Spiritual Yearning in Science

Stump: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump

Hoogerwerf:

And I’m Colin Hoogerwerf.

Stump: 

We’re almost through the year 2025 as I speak these words. This year we have seen dramatic advancements in the use of AI and major scientific breakthroughs in the development of cancer vaccines, fusion power and quantum computing. We live in a world driven by science. Even those who distrust science and scientists can’t escape what science has revealed. Technology is now built into every part of our lives but also just our understanding of the world and the ways it works. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And science is really good at uncovering mysteries in the world. The result of that, for some people at least, has been that the world feels less…well, mysterious. Even if there are questions left to answer, it starts to feel like science will eventually uncover all the secrets. 

Stump: 

That idea—that the revelations of science strip mystery from the world—that was around a long time before any nuclear fusion testing. Back in the early 1900’s, a German sociologist, Max Weber, brought this into public discourse when he wrote about “the disenchantment of the world.” While he didn’t think that science could answer all of our questions, especially those about meaning, he did see that science was pushing aside some of the religious frameworks that once gave people a shared sense of meaning. Science could explain how things worked with increasing precision, but it couldn’t tell us why life mattered or what we ought to do. Weber saw that this left people in a world that was technically knowable but spiritually emptied—that’s what he called “disenchantment.”

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah. Hmm. A hundred years later and I do think disenchantment is a good word to describe some of the sentiment people have about the world. But I’m not so sure we can blame science. The scientists we often talk to on this podcast—they sure don’t seem to be disenchanted. Quite the opposite. I remember talking to Heino Falcke, an astronomer who played a key role in taking the first ever picture of a black hole back in 2019. Talk about revealing mysteries. But here’s what he said.

Falcke:

We have used the entire arsenal of science, of technology to go really to the extremes of the cosmos, trying to understand everything, trying to predict everything. And we are extremely successful. Let there be no question about it. Science works, science is important. And I believe that actually, as a Christian, I believe that also God speaks through science, so you have to listen to science. But the ultimate question, the hope that you really can explain every question and the most fundamental question where does everything come from? Why is it that it works? That ultimate question has become just even more mysterious, more wonderful, so to speak. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And here’s from Jennifer Wiseman, another prominent astronomer, in her interview with us back in Episode 3. 

Wiseman:

All of us kind of have, I hope, a sense of awe and wonder when we look at, at the universe I certainly still have it even after working in this field for decades, that there’s, there’s never a time when an image of a galaxy or a beautiful nebula that’s being lit up by newly formed stars just doesn’t thrill me and give me a sense of amazement. 

Stump: 

Alister McGrath, a theologian who also has a doctorate in molecular biophysics, also spoke about science as something that leads deeper. 

McGrath:

At the heart of the whole scientific enterprise, is a sense of wonder at the natural order, not just, hey, this is interesting, but more there’s something really significant here. It’s imaginatively challenging. It makes me want to engage, want to reflect, want to unpack. And a very similar trajectory in my own case led to the rediscovery of religious faith. I think that’s a very important point. 

Hoogerwerf: 

That doesn’t sound like disenchantment. 

Stump: 

These all happen to be religious scientists, so maybe there’s a bias there, but clearly science for them is not leading them away from mystery and meaning and a yearning to be connected to the world and to God. But we’ve heard similar sentiments from non-religious scientists. Here’s Marcelo Gleiser, a well known physicist we talked to a couple of years ago. 

Gleiser: 

There is Mystery with a capital M out there. It would be very presumptuous of us humans to think that with our minds we could uncover all of them. And so we need to embrace this mystery. And in a sense, science is a flirt with this mystery. And Einstein said something somewhat similar, perhaps not in so much detail, but he did say that the most profound emotion we can feel is this mysterious because it is the emotion that is at the origin, as the force that gives us the creativity in the arts, and in the sciences. So he brings them both together and whoever does not feel this power, this passion for the mysterious is as good as dead.

Hoogerwerf:

So maybe this whole idea that science is leading us to disenchantment is off the mark? 

Stump:

Well this is still a pretty small sample size but clearly, for some people science has not stripped the world of mystery and meaning. And so the question is, what is driving scientists toward this search for meaning and is it happening more widely than our small sample here? 

