Nature Inquiries

by Carl Strang

Winter is a time when we slow down and become introspective. Sitting and staring into the fire, we ponder the big questions. If you have been following this blog, you know that the focus here is science, science that can be done simply in outdoor settings. But we are more than scientists, and science has well defined limitations that need to be understood by everyone who does science or studies its findings. This winter I am using one post per week to develop my own viewpoint and biases, in particular sharing my take on the relationship between science and spirituality. In part this defines for me what these two realms of human experience are all about, and also develops the separate methods used for inquiry in each realm. I plan to place this paragraph in front of each entry in this series, so that those who are interested only in natural history or in scientific practice can skip these posts.

Introduction

All musical instruments contain a space, a volume empty except for air (it’s obvious in a guitar, drum or didjeridu, but even a triangle has a gap; sticks hit together have free ends which accomplish the same thing; the human voice results from vibrations in the vocal chords impacting many resonating chambers in the chest, throat and head). This space, set in motion by the appropriate application of energy, creates a sound, and the nature of the sound depends on the nature of both the space and the compelling energy. (The 3 Stooges found many creative ways to make sound with the human head other than with the voice). The space within an instrument permits the formation of a standing wave which emanates as sound.

Possibly the original instrument was a gourd rattle, the gourd containing seeds in its space, and the shaking of it providing the energy (this idea is discussed thoroughly by Dolores LaChapelle in her 1988 book, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life). The gourd and, by extension, every musical instrument is a universal symbol, representative of the Void of creation, the Motionless that sits in eternity awaiting energy so as to take form. Music making (and Stooge head klonking) is a highly meaningful symbolic act.

Physics, in its close examination of matter, has found that our conventional view of “solid” substance is an illusion. When viewed at the subatomic level, matter turns out to be nearly all empty space. (Remember this the next time you sit before a hot fudge sundae). Even the “particles” that dot this space are not solid, but rather seem to be quantities of energy in motion. They are regarded as patterns of standing waves. This makes them, and by extension all “objects,” forms that have much in common with the sound waves emanating from those musical instruments.

This all, of course, applies to us, as well. If we are part of a universe-as-musical-production, then we can imagine the energy of God’s love emanating from the aboriginal Void, with our universe resulting as a precipitated creation. I recognize that this may seem like empty metaphor, but theoretical advances by some of the leading physicists over the past decade or two describe the universe as a complex wave function resulting from a collision of multidimensional “branes” (I’ll return to this later). I can imagine those branes as hyperdimensional cymbals. Various spiritual traditions suggest that we co-create our bodies as outer, small expressions of a larger Spirit beneath the physical surface. Both the mythologies of the world and emerging scientific understanding point to the notion that ultimately the universe and consciousness are bound together into a complex, folded, intercommunicating, interacting whole. They only seem to be composed of separate parts.

Our understanding of reality is based entirely on what we experience, what we perceive. Such experiences include everyday physical sensory impressions, but also what are called mystical experiences. Physical experiences feed science. Mystical experiences feed spirituality. Both kinds of experience, both methodologies, involve inquiry. But both kinds of experience are constructs within our brains; we are a step removed from whatever gives rise to them.

We seem to exist in a time- and space-bound arena, this physical world. But advanced theoretical physics and spiritual traditions agree, though from different viewpoints, that our perception of time and space is illusory. General relativity, and problems with defining what time and space are in the first place, challenge our assumptions from a scientific viewpoint. In the underlying Spirit realm where the bulk of us exists according to some traditions, there is no time or space, only the eternal Dreamtime. Yet within our everyday experience, in every moment we seem to be maintaining and playing with, changing and growing our form (that “growing” part will be especially true if we contemplate too many of those hot fudge sundaes).

My original goal for this study was to explore ways in which science points toward or is congruent with spiritual ideas. For a while that direction seemed promising, but now I feel that ultimately it is a dead end. The discoveries of quantum and relativistic physics, sensory and central nervous system physiology all have dismantled our everyday assumptions about the physical world, showing it to be insubstantial, and that body of fact can open the mind to spiritual possibilities. Some of the notions that have arisen within spiritual traditions find support in these branches of science. But I realize now that spirituality is insubstantial in a different way, a way that remains accessible only through subjective experience. Science has not yet developed methods to touch it. Stephen Hawking’s 2001 book (The Universe in a Nutshell) convinced me that nothing in the “new physics” requires a spiritual interpretation.

Subjective experience remains valid, though Hawking’s language implies that he personally wants to consider only ideas that meet Karl Popper’s (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) criterion of inter-subjective agreement. To do so, I believe, is to commit the error of confusing science with religion. Even Popper was not so extreme. As I read him, his criterion of demarcation was intended to separate science from other ways of understanding, not to argue that it is the only way. Popper pointed out that science is done by human beings, who cannot totally abandon their subjectivity. So science depends upon observations that are the same no matter who makes them. There is no way to prove that any hypothesis is true, because you never can be sure that an exception will not appear. But you can try to falsify a hypothesis, and if a hypothesis stands up to a variety of tests, it can be treated as though it describes a part of the physical universe correctly. Science is our best tool for understanding physical reality.

The picture is made fuzzy, of course, by the statistical nature of many phenomena in the natural world, as well as by chaotic determinism. The humanity of scientists leads them to bend the rules, often without being aware that they are doing so. These are points which have become better known in the years since Popper’s treatise. But in my view they simply add interest and color to the basic structure outlined above.

Of greater concern is the assertion by many scientists and others that science is, or should be, the only way to obtain knowledge. Extreme proponents of this view (I call them science fundamentalists) maintain that phenomena or aspects of reality that are inaccessible to scientific methodology simply do not exist. Popper pointed out that there are clear, logical limits to science and intrinsic uncertainties in its foundation. The whole range of mystical experience is subjective in nature and thus out of bounds to science. We celebrate this, in the arts and in religion. It is irrational to condemn such experiences in the name of science. They are not scientific, but that does not mean they are not real and meaningful.