The variety of faiths around the world is staggering.  From the animism of Native American and other indigenous populations worldwide, to Western monotheisms, to the panoply of Eastern, polytheistic mysticisms, a broad array of words and symbols are used to communicate the nature of the divine.  There is a dissonance between the language of science and the language of the world’s various faiths today.  As science marches steadily forward these traditions have been challenged and reshaped, and these processes are again causing humanity to critically examine long-held religious ideations of God, the universe, and planet Earth.  Scientists and theologians are staking out complex, intellectual positions.  And they are trading barbs with unusual regularity in the arena of public opinion by leveraging social media and the WWW.  Philosophers and social scientists look unconvincingly to bridge the divide.  As physicist-theologian J.C. Polkinghorne laments, this may be a “task for the third millennium, rather than something that can be expected to be achieved by the end of the twenty-first century.”

​ In response to the impasse, nuanced multi-disciplinary efforts emerged to bring these major religious groups together, in parity.  The effort was designed to co-mingle the reality of modern cosmology and physics with any broad and uniform mysticisms shared by each group’s followers.  “Religion once again needs the rigors of science to rid it of superstition, for religion inevitably makes truth claims about this world that ‘God so loves,’ claims which must be weighed against the grueling tribunal of evidence. More surprisingly, science needs religion to expose its pretensions to absolute authority and unique and unequivocal truth,” remarked Founder Robert Russell of CTNS, an academic foundation working to foster dialogue between the scientific and religious communities. Then the conversation rebooted.  Since these efforts have gotten underway, CERN has detected the Higgs-Boson and BICEP2 has proven the existence of gravity waves, further demystifying, confounding, and blurring the various faith traditions.

​ These are issues of grave practical concern.  Humanity lives under a cloud of willful ignorance.  In America today, where citizens have before them the full array of scientific inquiry at the fingertips via the WWW and the facts of much of the known universe are as clear as Gorilla glass, only 12% agree that life evolved from the natural world, 31% think this process was “guided by God,” and 33% are outright creationists. The mystical underpinnings of these positions form the foundation of social norms, policy, and customs in the U.S., just as the certainty of Enlightenment philosophy guided Europeans on their expedition of savage settlerism across the ‘New World’ four hundred years prior.  And they carry with them the same tacit approval of the world’s most influential culture in combination with the noxious, invisible certainty of purpose, driven by material (property) concerns of the willfully ignorant and couched in the language of religion.  This is a real impasse and only one ideation of reality will break through unscathed.  Contrary to the Vatican and CTNS, American evangelicals, Jihadi radicals, or intellectualist theologians, religion simply no longer “needs” to inform science. The spirit, then, is where we turn, the last bastion of safety for mysticism.

The word spirit is here recycled from the pages of biologists, ethicists, philosophers, and cosmologists writing in the now, in 2016.  Humankind is interconnected by functions of the physical universe (biological and electrochemical impulses, e.g.) and this universality gives each of us pause to consider working in the spirit of goodwill.  The spirit of goodwill requires of each person adherence to a social compact with one another to, above many other reciprocal-altruistic responsibilities, embrace rational thinking.  We can loosely refer to this idea as the ‘first position’.  The ‘first position’ might be considered to inform our political activity and the many varied social interactions, our very duties to family, community, and society as outlined by John Locke and the Bhagavad-Gita alike.  This spirit of goodwill could bring societies to a social democratic technocracy that relegates mysticism to the homes and community centers of its adherents.  One can envision a unified practical and social science community advocating a rational ‘first position’ in the halls of Congress and classrooms of the world, informing the religious, as science has informed theology for thousands of years. 

Vincent D. Rougeau, Dean of Boston College Law School describes in his book Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order this social compact-based solution to the competing faith’s issue as a paradigm shift in American society, and indeed the world, by summing up, “This rooted, Christian cosmopolitanism demands a rejection of certain notions of nation-state sovereignty currently embraced by right-wing politics in the United States, and it has profound implications for understandings of citizenship and community membership in pluralist democracies.” And as Sam Harris, one of the world’s most famous modern philosophers wrote even more succinctly, in his Letter to a Christian Nation, to bridge this gap the only feasible solution is “for spirituality to be deeply, rational. . .even as it elucidates the limits of reason.”

References

​Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York. W.W. Norton. 2004.

Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York. Knopf. 2006.

Polkinghorne, J. C. Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2005.

Rougeau, Vincent D. Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order. Cary, North Carolina. Oxford University Press, USA. 2008.

Russell, Robert John. "Bridging Science and Religion: Why It Must Be Done." CTNS, n.d.