Vaidyanathan:

That desire for meaning, that that yearning is something that I wanted to be able to capture? And so that’s what the project aims to do, and then try to sort of map what that looks like.

Hoogerwerf:

This is Brandon Vaidyanathan. 

Stump:

Brandon is a returning podcast guest. In our interview with him in 2023 he told some of his own story of coming to Christianity through a secret relationship with a catholic girl in Dubai and we talked about his research on Beauty. Brandon has been engaged in several interesting research questions at the intersection of faith and science but recently he’s been focused on a project that explores yearning, especially in non-religious scientists. His project is why we’re here today and he’s going to walk us through these questions and ideas. 

Vaidyanathan: 

One of the fundamental motivations for this project was actually attending an event

Hoogerwerf: 

The event was the Greenbelt festival, which is a long running festival in the UK on art, faith and justice. 

Vaidyanathan:

Richard Dawkins was speaking at this and that’s where I heard him say, for the first time, that he considered himself spiritual.

Stump:

For those that don’t know, Richard Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist and author of many books—The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker are some of his most famous—but he is probably at least as well known for his outspoken critique of religion as he is for his scientific accomplishments. He also wrote a book called “The God Delusion” —the title of which doesn’t hide any of his thoughts about religion—and he was one of the founders of The New Atheism, along with Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. So hearing Dawkins talk in this way would warrant surprise. 

Vaidyanathan:

I nearly fell off my chair when he was talking about himself spiritual. 

Stump: 

Since that time, Dawkins has changed his tune a bit, sometimes referring to himself as a cultural Christian. That’s not to say he believes in God. But he admits to liking church music, and he has certainly toned down the antagonism toward religion, which you can see in a conversation a couple years ago with Francis Collins on Justin Brierley’s show, we have a link to that in shownotes.  But when Brandon heard that first mention it really got him thinking…why would Richard Dawkins, of all people, talk in this way, calling himself spiritual?

Vaidyanathan:

And it struck me that we just don’t have stories of the kinds of experiences that scientists value and find meaningful, right? And when you do try to get at some of those stories and those experiences, there’s no better word than spiritual to characterize what those are the things that matter most deeply to us, right?

Hoogerwerf:

Brandon is someone who is interested in big questions about science and religion, and although finding answers to questions like the ones he has aren’t quite the same as calculating the speed of light or diagnosing a disease, there is still a scientific approach to take. Brandon is a social scientist and he went about setting up a study. 

Vaidyanathan: 

It’s a qualitative research project. So it’s not meant to be statistically generalizable. And what we’re trying to get at is, really a lot of variation in the ways in which people make sense of things.

Stump: 

Back in 2021, Brandon had been part of another study that had conducted a survey from biologists and physicists in four different countries—The US, UK, Italy, and India. And from that survey they had a bunch of the scientists agree to be interviewed for follow up interviews. So they ended up finding about 100 people and conducted extensive interviews. 

Vaidyanathan: 

We told them this would be a study of meaning in scientific work and why you find it meaningful. So this is fairly generic, and you know, most scientists who like the work they do, or are interested in their work, would be happy to talk about it and why they find it meaningful.

Hoogerwerf: 

And so they went out and started doing their interviews, asking them about times in their work as a scientist when they felt a profound connection with nature, with themselves, with others or with God or a higher power. The research team ended up sorting the interviews into a few different categories…Those who didn’t consider themselves to be religious or spiritual, the spiritual but not religious, and the religious. Unsurprisingly, they did find some differences in how these different groups of people approached their searches for meaning but more importantly they found that the search for meaning and the desire for connection was widespread. 

Vaidyanathan: 

It is clear that there’s some basic desire for something we might call yearning, some sort of deep search for things that are deeply significant, and then so there’s an assumption of there’s some kind of depth to reality.

Hoogerwerf: 

Yearning is an important word here and maybe starts to get at something in common between people who are part of a religious community and people who aren’t.

Vaidyanathan:

And I think the project and perhaps this podcast episode can help better humanize non-religious scientists and help us recognize the spiritual quest that animates them is the same that animates the rest of us, right? 

Hoogerwerf:

So we’re going to explore that a little further—what exactly is the same? We’ll start by hearing the perspective from some scientists about what it is they value and find meaningful and how they describe this idea of yearning. 

