Religious Scholar

A few months ago, I was talking with a very scientifically minded CEO. As soon as he heard about this Web site, his mind snapped shut, like a live clam tossed into a pot of boiling water. Religion! Bad! I knew that talking to him further was an exercise in futility and would serve only to frustrate us both.

To many people, religion means prejudice, but those firmly grounded in the material world have prejudices of their own. The CEO mumbled something about the dangers of people who despise the “real” world in favor of an afterlife that may not even exist. It was clear that he took the “Bomb in a Backpack” view of religion!

But what if scientific and religious seekers are using different vocabularies to describe the search for the same phenomenon? There are not only many intriguing commonalities among the world’s religions; there are also shared goals and values among the scientific and the spiritual.

Seekers along both paths deeply desire an understanding of essential truth. As high-energy-particle physicists plumb the mysteries of quarks, quasars and cold dark matter, rational religious people seek to know the source of life through prayer, reflection and meditation. The spiritual path adds compassion and love. The scientific path contributes measurement and accountability. Together, they offer perhaps the optimum path for people of integrity, intellectual curiosity and responsibility to live lives of purpose, discovery and service.

Mathematicians and scientists who have gone as far as these disciplines can take us marvel at the perhaps unknowable mystery at the core of the universe. This mystery is the object of contemplation among religious mystics of all traditions. To paraphrase the German theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), true awakening comes not in the sacraments of a particular faith, but in what happens when we pass through those sacraments, have burst the boundaries of all the forms of knowledge and come face to face with naked Reality. I think that not only would a Hindu or Buddhist agree with this assessment, but also any scientist who had explored, at the micro-level, the endlessly complex world of subatomic physics, and at the macro-level, the DNA-like spirals of time in an infinite universe.

In this life and possibly beyond, there is the Core, and whether we are spiritual or material people, we are drawn to it with wonder and awe.