I was already a space nerd kid when my brother died. I was just 9 years old and a drunk driver hit the car that he and 3 other people were in. For months afterward, I’d take out the big astronomy picture books my parents had given me and find solace in images of vast star fields, whirling galaxies and towering nebulae. Those images didn’t make me feel small, they made me feel like I was part of something vast and magnificent, a Universe of infinite possibilities where my grief was a story that also fit into all possible stories. 

What I felt then has stayed with me throughout my life and my career as a scientist. Though I was raised in a distinctly atheist household, it was through science that this call to something greater - that there must be something more - came through to me. In a word, I felt a call to a spiritual life. But right there, in that word spiritual, lies a whole mess of misunderstanding.

Today, I want to begin a brief discussion about this question: Can you live a life with a deep spiritual practice that is also committed to the beauty and power of science? Based on my own experience the answer is a resounding yes.

Let’s start with the basics i.e. the words we use. In 2009 I wrote a book called The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs Religion Debate. To research the book, I spent a year in the University of Rochester’s Religious Studies Department exploring the classic texts on the deep, long history of human beings expressing an impulse towards …well, towards what? 

Since I did not believe in an all powerful, creator-Deity (and as a Zen Buddhist I still don’t) it wasn’t an image of God that I was aiming for. After all, some religions have a Deity some don’t, so believing in God is not necessary for pursuing this impulse I was exploring. In the end, the word I liked best was “sacredness”. In my readings of scholars like Mircea Eliade and others “the sacred” is a kind of experience of the world that overflows in meaning and importance. If you are inclined towards a belief in God that’s what you might mean by the sacred. But the experience of sacredness - of that overflow and sense of “more” - can be couched in a lot of ways. One of those ways even includes what happens in our experience of science. 

What this means is that saying you want to pursue a spiritual life doesn’t mean a life of spirits. Instead, it’s a recognition that there are many ways the world speaks to us, and that language is always more than what words or logic or equations or paint or musical notes can corral. There is always that more. There is always that sense of sacredness grounded below and beyond our ability to capture it in words, math, pictures or music even as it shines through our attempts to do so.

For some people this pursuit of sacredness is found in organized religions. For others it is found on their own paths. But as long as we don’t fall into the trap of fundamentalisms where the poetry of spiritual life is pounded in literal meanings then there is a place for both science and sacredness.

In fact, I would argue, science is exactly a location where sacredness can make its appearance.

Just a note that this is the first of a recurring series on this topic (which we all know can be fraught with difficulty). If you have specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]

— Adam Frank 🚀