Stump:

The point isn’t to try and claim that all these scientists really are religious. And we’re not claiming that these attitudes of scientists prove that there is a God. We’re not even trying to claim that everyone who studies science ought to feel this way. As we’ll see, not all of them do! But by exploring some of the stories and testimonies we start to see that a rigorously scientific mindset does not automatically lead to disenchantment. 

Hoogerwerf:

Maybe we can even go one step further than that. More than just saying that science doesn’t automatically lead to disenchantment, I think we can see that sometimes science can serve as a pointer to something beyond itself. 

Several quotes from the interviews stood out, but since the interview subjects themselves were anonymous, we had some of their voices generated from the text by AI. First from a group of people who described themselves as spiritual but not religious. 

Interview Subject:

I think we are deep down in the end trying to understand how things work and why they work the way they work. And how we go about it, it’s all different, and some scientists can say they don’t believe that it is spiritual. But I think it is. Deep down we’re really trying to understand, why are we here and why do we exist? And what helps us exist? Those are things that are all important, and whether or not God is responsible for that, that’s the question for… I don’t think we’re ever gonna be able to answer. But I think understanding the unexplainable in a sense is understanding how we’ve been created by a higher power.

Interview Subject:

I feel moments of communication and contact with the spiritual world.

Interview Subject:

What is yearning for me? Always the connection aspect. There is certainly something more complex than what we see. We feel we are part of it, but we don’t really understand where we are, or how we are. There are times when belonging is clear. Some people experience that in different places. Some in love relationships, some in suffering. I was in Kosovar refugee camps during the war. You can feel the suffering; I understand the people who go there to help. Because there you feel the connection with others. Different people see this spirituality in different places. I think I felt it in nature because I am particularly connected to it. Because humankind is not enough for me. We are just another species out of one million eight hundred thousand.

Stump: 

And here’s a few more from those who said they were neither religious nor spiritual. 

Interview Subject: 

I’m old enough that I realize I’m not going to live long enough to understand all the things I wish I could understand. So, in that sense, it’s a yearning. A yearning to understand things, more things than I know about things that we mentioned. Is there something higher dimensions of us, and what’s going on? What does the Big Bang mean? What’s are there other big bangs? Are there parallel universes? We would like to know those things and I’ll never know them.

Interview Subject: 

Spiritual yearnings come to me, for example, looking at cuttlefish. That is, the questions that arise when you get to touch the cultural level of animals like this lead you to question several things. They are really rare moments, though.

Hoogerwerf:

That’s just a taste of some of the responses Brandon and his team received when asked about yearning. These and many others from over a hundred interviews led Brandon to many of his conclusions, that a scientific disposition does not necessarily lead to disenchantment, and that it may even evoke some spiritual yearning. 

Stump: 

It was also clear that there were some pretty different orientations for how people approached these things. For people within a religious tradition, they tended to express yearning through rituals that were in place in religious practice and through a community they were a part of. This will sound pretty familiar to listeners of this podcast because it’s the story we often try to tell. The spiritual but not religious tended to find their links through nature and art, and, not surprisingly, outside of traditions, and it tended to be more personal. And the non-religious and non-spritual, as you heard, still sometimes spoke in ways that expressed some longing for understanding and connection, even if they avoided or denied spiritual terms. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Since we couldn’t go and talk to the interview subjects, we found a few of our own. 

Stump:

Some listeners will remember our interview from earlier this year with the scientist and writer Alan Lightman. We interviewed Alan at an event that Brandon was putting on as a part of his project on yearning. And Alan’s own experience and story really highlights some of the same kinds of questions that Brandon’s research gets at. 

Hoogerwerf: 

In our interview with Alan he told two really powerful stories, both of which highlight an experience of transcendence. Here’s Alan. 

Lightman:

My wife and I are very privileged in many ways, and one of the ways is that we have a summer house in Maine on an island. And for many years there was an ospreys nest high in a tree near the house. And every summer I would stand up on our second floor. I have a circular deck up there, and I would watch the baby ospreys that were growing up. And they would look at me, and I would look at them. And I’m sure to them, it looked like I was in my nest because of the circular deck. We’re about eye level. 

Stump:

How far away are they? 

