Recently I went with my wife Devorah to see the Discovery Time Square‘s exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This excellent exhibit featured both biblical and “sectarian” (related to the Qumran community nearest to the scroll caves) documents. Most exciting among the biblical documents was the oldest written version of the Ten Commandments. This rarely exhibited document is exceedingly delicate and predates the next oldest version (perhaps the Aleppo Codex) by about 1000 years. Devorah and I took the opportunity to make a spiritual connection, but that is not the subject of this post or this website. Rather, I would like to convey to you some of the introduction provided live by the museum staff. What was said is illustrative of the dismissive attitude some social scientists have about religious and spiritual materials and culture, even when their own methods are far from the most precise.
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The mission of SoulLaboratory.com is help close the gap between people with scientific and people with spiritual outlooks. To help that effort I will periodically point the readers of the blog to like-minded individuals on the Web.
Ervin Laszlo is a renaissance man making a very positive effort in line with the goals of SoulLaboratory.com. Check out…
These two sites are rich resources with many contributions to a constructive dialog between science and spirituality.
All the best,
B.
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When I began teaching “Introduction to Psychological Science” at Columbia University (their version of “Psych 101”), it fell on me to explain to 18-20 year olds what science was. For many of these rather brilliant students, my class would be one of the two science classes required for their degree, so I took this responsibility very seriously. Never having had to communicate this basic information before, I relied on my textbook, “Psychological Science,” by Gazzaniga, Halpern, and Heatherton, to guide me. A crucial aspect of their definition of science, is that it is objective, a word that I didn’t fully understand and appreciate until that point. Understanding the objective nature of science turned out to be a major event in the development of my understanding of the relation between science and spirituality, because it helped me understand that science was never intended to help us understand the subjective. Simply put, science can help us understand many things, but not our experience of our selves. That is what spirituality is for.
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It is my hope that by making personal posts that describe how I have come to live fully in the world of science and fully in the world of spirituality without conflict, I can do my small part to heal an aspect of the world’s wounds. I want my life to demonstrate that each of us can and should benefit from all the world has to offer as far as wisdom and understanding of the way the world works, to help us individually achieve peace and happiness, which will lead to the same for our neighbors. But as with everything in our lives, my ego has something to say about this, and this weekend I learned that I should not write from a place that assumes I have perfectly reconciled the apparent opposites of science and spirituality. Here’s what happened.
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