thought of the day.117

“How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one's place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. In this sense, science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. And, I think science does this in spades.

I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my eight-inch telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 3 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the plains of Africa.

I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson just above us here in the San Gabriel mountains, discovered that this "nebula" was actually an extragalactic stellar system of immense size and distance. Hubble subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that the universe is expanding away from an explosive creation. It was the first empirical evidence indicating that the universe had a beginning.

What could be more awe-inspiring—more numinous, magical, spiritual—than this cosmic visage? For my money, Mt. Wilson Observatory is the Chartres Cathedral of our time, and I recommend that you make the 25-mile trek up Angeles Crest Highway (Highway 2, off the 210 freeway in La Canada, its a public venue so everyone can go) to see it and be moved that our species in our generation was able to widen our cosmic horizons by so much—from 1900 light years in Hubble's time to 13.7 billion light years in our time—the universe grew by seven orders of magnitude in our time alone. That's even more than the federal deficit!

So in conclusion, what science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, whirling away from one another in an accelerating expanding cosmic bubble universe, that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes.

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciencuality, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are suppose to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Through a natural process of evolution, and a creative course of culture, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited parsec of space, potentially elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, a passing proscenium in the drama of the cosmos.”

~ Michael Shermer