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A Brief History of Evolutionary Spiritualityby Tom Huston

Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions there is but one answer: Because God isLife, and not merely Being.

F.W.J. Schelling, 1809

Charles Darwin did not invent the concept of evolution. In fact, he himself acknowledged that the idea, however loosely defined, had a history dating back to Aristotle. And despite the general impression offered by most scientists today, it wasnt always a materialistic notion either. In its modern incarnation, the concept of evolution can be traced directly to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who viewed the evolutionary process as an act of God.

A renowned German philosopher, scientist, lawyer, linguist, mathematician, and inventor of both calculus (independent of Newton) and the binary system (the basis of computer technology), Leibniz was a man ahead of his time. Writing on The Ultimate Origin of Things in the year 1697six years after speculating in hisProtogaeathat over the vast course of the earths history even the species of animals have many times been transformedhe stated that a cumulative increase of the beauty and universal perfection of the works of God, a perpetual and unrestrictedprogressof the universe as a whole must be recognized, such that it advances to a higher state of development. Although the idea that Gods creation was evolving in a ceaseless ascent toward perfection had already been profoundly intuited over seventy years earlier by the German mystic Jakob Bhme, it was Leibniz who first placed it in a scientific context. And to him, clearly, it was still a novel concept. I flatter myself that I have some ideas of these truths, he wrote to a friend in 1707, but this age is not prepared to receive them.

Over the next few decades, an increasing number of Europes brightest minds began to finally catch Leibnizs evolutionary drift. Among those illumined ranks were names such as Diderot, Maupertuis, Buffon, and Voltaire, who all wrote about the topic of evolution but, like any self-respecting champions of the Age of Enlightenment, rarely felt compelled to inject divinity into their more scientific speculations. Indeed, by upholding the liberating power of rationality to subvert the ancient myths and dogma of the Church, many of them actively sought to draw a firm line between science and spirituality, reason and religion, bringing to sharper contrast the divide that began with Galileos confrontation with the religious authorities two centuries earlier. In this context, through much of the eighteenth century, the many musings about the idea of evolution frequently took on a strictly naturalistic or materialistic tone.

It was only around 1799, ten years after the storming of the Bastille, which ignited the French Revolution and cemented the success of the rational Enlightenment in the chronicles of the Western mind, that these varied intimations of evolution finally congealed into a cohesive new model of reality. Arising, once again, from the fertile depths of the German zeitgeist, it was a cosmological and metaphysical paradigm that seamlessly united science and spiritualityan evolutionary vision that stretched from the simplest atoms of the distant past to a sacred future in which human society would perfectly reflect the transcendent unity of the Divine.

On any given evening during the fall and winter of 1799, in the pastoral college town of Jena, Germany, at least one candlelit home could likely be found abuzz with the excited voices of some remarkable men and women. Meeting over fine food and wine in the home of local literary critic Wilhelm Schlegel and his brilliant wife, Caroline, an eclectic band of young artists, intellectuals, and self-styled scientists would symphilosophize and sympoetize late into the night, absorbed in a seemingly endless swirl of radically unconventional ideas. They called themselves Romantics: revolutionaries of the human spirit determined to infuse the Enlightenments increasing trend toward dry materialism with some much-needed passion and poetry. Troubled by the rational minds tendency to brusquely reduce the full grandeur and beauty of life to stale scientific abstractiondissecting nature atomistically like a dead corpse, in the words of one of their early proponentsthey strove to steer Western society in a more holistic, spiritual direction. And perhaps no individual better fulfilled that dream than the youngest member of Jenas Romantic inner circlethe charming twenty-four-year-old wunderkind and idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.

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Evolutionary Influences: A Brief History of Evolutionary ...

Sunday marked the 80th birthday of Carl Sagan, the spiritual scientist. Author James Croft writes that Sagan, who died in 1996 at age 62, found science to be a profoundly spiritual pursuit.

