It’s the Weltanschauung, stupid!

[Eckersley, R. ‘The view from a cave: a personal look at science, spirituality and meaning’, Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National, 12 December 1999; ‘Universal truths’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2000, Spectrum, p. 4; ‘From the mouth of a cave, a vision of a moral universe’, The Age, 8 April 2000, News Extra.]

The view from a cave: science, spirituality and meaning

Richard Eckersley

Back in the 1970s, when I was a young man travelling abroad, I spent some time living in a cave on a remote part of the south coast of Crete. It was there, alone, watching the full moon rise over the sea one night, that I had my most intense spiritual experience. It was something I find almost impossible to put into words.

There was nothing ‘romantic’ about the moment. It felt as if some force or power had penetrated to the core of my being, a part of me that seemed to go back in time forever, and be connected with everything else. I was filled with awe and reverence.

I understood instantly why my ancestors had worshipped the moon, so eerily powerful in a vast, otherwise-unlit landscape. But for me, the rising moon was the trigger, not the source, of my transfixion. I have no doubt that had I come from a religious background, I would say that I had ‘felt the presence of God’. But my background is science, so I think of the experience as the tapping of a ‘genetic memory’ of my evolution, of everything that had ever come before me.

The mystery of my experience, and the difficulty of articulating it, is well understood. I remember the Catholic theologian, Tony Kelly, saying in a television program that God is beyond images and beyond thought. ‘Thomas Aquinas said that we know God best when we come to the point of knowing that we don’t know him.’

A Sanskrit text, the Upanishad, says of Brahman (the ultimate reality, or Self, from which the world was created): ‘Brahman is unknown to those who know it and is known to those who do not know it at all.’

The novelist, Morris West, a devout Catholic, once said: ‘I don’t know who or what God is but I do know that there is a relationship between me and the Cosmos and its origins - I’m part of it.’ The biologist and theologian, Charles Birch, also emphasises the ‘relational’ nature of God. God, he says, ‘is internally related to all that is’. ‘God is to the world as self is to the body.’ As I understand this, he is saying our relationship to God is personal, but it is an internal relationship, not a relationship to something or someone else; there is no ‘other’.

After my stint as a Cretan troglodyte, I travelled back to Australia through Asia. I got to talk to quite few disciples or devotees of various gurus and cults. I could see they were all speaking of the same ultimate truth, but using different stories or metaphors. Yet they usually couldn’t see this; they tended to believe their faith was the one true path to enlightenment, and everyone else was just ‘on a trip’.

My definition of that truth, of spirituality, is a deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to the world and the universe in which we live. I see religions as social institutions built up around a particular spiritual metaphor, or set of metaphors.

Religions may be socially necessary and desirable to obtain the greatest social and personal benefits from a sense of the spiritual - meaning, fulfilment, virtue. I don’t feel my own spirituality is particularly adequate or developed.

On the other hand, religions can be made so rigid and sclerotic by institutional inertia, and by layers of bureaucracy, politics and corruption, that their spiritual core withers. When this happens, they become self-serving institutions lacking any higher purpose; worse, they can become potent ideologies of oppression and abuse.

Science also uses metaphors to describe the world. These days, cosmology is full of terms like black holes, worm holes, quantum foam. We are learning that science and religion use different metaphors to describe the same world, or different dimensions of the same world. (Some metaphors, such as Gaia, the notion of the Earth as a single, self- regulating living system or organism, can even be both scientific and religious).

Here are two scientific descriptions of the world. The first comes from the biologist, Richard Dawkins:

‘In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’

The second is from the physicist, Paul Davies:

‘The true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life....(T)he universe (is) a coherent, rational, elegant and harmonious expression of a deep and purposeful meaning.’

The two views represent the extremes of the modern scientific worldview. According to the first, we are doing what all species have ever done: to do as well as possible, to sequester for ourselves as much of the earth’s resources as we possibly can. According to the second, we are part of an awesome evolutionary pattern that has seen, in the space of some 15 billion years, the emergence of a universe that can wonder and marvel at itself. I don’t think the two are irreconcilable, and simply reflect different dimensions of the evolution of life – Dawkins focusing on living organisms and their struggle for survival, Davies on a cosmological perspective.

Western culture has been deeply influenced by the old, Newtonian model of a dead, mechanical, clockwork universe. It has yet to absorb the significance of the new model, one of a dynamic cosmic network of forces and fields, of an ‘undivided, flowing wholeness’ - to use physicist David Bohm’s words - that is far more compatible with a spiritual sense of connectedness to the universe.

The Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, argued in Scientific American a few years ago that life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values. For example, the vacuum energy or cosmological constant appears to need to be fine-tuned to an accuracy of about 120 decimal places for life to exist in the universe. So is this the razor’s edge of probability or exquisite precision engineering?

The significance of all this, for me, is not that there is some Divine Purpose or Supreme Being somewhere ‘out there’. Rather this understanding of our relationship with the Cosmos fosters a sense of deeper purpose, or meaning, within ourselves.

Spirituality is the intuitive sense of what science seeks to explain rationally. The anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, said that, ‘Whatever else religion does, it relates a view of the ultimate nature of reality to a set of ideas of how man is well-advised…to live.’ It has often been said that science, while also offering a view of ‘the ultimate nature of reality’ lacks the moral dimension. Yet research in a wide range of disciplines – from psychology and physiology, epidemiology and sociology, to ecology and cosmology – does provide guidance on how we ought to live – guidance of a kind that is compatible and consistent with religious teaching.

But in both realms – science and spirituality – we are operating at the very limits of our capacity to comprehend ‘the grand scheme of things’. We can only express ourselves in clumsy metaphors; the moral lessons can only be human interpretations, not laws of science or of God.

Human well-being is associated with the personal, social and spiritual relationships that give our lives a moral texture and a sense of meaning - of self-worth, belonging, identity, purpose and hope. Psychologists have shown that positive life meaning is related to strong religious beliefs, self-transcendent values, membership of groups, dedication to a cause and clear life goals.

Meaning in life need not be religious. Many people today find it in the pursuit of personal goals – in careers, sport or family, for example. But spirituality offers something deeper. It is central to the age-old questions about the meaning of life: Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I here? It represents the broadest and deepest form of connectedness. It is the most subtle, and so easily corrupted by societies, yet perhaps the most powerful. It is the only form that transcends our personal circumstances, social situation and the material world, and so can sustain us through the trouble and strife of mortal existence.

Morris Berman concludes his book, ‘Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West’, with these words:

‘Something obvious keeps eluding our civilisation, something that involves a reciprocal relationship between nature and psyche, and that we are going to have to grasp if we are to survive as a species. But it hasn’t come together yet, and as a result, to use the traditional labels, it is still unclear whether we are entering a new Dark Age or a new Renaissance.’

I read - in the context of the coalition between Muslims and Catholics on the issue of birth control at 1994 United Nations summit on population and development in Cairo - that the Iranian deputy Foreign Minister had stated that ‘the war of the future’ would be fought between the religious and the materialists.

This is one tension we must deal with. There is another growing tension that will also bear mightily on the future: a tension between developing new, or renewed, ‘transformational’ religions and retreating to old, fundamentalist faiths. The former would use metaphysical metaphors and practices attuned to our times and our modern, scientific understanding of the world; the latter offer rock-solid certainties in a time when these can be enormously destructive.

I don’t mean, in talking about this tension, to sideline current mainstream faiths, but rather to suggest they will be caught up in it, and could be profoundly shaped by it. The danger with fundamentalism is that it mistakes the religious ‘metaphor’ for the spiritual ‘truth’, and so cedes too much power to those who claim to speak on God’s behalf. On the other hand, more ‘modern’ concepts of God, while philosophically compelling, may be too abstract to meet the human yearning for spiritual comfort and moral authority. Still, this path seems to me to offer the best prospects of a better future – harder, undoubtedly, but more likely in the long run to lead to a peaceful, equitable and sustainable world.

The new religions would transcend, rather than confront, the powerful individualising and fragmenting forces of postmodernity. One of the most exciting ideas to emerge from recent postmodern scholarship is that we have the opportunity, however small, of becoming truly moral beings, perhaps for the first time in history.

That is, we have, each of us, the opportunity to exercise genuine moral choice and to take responsibility for the consequences of those choices, rather than accepting moral edicts based on some grand, universal creed and handed down from on high by its apostles. This seems close to what theologians call the doctrine of ‘primacy of conscience’.

This is an immense challenge, and it may well be asking too much of us. But the ideal is there, if often hidden, in both religious teaching and science. To succeed, we will each need the opportunity to view the world from the mouth of a cave (metaphorically speaking, of course): to experience a place of solitude, a time of reflection.

Richard Eckersley is working on aspects of progress and well-being at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.

Note: This version may differ slightly from the published articles because of editorial changes.