Lightman:

About 100 feet. Yeah, not too far. And so I’ve been looking at this pair of baby ospreys as they grew up over the summer, and an adolescent osprey is is actually quite large, and it has very strong talons. And on the day of their maiden flight, the first time they ever left the nest, they’d been in—

Stump:

Fledge? Is that the word for this

Lightman:

Yeah, fledge. This would have been in mid August was their maiden flight. They flew up from the nest and did one very large loop over the ocean, maybe a half mile in diameter, and then headed straight for me. And at high speed. And my first instinct was to run back into the house. I was frightened because these birds could have ripped my face off. But then something made me stay there and not run into the house. And the lead bird flew right at me, and it was about 10 feet away it did this high acceleration upward and over the house. But for about a half a second, no more than a second, before it made that high G vertical acceleration, we made eye contact. And we looked each other in the eye and it was incredible what was exchanged between us. I’ve never had that kind of communication with any animal before, any non-human animal, maybe with a lot of human animals as well [chuckles]. So after the bird flew away, I realized that I was in tears, it affected me so greatly. And I realized that we had had this profound communication. It was almost as clear as if the bird had talked to me. We’re sharing this land together. We’re kindred spirits here.

Stump: 

There are ways you could analyze this experience from a scientific perspective. You could say, maybe the osprey just thought Alan looked like a tasty lunch, or maybe he was a threat. And you could have scanned Alan’s brain during this and made some conclusions about what was happening. But none of that could discount the experience that Alan had and the meaning Alan made from it. Here’s one more. 

Lightman: 

I had an experience in Maine some years ago. I was in a boat out in the ocean. It was after midnight. I was the only one within sight. It was a very dark night, and I decided to turn off the engine of the boat. It got very quiet. I turned off the running lights of the boat, so it was very dark, and I lay down in the boat and just looked up at the sky and the stars were out. And after a few moments, I felt like I was falling into infinity. I felt like I was connected to something much larger than myself. And I lost all sense of my ego. I lost sense of time. And I was just connected. And I think that you could have hooked up every neuron in my brain to a giant computer and read every electrical impulse, and you would not have been able to capture or understand what I was experiencing.

[musical interlude]

Stump: 

So what do we make of all of this? We said that we weren’t trying to claim that all these scientists really are religious. But to those of us who are religious, that might sound exactly like what we’re doing: Alan really is religious? Maybe there’s another way to interpret that, that his expression is tapping into something earlier, capacities that developed long before we had recognizable religions. 

To help us make some sense of this we called up Agustín Fuentes. Agustin is an anthropologist, and he wrote a book called Why We Believe. He has worked a lot with primates as well as with the human archeological record, and  goes as far as seeing at least some roots or precursors of our yearning in our distant primate relatives and a long way back in our hominin ancestry. That doesn’t imply that religion today is just a construct, but just that the capacities on which it rests came from somewhere.

Fuentes:

Yeah, I think this, this whole notion of science as a sort of realm, and then sort of spirituality, religiosity, sort of more than the here and now as a separate realm is artificial, right? I’ll go back to even sort of pushing against CP Snow’s characterization of the two cultures, right, the humanities and the sciences. And I think we can, we have a history of doing this, right? You can look at Einstein, you can look at a variety of different incredible, hard scientists we might call who’ve nodded to, recognized, or explicitly stated that the world isn’t divided out into these categories, right? We humans artificially divide something like the material from the immaterial or the sensational or sensual from the quantifiable. And I would suggest that good science—and here I’m going out on a limb for many people—good science involves melding those things and recognizing that they’re not separate parts of the universe. And what do I mean by that? I think it’s really important to point out that there’s a standard approach in most of the sciences of a kind of reductionism. You need to reduce complexity, reduce the variables, so that you measure, quantify and understand. But that mode of reductionism is a methodology. It’s not necessarily—or I should say it shouldn’t be the theoretical commitment. So you reduce things to test and measure and quantify them, but you always hopefully in, I think the best science, have those in dialogue with, in the context of the multiple other processes, experiences, frames that existence entails, right? 

Hoogerwerf: 

Agustin gave a few examples from his own work. 

