Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [72]
One gentleman recounted a lengthy tantric sexual encounter with his lover that lasted for many hours, at the culmination of which a lightning bolt shot through her left eye followed by a blue light-being child entering her womb, ensuring conception. Nine months later, friends and gurus joined the couple in a hot house, sweating their way through their own “rebirthing” process (to cleanse the pain of one’s own childbirth so that it is not passed on to the child) before the mother gave birth to a baby boy. Right then and there the father informed this infant that he would need to become an athlete in order to get into college; two decades later, the father told me as I slipped deeper into the hot tub, this young man became a professional baseball player. “How do you explain that?” he queried. I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
People have and share such spiritual experiences, and impart larger significance to them, because we have a cortex large enough to conceive of such transcendent notions, and an imagination creative enough to concoct fantastic narratives. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made—our genes, proteins, memories, and personalities—then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos.
There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one in its awe-inspiring account of who we are and where we came from. “The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” began the late astronomer Carl Sagan in the opening scene of Cosmos, filmed just down the coast from Esalen. “Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” How can we connect to this vast cosmos? Sagan’s answer is both spiritually scientific and scientifically spiritual: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff,” he said, referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life, which are cooked in the interiors of stars, then released in supernova explosions into interstellar space where they condense into a new solar system with planets, some of which have life that is composed of this star stuff. “We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”2
That is spiritual gold, and Carl Sagan was one of the most spiritual scientists of our epoch.3
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 oneself. There are many sources of spirituality. Unfortunately, there are those who believe that science and spirituality are in conflict. The nineteenth-century English poet John Keats, for example, lamented that Isaac Newton had “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.” Natural philosophy, he complained in his 1820 poem Lamia,