Life presents us with any number of vexing mysteries that don’t have certain answers. Philosophy attempts to provide answers, but at a certain point it can only hazard guesses and conjectures based on the available evidence. And for the most difficult questions, there is no concrete evidence at all: What was our conscious experience before we were born? What is our conscious experience after we die? Are we the only beings with sentient life in this entire universe? Was this universe created by accident, or is there some purpose behind it? These questions were hard for man to entertain in the centuries before modern scientific knowledge and technological power. But while science and technology have come and expanded our scope, the questions remain unsolved. And it’s not clear if the great spiritual seekers and philosophers of the past who were vexed would have found the presence of science and technology to be of any help or hindrance in confronting their great questions and doubts.
But regardless of the possibility of the doubt of saints or extreme skepticism of radical philosophers in the past, in our present world, the triumphs of science do appear to provide a substantial reason for doubting at least one set of answers: the philosophical answers that come from theistic conceptions of the universe. The scientific and technological works of man now appear to far exceed anything that is directly attributed to God. We have probes that travel our farther than the ends of the solar system, airplanes that carry humans safely and reliably to the other side of the earth, weapons that can level cities, surgical interventions that can heal the lame and sick—and all of these are the works of science, not of God.
There have certainly been great works in the past that seem to have been inspired or coordinated by religion or spirituality, such as the work of constructing grand temples or cathedrals, coordinating large societies around religious principles and observances, inspiring artworks whose details and forms evoke pity or love, or simply cultivating noble human qualities like love and charity. But these all pale in the comparison to the sheer spectacle that science is able to bring about. And the modern temperament is likely to see those past works as brought about by human means and talent anyway, whether the talent of architects, artists, and social organizers, without any need to appeal to the power of God.
To this modern temperament, the spiritual impulse, when it is not discounted completely, appears to be merely a private emotional consolation, or at best something that thrives in the few unexplained gaps that science will eventually fill in one day. Science promises that mysteries can be explained in a rational way, without the need to appeal to anything that cannot be demonstrated physically. It may take decades of training to understand the explanations, and huge laboratories and complicated instruments to bring the demonstrations about, but ultimately all of its results can be communicated in a language shared by the appropriate experts. It has had spectacular success with explaining certain mysteries, and these have been explained so completely that it appears that all the rest are sure to succumb eventually.
Science generally rejects God because God has not been necessary to answer any of the mysteries that it has answered. This is, of course, because science works to explain everything that can be seen and measured. God, on the other hand, cannot be seen or measured. Spiritual seekers would say that this just means that God does not fall within science’s purview. Spiritual experience, in particular is held by spiritual seekers to be a sovereign field, not subject to science’s truth claims: though the scientists may be on the trail of full knowledge of the chemical and biological workings of the brain, for now they still cannot provide answers as to what is the experience of the God-lover or God-knower in the moment of illumination; they may offer explanations of what is going on in the brain’s cells but they cannot explain the subjective illumination and bliss. Of course, this doesn’t stop science from opining that spiritual experience is nothing more than a trick of perception, like finding a way to get a vending machine to dispense candy without paying, and not something that reflects and real demonstrable physical or metaphysical reality.
For the theist, the seeker, or the believer, then, the answer can only be the affirmation—private, if necessary—that science cannot see everything. But this need not mean that it is impossible to reconcile the existence of science with spiritual belief. If we accept the *primacy of spirit over matter*, there is no issue. From the perspective of the spiritual seeker who sees all life and activity as a manifestation of God, it is not hard to see a biological lab, a construction project, a rocket launch, a submarine as so many more novel expressions of God. If one’s experience is primarily grounded in the internal experience of the unity of spirit or consciousness, it’s easy to imagine emerging from absorption in that unity into the external world and finding, say, dedicated scientists and engineers who make discoveries and unleash powers of nature and sophisticated measuring devices used to understand physical world among the many other forms and images of the universe. That is to say, the idea that the existence of scientific knowledge and the outputs of engineering are just so many more manifestations of consciousness is not hard to imagine.
This is not so much integration of science and and spiritual philosophy as a change of perspective, a favoring of one over the other. It does not address the arguments that science levels against spiritual seeking so much as change the frame of reference to make them appear less salient. This might seem less powerful than finding arguments to “combat” the claims of science. But this can still be done indefinitely; the point of this reframing is to get to the peace of mind that comes with a basis from which there is fundamentally no need for argument, per se. At that point, philosophical inquiry and even debate with materialist perspectives can continue for mutual enrichment.
This perspective shift is effective perhaps because of its modesty: one only needs to see that the existence of science and technology *should not be surprising* for someone who believes in a God who contains infinite possibilities of manifestation. But in a more affirmative spiritual view that goes beyond all doubt, one would not only accept the fact that science exists but would also affirm more positively that science is a manifestation of the knowledge and power of God himself. As humans separated from God, we forget where these powers come from when we wield them: we think they are our powers. But scientific knowledge is not simply the force of human agency discovering or inventing truths and powers from thin air. In fact, the powers that the scientists and engineers find are the powers of God himself, meant to achieve God’s aims by being put to use by human beings for the benefit of the world he created.
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