5. The Place of Science

The modern West is the first society to view the physical world as a closed system.  Our objection to regarding the physical world as a closed system is not that the view is unfortunate but that it is untrue. The question for us here is not, Does science require transphysical domains? but rather, Does it hint of their existence?  Clues are not proofs, of course, but they are something, and to follow their lead is the present chapter's object. Science, man's brightest intellectual exploit may house meaning beyond those it wears on its sleeve.  These meanings as they bear on the human spirit show themselves in a series of parallels between science and religion. Both claim that:

I. Things are not as they seem.

A. Science:

Modern science has unmasked the claims of man's sense receptors to disclose the world as it actually is. Had they presented us with the way things are we could not have survived. If we perceived atoms or quanta instead of cars we would be run over. Had our ancestors seen electrons instead of bears they would have been eaten.

B. Religion:

No more than man's unaided senses disclose the nature of the physical universe do his standard sensibilities discern the world's import: the meaning of life, history, or existence in general. World religions teach us these meaning whereas our hearts disregard event that lie outside their own self-interest.

II. The other-than-the-seeming is a "more": indeed, a stupendous more. It outstrips anything everyday experience might suspect.

A. Science:

1. The galaxies in the universe number in the billions. Their distances from us measure in the million and billions of light years.

2.In the opposite direction, the molecules in a half ounce of water is roughly 600,000 billion billion.

B. Religion: When world religions use numbers to suggest qualitative degrees it gives the astronomers a run for their money but generally will not bother with such number games but move right to the word infinite.

III. In their further reaches the world's "Mores" cannot be known in ordinary ways.

A. Science: When the physicist comes upon the very large, the very fast, or the very small nature violates, disregards, transcends the categories of space and time as we intuit them. For example, light is found to be both a wave and a particle.

B. Religion: The more we try to comprehend Perfection or even the heavens pictorially, the more credibility drains out of them, leaving us with cardboard cutouts of pearly gates and streets of gold or of thousand-armed divinities. Notwithstanding the infinite difference between God and man, Christ is fully both.

IV. The "Mores" that cannot be known in ordinary ways do, however, admit of being known in ways that are exceptional.

A. Science:  The device for discerning matter's farther reaches is mathematics. Nature can no longer be consistently imaged or described in ordinary language, but it can be consistently conceived through equations.

B. Religion: The comparably specialized way of knowing reality's highest transcorporeal reaches is the mystic vision. For example Buddha beneath the bo tree, Saul on the road to Damascus. The message is always the same.  We find that it consists of four components:

1.The insight is ineffable. Emphatically it knows, but like higher mathematics, what it knows is so little contiguous with ordinary knowing that scarcely a hint of it can be conveyed to the uninitiated; it is incommunicable.

2. The vision shows existence to be characterized by an entirely unexpected unity: earth joined to heaven, man fused with God, The Lord is one. (Another striking parallel with science: time and space are one, space and gravity are one) 

3. The discovery naturally awakens joy.

4. But the joy is not a mere feeling.  The man of God is never rejoiced; he is joy itself.  The mystic vision is not a feeling: it is a seeing, a knowing that involves being.  The insights are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance; they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.

V. The distinctive ways of knowing which the exceptional regions of reality require must be cultivated.

A. Science: It takes time to become a physicist today. When asked how he discovered the composition of the radiation emitted by radioactive substances Rutherford replied, "I don't think I thought about another thing for seven years."

B. Religion: It would seem that mystic knowing does not presuppose this kind of discipline and training. However, we must distinguish on the religious side between individuals who experience flashes of insight and others who stabilize these flashes and turn them into abiding light. Memory of the experience must be operative rather than idle, become his defining sense of reality, takes command and has the "curious sense of authority for aftertime.

VI. Profound knowing requires instruments.

A. Science: No amount of theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us as much about the galactic and extragalactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance by means of a good telescope, camera, and spectroscope.

B. Religion: The mystic counterparts of such instruments are basically two:

1. For collectives - tribes, societies, civilizations, traditions - the revealing instruments are the Revealed Texts or in non-literate societies, the ordering myths that are impounded in stories.

2. Other more individual instruments are required as well. Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.

VII. Both science religion come to a highest strata, a final riser leading upward into a nothingness out of which all matter is created.  It is a far cry from antimatter and super-space to the mind of an aborigine, yet it is conceivable that if the whole sweep of science were to be spread before the latter he might see it in better perspective than we do.

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Preface ] [ 1. The Way Things Are ] [ 2. Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional Cross ] [ 3. The Levels of Reality ] [ 4. The Levels of Selfhood ] [ 5. The Place of Science ] [ 6. Hope, Yes; Progress, No ] [ 7. Epilogue ] [ Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence ]