The place of spirit in the scientific worldview

Some Christians I know have a yearning for evidence or proof of God. And yet, they acknowledge that faith is core to their religion. There is an obvious tension between these two modalities. To want evidence demonstrates precisely a lack of faith, so Christians may view such a yearning as a kind of weakness. It is something with which they may struggle and seek to overcome. Perhaps. But alternatively considered, faith that comes easy may have little meaning. In fact, faith that requires no ‘leap’ may be faith only in name. It almost becomes rather an unverified knowledge claim, where ‘I believe in God’ and ‘I know God exists’ become essentially interchangeable statements. Faith here seems to require residing in a space of uncertainty, an uncertainty that can be uncomfortable, lonely, alienating or confusing. It drives the desire to make contact with what is good and enduring. It may well be that the yearning for evidence is simply part of the soil out of which faith can grow, the inorganic substrate out of which life can manifest, necessary in its time and place.

Shifting gears, I know people (and include myself in this list) who are trying to recover from the spell of reductionism. These are people who have been brought up in a scientific worldview that sees physics creating chemistry, and chemistry creating biology, and biology creating consciousness and so on, such that all ‘real’ causes seem to be located only at the lowest and simplest level (i.e. physics) and everything above it ‘just a bi-product’ of underlying forces and laws. This worldview sees experiences of emotion, beauty, love, the sacred, but also indeed, pain, violence and destruction, and so on, as derivative. Life and death and all in between is merely, as they say, ‘epiphenomenal’ patterns generated by interacting pixels and waves deep below the surface. Such a view obviously conceives of consciousness as not doing anything because there is no space for additional causes to intervene in the lockstep march of the physical world. This means that the feeling of freedom, both as a direct experience of self and as something we intuit other creatures to have when observing them, is also seen as illusory.

When I say I am trying to ‘recover’ from the spell of this worldview, this is what I mean: I live in a world where the living world matters, and where experiencing this world as meaningful is part of how I live and create a world with others. I have spent decades thinking about the relationship between different kinds of causality to build up an understanding of an alternative metaphysics, one that accepts what science comes across but that also recognises that these ’emergent’ entities are also ontologically and causally real. In that vein, I have also written papers and teach critically about reductionism, which I see as not only as a metaphysically problematic position but also as highly destructive. I believe it is a kind of fatal ‘nocebo effect’ that leads to bad relations with self, other people and nonhumans. And yet, I have moments where I am shook with the returning thought: But how is it possible? Can we really get out of the notion that physics determines everything? Time and again, I have to reconstruct all my arguments (and develop new ones too), say about the place of feedback loops, enabling constraints, formal causes, ‘experience’, and so on, in the co-constituting and co-arising of the world. I am continually recovering the alternative ontology that seems necessary for all I cherish and yet also seems to slip through my fingers.

Like the Christian’s desire for evidence of God, being born into a reductionistic metaphysics may also seem like a deficient position. But the back-and-forths between doubting and restoring the world ‘above’ physics has taught me a different lesson. I learn there is something essential about falling back into the possibility of reductionism. Reductionism sets me up to experience the wondrousness of the restored lived world in a way that would not occur if I took it granted. Just as how beauty is all the more a miracle when it arises from out of ugliness (see Affifi and Bertoldo, forthcoming), the meaningfulness I experience is astonishing and accentuated by how it develops in relation to the experience of meaninglessness — and indeed in that way makes meaninglessness itself meaningful.

Perhaps all spiritual positions involve dialectical tensions between some kind of doubt and a different kind of certainty, a difference that works like a charged battery to enliven the encounter. A dialectical spirituality does not seek to come up with a final worldview, position or belief system that, if only believed, would lead us to salvation. Instead, it recognises that what is already implicit and indeed offered in each of our individual and developing contexts, holds already a spiritual potency actuated in the tensions we struggle with.

I’ve been wrestling with what word to choose to describe it, and have settled on ‘spirituality’ not because I really like the word, but because I was recently led back into this dialectical labyrinth in a discussion with a colleague, Alice Cimenti, who herself raised it as an appropriate term. I’ve decided to stick with it, at least for this blogpost. Why, and what does it mean to me right now? I invite you to think about some of the non-supernatural ways we use the word ‘spirit’ in the English language. The spirit of the age, he is in good spirits, and so on. I will consider the ‘spirit’ of a piece of music. Note that it only appears when one can perceive its melody and rhythm. The form or Gestalt of music only exists when we can perceive relations between things. It is invisible when the individual notes are looked at one at a time and in isolation. But it is clearly real because it is the melody and rhythm that I perceive and that affects me. The spiritual evaporates when we look for the blocks that built it up. Lego is probably a terrible toy for ushering in an ecological age, not least because of the plastic.

My response to the music I hear also has its own spirit, a relational dynamic between different swoons and pops of feeling where each gives sense to the others. In doing so, the melody of sound and the melody of my being mutually affirm one another as real non-decomposable events. So too, the spirit in the things around me, such as my friend’s personality, the atmosphere of a rocky Scottish hill in the afternoon light, and so on. Each are Gestalts across time (and space), invisible upon analysis but carrying on just the same. Of course, to think of the long causal journey from subatomic particles to feelings of wonder at passing clouds imbues the latter with an obvious, and indeed literal kind of ‘depth’. And spiritual encounters need depth. But they also involve levity and ascents to great heights, vistas from which nothing could be seen otherwise. Spiritual practice is, as people keep rediscovering in different ways, a climb.

References

Affifi, R. & Bertoldo, J. (2026). The return of beauty on a dying planet. In “Artful education and the downward journey: Facing finitude and death” (MacAllister, Pirrie and Affifi, Eds).