For Sagan, science was not just a technical pursuit, nor was it simply about the discovery of new facts, Croft writes.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship, Sagan wrote in The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

Croft writes, "This may be surprising to some, but one of the foremost icons of todays rationalist movement believed passionately that to preclude spirituality from a relationship with science was to demean science, as well as spirituality."

But here is Sagan's definition of Nature (with a capital N): reverence; awe; celebration; magnificence; intricacy; beauty; soaring; elation; humility; joining and merging with the Cosmos.

Sagans spiritual approach to science, Croft writes in a Religion News Service piece, is important for atheists, skeptics, and Humanists to rememberbecause it offers a different view of the relationship between science and religion than the battleground itis so often portrayed as today.

Read the rest of the story here: http://chrisstedman.religionnews.com/2014/11/09/atheists-carl-sagan-lead/

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Carl Sagan: the spiritual scientist

If the pseudoscientific woo about love and time travel in Interstellar pissed you off, you aren't alone. Though Christopher Nolan's gorgeous space opera isn't the first science fiction film to descend into a morass of new age platitudes, here's why it should be the last.

Spoilers for Interstellar ahead.

Let's get something clear. There are no science fiction movies that "get it right" perfectly when it comes to physics and other areas of science. Any story that involves interstellar travel is by definition based on speculation. We have no idea how faster-than-light travel would work, so we rely on semi-scientific tropes, from wormhole travel and interdimensional jumps to hypersleep and brain uploading. These tropes are all based on contemporary scientific understanding, but of course they are also wild extrapolations that may ultimately turn out to be complete bullshit.

But there's a difference between wormhole travel, which is depicted superbly in Interstellar, and the idea that love is a "fifth dimension" that can allow a man to jump inside a black hole and travel backwards in time to communicate with his 10-year-old daughter. This is what we are asked to believe in Interstellar, whose climactic scene involves Cooper flying into the black hole Gargantua. Once he's gone inside, he's rescued by mysterious, fifth-dimensional beings who put him inside a tesseract box where time behaves like space we can see millions of versions of his daughter's room around him, each representing a slice of time.

So far, we're on weird but still relatively solid ground when it comes to speculative science. Physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted on the movie, writes in a book called The Science of Interstellar that he could imagine such an event being plausible. Other physicists disagree with him, but that's not the problem. The real issue is that Cooper figures out how to contact his daughter by recalling what his colleague Brand told him that love is a "force" that transcends dimensions just like time does. Using the force of "love" to guide him through the bewildering array of time-rooms, he finally finds the exact right version of his daughter to communicate with. And then he sends a message to her through time.

This is an example of confusing physics with metaphysics, or assuming that observable phenomena like gravity are the same as psychological states like love. Put another way, it blurs the line between science and spirituality without ever admitting that's what's going on.

Anyone who has seen the movie The Fifth Element is no stranger to this idea. The "fifth element" of the title is, in fact, love. Which turns out to be a physical force that can save the world. This idea is hinted at in widely-condemned pseudoscience documentary What the Bleep Do We Know, which suggests that quantum mechanics have revealed that anything we believe can come true because our minds affect quantum reality. That is most definitely not what quantum physics suggests.

Again, the issue here isn't with saying that spiritual beliefs can intermingle with scientific reality. The problem is with category confusion. Just because two things are equally important does not mean they are the same. There is absolutely no evidence that love transcends time, but there is significant physical evidence that other dimensions do.

This notion that love "transcends" space and time also makes an appearance in the otherwise rationality-centric movie Contact. In that film, based on work by Carl Sagan, the main character takes a journey through space/time and communicates with aliens who take the form of her father. The idea is that they are so alien that they can only appear to her by taking on the form of a person she loves. Ultimately, the suggestion in Contact like in Interstellar is that love is a force we can measure using physics.

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Stop Putting New Age Pseudoscience in Our Science Fiction