In the previous post in this series, I said that naturalistic humanism borrows from religion the meanings of joy and good. I have found no greater example of this than in the writings1 of Carolyn Porco. Dr. Porco is a planetary scientist and currently leads the imaging science team on the Cassini mission now in orbit around Saturn. She was awarded the Carl Sagan Award in 2010 for “magnifying the public’s understanding of science.”
The confrontation between science and formal religion will come to an end when the role played by science in the lives of all people is the same played by religion today.
At the heart of every scientific inquiry is a deep spiritual quest — to grasp, to know, to feel connected through an understanding of the secrets of the natural world, to have a sense of one’s part in the greater whole…
Spiritual fulfillment and connection can be found in the revelations of science. From energy to matter, from fundamental particles to DNA, from microbes to Homo sapiens, from the singularity of the Big Bang to the immensity of the universe …. ours is the greatest story ever told. We scientists have the drama, the plot, the icons, the spectacles, the ‘miracles’, the magnificence, and even the special effects. We inspire awe. We evoke wonder.
These are reasons enough for jubilation … for riotous, unrestrained, exuberant merry-making.
So what are we missing?
Ceremony.2
Imagine a Church of Latter Day Scientists where believers could gather. Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way. Or others rejoicing in the nuclear force that makes possible the sunlight of our star and the starlight of distant suns. And can’t you just hear the hymns sung to the antiquity of the universe, its abiding laws, and the heaven above that ‘we’ will all one day inhabit, together, commingled, spread out like a nebula against a diamond sky?
One day, the sites we hold most sacred just might be the astronomical observatories, the particle accelerators, the university research installations, and other laboratories where the high priests of science — the biologists, the physicists, the astronomers, the chemists — engage in the noble pursuit of uncovering the workings of nature herself. And today’s museums, expositional halls, and planetaria may then become tomorrow’s houses of worship, where these revealed truths, and the wonder of our interconnectedness with the cosmos, are glorified in song by the devout and the soulful.
“Hallelujah!”, they will sing. “May the force be with you!”
- Dr. Porco’s essay has been edited for brevity. The full essay was included in Edge.org’s 2006 compilation, “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” and can be found at http://edge.org/response-detail/11273. [↩]
- The word “Worship” would be far more appropriate here, considering what Dr. Porco describes in the following paragraphs. [↩]
What a scary world. However, this nothing new. She may think it’s some radical idea to have nature as the subject of worship, but people have been doing it for thousands of years. Sun, stars, moon, sky, love, trees, earth, water, and fire, to name a few, have all been worshiped and the people doing it deceived and blind to the One who created it. The only difference now is that the worship is hidden behind “science”. All science is, is a nature explanation of the wonder of creation. Just because we can explain some things doesn’t mean that it self existent. A person who has never seen a car could learn how it functions but that does not mean it is worthy of worship because all the parts work harmoniously and it has a purpose.
Can you image the moral decay of the world if it went her way?