Speaking of dogs, I don't have a horse in this race, but it seems to me that there's an obvious point that has yet to be made in this thread: the full-blown symphony of existence is inherently ungraspable by rational thought.
That is, the brain is fundamentally a filter between reality and the individual ego, a mechanism for reducing the cacophony of sensory input to manageable proportions by muting or squelching some information, classifying some information according to constantly-evolving taxonomic schemes, grouping similar data relationships together on the basis of apparently shared underlying patterns, etc.
Our capacity to understand, in other words, is limited by the very logic we employ to elaborate that which we do understand. We can no more describe all of reality using science than we can describe all possible feelings or states using language. And just as the very act of composing sentences represents a reduction of the fullness of expression in the interest of communicating a specific idea, the act of describing the universe scientifically represents a reduction of the fullness of description in order to grasp a specific relationship among observed phenomena.
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I was in the cathedral at Chartres on a family vacation when I was a teenager. It was the middle of a weekday, and with parts of the ceiling undergoing repair, the organist was practicing amidst the informality of drop cloths and scaffolding.
Hearing that music (which some would hold to be sacred) reverberating through that ancient Gothic edifice (held by many to be sacred) by the dusky light of eight-hundred-year-old stained glass windows (a particularly renowned example of what numerous folks believe to be a sacred art form) certainly evoked a sense of connectedness to something greater than myself (or my family, or the other folks in the cathedral, or the other folks in France, or the U.S., or any other subdivision of reality). I don't consider myself religious, but I do consider myself to have, for want of a better word, a spiritual life...and that was a spiritual experience.
What constitues spirituality? Is it a vestigial remnant of the days when we sought to explain the unknown by creating divine or magical figures because we hadn't developed the tools to explain things rationally?
I think not, or at least not for me. I think spirituality is simply a different medium of perception, one in which understanding occurs emotionally rather than rationally. Otherwise, whence comes art? music? poetry?
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If I did have a horse in this race, it would be that science explains everything that is explainable scientifically—a continually expanding body of phenomena—but that only a portion of everything that is explainable is explainable scientifically, and that portion of experience which lies outside of the descriptive abilities of science is, like that portion of expression which lies outside of the ability of language to communicate, infinite.
dkmarsh—member, FineTunedMac Co-op Board of Directors