Fuentes:

One of the most important things, right now, I’m working with incredible scholars from around the world looking at the evolution of cognition, so the evolution of sort of how we think, right in our genus, right over the last 2 million years. So we’re looking at humans. We’re looking at things that are very close to humans, but not humans. And we’re looking at sort of material remains, archeological remains, looking at sort of how do contemporary brains and bodies work in collaboration around solving challenges and problems. And we’re looking at sort of these statistical modeling of extinct forms of humans and human-like things, and how might we understand them. So all three of those things involve a heavy load of “the science”. That is, we’re trying to use material things or test things to engage with them, but one of the walls we keep hitting is—and something that we’re actually trying to publish right now in review—is something called, that we’re calling emotional cognition. We tend to think so much about analytic cognition…so like, okay, you rotate something, you chip something, there’s some material. What’s always problem solving in the context of material solutions, sort of reducing the complexity to a particular material target that you manipulate for some outcome. 

It’s getting more and more evident from the evidence that we’re looking at, the bodily evidence, the archeological evidence, and the theoretical frames, that relations and perceptions in deep time, in organisms over time and the contemporary moment, are as important as the sort of analytical, quantifiable challenge solving, right? And so that might sound a little bit sort of out there, but I think what’s really important here is that the relations between individuals, between individuals and their material environment, and between individuals and their perceptual landscape, is actually how we’re going to get at these questions. And it’s individuals and each other and individuals and perceptual landscape that is involving the more than the here and the now, a kind of notion of transcendence, because that’s a deep time experience for human and human ancestors.

Stump: 

There is actually archeological evidence to back this up.

Fuentes: 

So what’s really interesting is that we see things like engravings at nearly 500,000 years ago on a clamshell. We’re seeing engravings on walls by a number of different human and human-allied dominance, right, our close relatives, but not us. And then we see the emergence or use of materials that don’t clearly have a function. They’re not getting food, they’re not helping you stay alive, they’re probably not attracting mates, but they’re important, and there’s a lot of effort in it. And really the thing that’s been driving some of my work, is my work with the rising star project in South Africa, looking at Homo naledi and the mortuary behavior we’ve now published, and it’s not widely accepted by everyone, but accepted by many of the scholars if you look at the data, that Homo naledi, which is not human, part of our sort of genus, or part of our cluster, much smaller brains than ours, were taking their dead deep into caves and enplacing them in some way mortuary behavior. Mortuary behavior is found in some other species, but not the kind of investment typical replicated, meaning laden behavior that we’re seeing in Home naledi and in Homo antecessor, another human or Neanderthal ancestor at about 300,000 years ago, or 400,000 years ago, in northern Spain. So the challenge is, how do we explain this very risky, very energetic, very complicated, difficult to do, behavior of taking your dead and manipulating them, moving them, placing them in some meaningful way? We can’t just explain that through analysis of the material. We have to also invoke an understanding of perception and relations, and I would argue, a transcendent framing.

Stump: 

It’s intriguing to me to think about the role that language might have played in all of this, in the separating of the material and the spiritual world, because clearly we try to categorize things and put things in buckets, even if they are artificial categories. And how language would have played a role during the evolution of our species, as language itself was developing, is something that is interesting to consider. 

Fuentes:

I think that’s actually fairly recent. And when I’m talking here recent in a human evolutionary perspective, I think that’s the last few 100,000 years, where we got the kind of language that we’re talking about. And so I think we’re seeing mortuary behavior, complex meaning making, behavior, the use of ochres and pigments and things like that, without what we would consider sort of contemporary human language. Because language, like everything else about us, evolved, right? So it’s increasingly complex modes of communication and relation. But this division in the contemporary sense, or at least, let’s say, in the last two centuries, around the emergence of particular sort of Western scientific practices, has created a notion or a sense linguistically, both semantically and, I would argue, semiotically, sort of in the sense of meaning of what we’re talking about, of a difference in kind of the knowledge created through experimental sciences and the knowledge created through philosophy, theology, or sort of transcendent experience by individuals. 

And I think that’s true in the most reductive sense, but it’s artificial, because many of the great discoveries in, let’s say, chemistry, right, as we’ve added to the table of elements, a lot of that has not just come from simple repetition of experiments, but rather innovation, experience and insight by humans. And I’m going off the language thing a little here, but experience, innovation insight by humans that are influenced by much more than the chemical materials they’re engaging with, right? I just think, I think it’s really important for us to step back and recognize that we’ve and recognize that we’ve artificially created, and linguistically created, a division between the science and the humanities, let’s say. Or, you know, religious experience and secular experience, which is a weird for me, non existent, real difference. But what we fall down on then is going to our past, for example, and looking 200,000 or 100,000 or 300,000 years ago in the past, and using these semantic structures to describe what’s going on. 

