastern Orthodoxy, theology begins with philokalia, or “the love of beauty.” I've also been reading Jonathan Edwards for the next book I'm writing, who, like the great Puritan pastors of the eighteenth century, studied both nature and Scripture as sources for finding beauty. Edwards wrote,

For as God is infinitely the greatest being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.

And there truth becomes beautiful. And I hope my meaning in that sentence isn't lost: rhetoric—as an engagement with beauty—should be used in concert with philosophy—as the pursuit of truth. Truth is only worth engaging if it’s beautiful, and beauty is that which allures us.

      

This is a particular beauty, the beauty of life’s making sense, of satisfying our need for deep abiding happiness, for Aristotle’s “human flourishing,” and for Jesus’s promise of “abundant life” (John 10:10). Drawing on these ancient, wise voices indicates that this obviously is not a new idea, and I concur here with the great French physicist Henri Poincaré,

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living….

Let’s can join hands with Poincaré and with the ancient theologian’s philokalia. Let's weave together mainstream science and mere Christianity into what is truly beautiful and beautifully true.

What Does Our President-Elect Think About Science?

As a member of the faculty, I wrote this piece for our comparative religion and humanities department at Cal State Chico, and it seemed worth posting here too.

September 2017 post-script to this article, which I'll post here and is thus more of a "prescript" than a "postscript." It appears that the positive words toward science that Trump presented are not panning out. Read this article for a few examples.

This fall, ScientificAmerican posed Twenty Questions to the four presidential candidates on their scientific knowledge. And now that the election is decided, these answers either represent opportunities missed or promises to be fulfilled.

Naturally, the answers fell into some predictable patterns: Jill Stein leaned toward enthusiasm about science, but concerns about environmental issues. Gary Johnson celebrated science and believed the free market has the best means for directing the future of science. This was mirrored in many ways by Donald Trump, although he sometimes offered much shorter answers that stuck to key emphases of his campaign. Hillary Clinton presented the most lengthy responses and sought to counterpoise government regulation and investment alongside private entrepreneurship. (Since I’m also interested in religion and science, it’s worth noting that, of the four, Clinton is the most articulate about, and committed to, her faith—in this case, Methodist.)

      

With twenty issues and fifty pages of text, it’s only possible to highlight a couple of issues and focus on Trump as President-elect with the other three, and particularly Clinton, as foils. (Incidentally, there were some unusual topics included in “questions about science” such as opioids and immigration. This was a wide-ranging set of issues!) Concerned that government investment into scientific research is only about 1% of the national budget, Trump talked about the need for scientific innovation without mentioning investment of public funds, while Clinton asserted that funding science would be a high priority for her administration. Johnson leaned toward removing restrictions for private enterprise, while Stein believed that global climate change is our country’s biggest scientific concern. Notably—though climate change has support by the vast majority of scientists—only U. S. Republicans, out of every major party in the developed world, believe it is contested scientifically. Trump could only speak of “climate change” in quotation marks and moved quickly, when asked about it, to discuss clean water. Finally, I found all candidates’ comments on “Scientific Integrity” supportive of science and scientists. Trump made a clear declaration, 

“Science is science and facts are facts.  My administration will ensure that there will be total transparency and accountability without political bias.” 

(I heard scientists nodding in agreement in the background with a hope those words come true in his administration.) Clinton comments were surprisingly similar here: “I am deeply concerned by the recent increase in partisan political efforts to interfere in science.”

      

It seems to me that, in order to move forward, we need a robust commitment to scientific advancement while respecting our deeply religious country. Naturally, I can only offer this provisional report, but I will close with the hope that a commitment to the best of religion and science will be in our country’s future.