A century and a half before Carl
Sagan explored the relationship
between science and religion,
Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer
programmer, contemplated the
subject in a beautiful letter. Two centuries
later, Alan Lightman crafted
an enchanting definition of secular
spirituality. This question has also
been addressed by Albert Einstein
in answering a little girl’s question
about whether scientists pray, Flannery
O’Connor in considering dogma, belief, and the difference between
religion and faith, and Jane Goodall in her exquisite conversation
with Bill Moyers on science and spirituality ” and
yet the question is, and perhaps is bound to remain, an open
one.
One of the most articulate and lucid attempts to answer it
comes from Alan Watts, who popularized Eastern philosophy
in the West, in his fantastic 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity:
A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library) ” the same
treasure trove of insight that gave us Watts on happiness and
how to live a full lifeand his prescient admonition about our
modern media gluttony.
Watts writes:
We must here make a clear distinction between belief and
faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean
a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief,
as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what
one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his
mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived
ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved
opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn
out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the
unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the
word, faith is the essential virtue of scienceThe present phase
of human thought and history … almost compels us to face reality
with open minds, and you can only know God through
an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear
window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass
with blue paint.
But “religious” people who resist the scraping of the paint
from the glass, who regard the scientific attitude with fear and
mistrust, and confuse faith with clinging to certain ideas, are
curiously ignorant of laws of the spiritual life which they might
find in their own traditional records. A careful study of comparative
religion and spiritual philosophy reveals that abandonment
of belief, of any clinging to a future life for one’s own,
and of any attempt to escape from finitude and mortality, is a
regular and normal stage in the way of the spirit. Indeed, this
is actually such a “first principle” of the spiritual life that it
should have been obvious from the beginning, and it seems,
after all, surprising that learned theologians should adopt anything
but a cooperative attitude towards the critical philosophy
of science.