So one of the big challenges that people have critiqued us for saying Homo naledi engaged in mortuary practice is they’re talking about, they’re like, “well, can’t be a burial like a funerary practice like contemporary humans, because contemporary humans do it a different way.” And our argument is, of course they do. Why would we be looking for a contemporary human mode of engaging with the dead and meaning making in something that has a brain a third the size of ours, that is not us and that lived a quarter of a million years ago? But we can still ask about the meaning making experience in these kinds of things. And so I think language actually tricks us up here. And I think scientists, science in general, especially in the contemporary moment, we argue about objectivity and neutrality, which is a goal, but any scientist is also a human being, and we know that there’s no such thing as real objectivity or neutrality. You try to be aware of your biases, and I think sometimes acknowledging a particular bias that has to do with sensory or perceptual experience is actually really important and can be beneficial in scientific undertaking.

Hoogerwerf: 

Agustin himself is a scientist. And you can hear that he has thought a lot about how the boundaries between science and religion or science and the humanities are fuzzier than many would have us think. We heard from Alan Lightman, another scientist, about some moments in his life where he experienced something like transcendence, something that felt like meaning making that couldn’t be completely explained by science. And so I wanted to know, did Agustin have anything like that? 

Fuentes:

I mean, there’s a couple different contexts. One has been working with a variety of different apes and other primates and interacting with them fairly extensively over decades now, right? Over three decades, three and a half decades about. One thing is understanding relational gazes. That is, looking at other species in the eye, and especially with apes. It’s been very powerful for me, and also has changed my research trajectory and engagement, because unlike many other organisms that I’ve worked with, apes look back at you in a way that is recognizable to me, or at least understandable to me, emotionally and cognitively as a gaze, a shared gaze. This is why I can’t work with captive apes anymore, because it broke me, in one sense, of the ability to recognize those relations. So in one sense, this more than the human, or more than the here and now that there’s something out there other minds that are also engaging, and this has happened looking at dolphins as well in the wild. And I haven’t worked with orcas, but my guess is, with most cetaceans, this happens as well. So that’s one. 

That’s a slightly different example, but let me give you a much better example, and that is, I remember making a whole bunch of assumptions about my dissertation work, right? This was the late 1980s early 1990s, going out to the field, having all done all the reading, being ready, going out to the field, and realizing, with astounding impact, that none of the monkeys or people that I was working with had read any of the textbooks, and they’re doing everything wrong. And then I slowly realized no, my assumption about the way the world works has been ingrained in this very structured, quantifiable approach, and I hadn’t been open to listen, to feel and to observe what’s actually happening in the world. And being in those forests, in the Mentawai

Islands, this very remote area, with people, with monkeys, with snakes, with a variety of other things, showed me that I was radically under-assuming the complexity of relations in the world, and that not all these relations had clearly quantifiable components. That there was a lot going on, and that that for me, was a transformational moment, and it also opened me up to working with philosophers, theologians, variety of other folks, because I realized that I can’t measure everything, but there’s other ways to talk about these things, and so trying to combine those all together. And just the last thing I want to highlight is I’m now working with a number of just brilliant indigenous conservationists, biologists and anthropologists in the Amazonian region, the upper Rio Negro region and the Amazon, and we’re navigating, expanding the toolkit, the vocabulary and the approaches of conservation science by incorporating more of these kind of relational perspectives. And it’s really been a radical change for me, and I think a much better science.

Hoogerwerf: 

Let’s recap what we’ve heard so far.

Stump:

First, we heard that Richard Dawkins, a brilliant scientist and passionate atheist has started calling himself a cultural Christian. Then we heard several reflections from scientists in Brandon’s study, all of them who self identify as not coming from a religious tradition, some spiritual and some not, who still all spoke about yearning for deep connection—to the world, to people, to creatures—and who saw science not as an ultimate explainer of mystery, but a doorway into deeper connection. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Right. Then Alan Lightman told two stories of transcendent moments where he felt less like pile of neurons and cells and more like a part of a grand and mysterious story. Agustin connected this sense of yearning even back into deep time of evolutionary history, finding examples in archeological evidence of other members of our genus involved in meaning making activities, maybe even going as far as seeing this is in our primate relatives? And he had his own stories of coming to realize that science was not the ultimate explainer, but could be a pathway to other ways of understanding. 

