science.spirituality.literature/ part 1

“Science, spirituality, and literature—we need all three to get through the day, the life, the universe.” –j.w.schlack

I feel obligated to explain my delay in posting; I did promise a twice-weekly blog. This week’s quote comes from the essay “Mindfulness and Memoir” from the December issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. The quote has been lingering above my head for weeks now, and I just haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it. A series—my first thought, but at the time, I didn’t have this space to talk it out.

Now I do, and for the next week, you can look forward to a three-part (maybe even four!) series on this quote. I tried to jam it into one, but it felt only right to give each its own, particularly because other quotes have been floating in and out of my brain, quotes that envelop this notion of all three factions of knowledge.

Science.

How often do you really think about science? About the way nothing ever truly touches because we’re all just a bunch of charged atoms, zipping around to avoid collision. About the way the Earth looks like a spec from Jupiter. About the way the universe is so much bigger than us, yet our surroundings feel so personal, as if the world were made for us (more on that later). But really, how often do you think about it?

One of my favorite quotes on the topic comes from the very beginning of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time:

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’

I’m constantly amazed by how much we think we know, just because we’ve come to the realization that the world is not flat and is (unfortunately) not held by giant tortoises. We use what we know to shape what we believe, and the more we know, the less we believe in ideas contrary to our own experiences.

This is why children stop believing in Santa Claus and why, personally, believing in Jesus is really hard when you start to think about science and matter and what defines life and death and God.

Just like with the turtles, the universe is simple matter; we shape a mental image that allows no room for God. We push him out. In our current, scientific blanket view of the universe, where is he? Who tugs the strings & keeps an ever-watchful eye? How often have you thought about it?

Science shapes spirituality by either opening or closing our imagination to what we know versus what we believe. Metaphysics 101…if only…

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