Stump: 

One of the questions that came up as I’ve heard all these different voices is, are they talking about the same thing? We have brought up language a few times here, but I don’t know that we’ve quite landed on an answer to this question…do we mean the same thing by these words when someone is coming from an explicitly religious context versus an explicitly non-religious context? Should we understand them as the same impulses that are just being fleshed out and described differently because of those contexts? 

Hoogerwerf: 

Right, so Alan describes those moments of transcendence. I haven’t had a lot of those kinds of things in my life, or maybe I just haven’t been as surprised by them as Alan was, but maybe one of the closest to that experience Alan describes was actually on a trip we did a few years ago that turned into a podcast episode called The Oceans Declare. We were out in kayaks on the Indian River Lagoon in Titusville Florida, watching the sunset, just floating—some people talk about thin places—it felt like there was very little separation between the material world and a world infused with the spirit of God. God seemed much more present than I often am aware of. So the question you’re asking is, was my experience and Alan’s experience of the osprey just the same experience told using different words? 

Vaidyanathan:

There’s actually a really great Seinfeld clip, which you might want to see if you could play.

Stump: 

Seinfeld was such a great show — the best sitcom ever, in my view — because it so often was able through parody to hit on something true about life and social situations. And the scene Brandon is talking about really displays just the kind of thing we’re after here. 

Hoogerwerf: 

For fans it’s from the Season 3 finale called “The Keys”…it’s the one where Jerry takes his spare keys back from Kramer and it sets off a chain of events that ends with Kramer leaving for LA. But this particular scene is in the middle, it’s just George and Kramer in the diner and Kramer comes over to sit on the same side of the table as George, right up in George’s face. 

Stump: 

We’d play the clip here…but copyright…so we’re going try acting this one out. I’ll be Kramer. You’re George. 

Hoogerwerf:

Whew, alright. Cut in the fake laughter. 

[laugh track]

Jim (Kramer): 

Do you ever yearn?

Colin (George):

Yearn? Do I yearn?

Jim (Kramer): 

I yearn.

Colin (George):

You yearn.

Jim (Kramer): 

Oh yes, yes, I yearn. Often I sit. And I yearn. Have you yearned?

Colin (George):

Well not recently. I crave. I crave all the time. Constant craving. But I haven’t yearned. 

[laughter and applause]

Stump:

Thank you, thank you…maybe we should have more laugh tracks and fake studio audience on the show?

But the point is: Yearning and craving. George understands a real difference here. 

Vaidyanathan:

But that is a real distinction I think, that people are able to recognize in themselves that there are things that really matter and they’re not all on the same footing. And my desire for, you know, chocolate ice cream as opposed to vanilla, is different from my desire for peace as opposed to anxiety, you know. So there’s something qualitatively different. 

Hoogerwerf: 

The difference between Kramer’s yearning and George’s craving is real and understanding the difference between those two things seems to be something universal that people recognize. Ok, but yearning…?

Vaidyanathan: 

Do we all yearn ultimately for the same sorts of things? Are there certain things it seems that we share in common? And it seems like the desire for deeper connection, to be more connected to nature, somehow to be connected to ourselves, to be at one with ourselves, to not be disintegrated, to not be fragmented.

Stump: 

Back to our question here…are these the same sorts of things in religious and non-religious contexts…Brandon is saying, in some ways yes. Some of the desires are the same.

Vaidyanathan:

Both religious and non religious people alike would, and have in our sample, you know, they would profess a desire for deeper connection to nature. And there’s some of these sort of the ways in which the ultimate questions emerge and present themselves as to, you know, why am I here? What is the meaning of all things? A yearning for some kind of answer to the ultimate questions and to like, what must I do, and how do I navigate the world? Right? I mean those kinds of things, I think that the nature of those questions are very similar—

Hoogerwerf: 

And…there are ways in which there are differences. 

Vaidyanathan: 

But there’s a way in which having a religious framework also shapes how you frame the question, right? And faith is—it not just provides answers and a language, but also, I think it shapes the way in which we process the questions, and the fact  that we have these questions at all, and you know what, what to do with them, right? And so there certainly is a difference between religious and non religious people in terms of how they’re processing the question, and the sense of, maybe anxiety, or, you know, with which they carry the question.  

There’s a sense in which a question about ultimate meaning that emerges and sits with you next to your conviction that ultimately we just turn into nothing, right? And there’s a certain kind of dread that some scientists have talked to us about that’s very different from the experience of a person of faith who has some sense of you know that there is something beyond, there’s life beyond death, and there’s ultimately, a loving presence that has generated me and that will accompany me forever. I mean, so that the way in which you live these questions out is different.

Stump: 

A religious context may help a person know what to do with the yearning, how to hold it, how to acknowledge it, how to explore it without fear. And yet, the religious context may also create some barriers. 

Vaidyanathan: 

I think one of the dangers for people of faith is we lose touch with the questions, and we say we’ve got the answers, and then we pat ourselves on the back for having arrived at the answers and live a sort of superficial relationship to those answers. And the challenge, I think, and this is one of the things I hope this project could do, is to reawaken the questions, especially for people of faith, and to show that maybe the practice of science—you know, all these dizzying facts, whether it’s about quantum mechanics or the acceleration of the universe, should lead us to think, “Gosh, you know, whatever certainties I had about who God is, or what God is, I shouldn’t be so smug about those because there’s just so much more here that I can’t wrap my mind around.”

Hoogerwerf: 

There are of course some people don’t relate with any of this. There were scientists in Brandon’s interviews who said, “no I don’t yearn for anything”, who didn’t relate to the desire for deeper connection. Science was enough for them. We could try to explain that away by saying, well when an interview drops into your office for an hour, maybe some people are just not in a place to talk about their deep yearning. Maybe their life has been comfortable and there just hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to come up against these questions. And there are clearly just many people who don’t relate to the world in this way. 

Vaidyanathan: 

Even like Max Weber called himself religiously unmusical.

Stump: 

And yet, the more time you spend with someone, eventually you will find a place where everyone has come up against some version of this yearning. 

Hoogerwerf: 

We tend to ask simple yes or no questions on a podcast and end up finding the answer is usually yes and no. Are these experiences of yearning in religious and non-religious people really the same things, the answer is…yeah…at least according to Brandon and supported by his team’s research, there is something that seems to be quite widespread …and also no…the overtly religious experience is a different approach to the underlying yearning. 

Stump: 

But that complicated answer seems to lead to a pretty definitive conclusion that science has not disenchanted our world. Of course science has had an effect on organized religion, and we could talk at length about that and whether science should affect religious beliefs and practice. But that’s not what Brandon’s work is about. Instead he shows that there’s a deeper enchantment that has not been eradicated by science. And at least for us religious people, we can see that as unsurprising. Deep in our biology, it seems that we’ve been wired for the transcendent, for yearning.

Vaidyanathan: 

This stereotype of the cold, disenchanted scientists is just not true, that there’s this deep sense of longing for connection that is part of the human experience, that science can be a pathway to pursue that kind of connection.

What I’ve seen in scientists we’ve talked to is an antidote to some of the problems that plague the institution of science. And so a lot of people would criticize Western science as, I mean, just being driven by domination and extraction and fragmentation, right? Like it’s this quest to dominate nature, to extract value, to fragment and analyze and tear things down. And I see it a lot of these scientists the exact opposite of these mechanisms. I see a sense of deep reverence in the face of reality, whether it’s bacteria or cells or stars. I see a receptivity to givenness, right, a sense of deep connection to the phenomena they’re studying and this recognition that here’s something that we don’t generate. To behold this mystery and to contemplate it is really critical. And then a sense of reconnection to reality, a sense of unity, that all these things are connected and we belong to this, you know, to this reality that we don’t generate. So that, for me, has been spiritually quite fruitful.

Hoogerwerf: 

Thanks to Alan, Agustin and Brandon and to all the other scientists who continue to remind us of the ways that science opens us up to wonder and connects us to a deep sense of yearning. 

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. 

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.