The Only Sacred Ground. Gregory N. Derry
of publicly verifiable observations, and hence is restricted to material objects (“material” is used broadly here in the sense of “composed of matter and energy”). There can be no scientific investigation of a spiritual being that acts outside spacetime and doesn’t affect the material world. Because science has no interest in non-material entities and because science has been so astoundingly successful in its endeavors, many thinkers have concluded that non-material entities (including any possible spiritual orders of reality) don’t exist. Put differently, these thinkers have concluded that the success of science demonstrates the correctness of a materialist ontology. Many commentators have shown convincingly that this argument does not withstand logical scrutiny, but these commentators have been too quick to congratulate themselves for having refuted materialism.
I believe the issues are a little more nuanced than a straightforward logical analysis implies. Along with the purely logical issues, there are also methodological issues. In addition to the actual content of science (what we know and how we know it), there is also the process of doing science (producing new knowledge). A materialist ontology combined with commitment to a scientific analytic process results in a stance that might be called “scientific materialism.” It is this view, scientific materialism, that I will often refer to as a mundane view of the world, and I will argue that this mundane worldview is in fact the most conducive ontology within which to do scientific work and to understand the results of that work. A mundane apprehension of nature is not logically entailed by the results of science, but it certainly fits very comfortably with those results. The rising fortunes of scientific materialism historically occurring simultaneously with the increasing success of science itself is thus not entirely an accident, nor is it merely the result of aggressive ideologues. Ultimately, I will argue that a mundane view is not only useful but is even, within its limits, correct. In other words, while doing and understanding science, we live in a mundane world. These issues will be examined more carefully in Chapter 3.
Science and Religion
Science, as we’ve already noted, is only concerned with a limited part of the totally available human experience. Aesthetic judgments, ethical decisions, and religious wisdom all lie outside the purview of science, for example. Religions have traditionally been centrally important parts of most human cultures, and the knowledge claims of religions have both areas of overlap and areas of disjunction with the knowledge claims appropriate to science. Leaving aside many of the social, moral and political roles that religion might play (for good or for ill) in a culture, I am mostly concerned here with the knowledge claims a religion might make. In other words, a certain religious vision of the world might entail some assertions about the way the world is. If these assertions do not overlap with any of the appropriate statements that science can make about the world, then science and religion can neither conflict with nor support each other. For example, a religious assertion is that “God exists” and no scientific result can possibly confirm or deny this assertion. On the other hand, the religious assertion that “the world is 6000 years old” contains a prominent empirical component which can be tested against valid scientific knowledge and found to be wrong. This latter example is a case of conflict, and many prominent writers have promoted the idea that conflict between science and religion has been common and is probably inevitable. Many others (myself included) have noted that this is nonsense and that the problems virtually never turn out to be an “inevitable conflict between science and religion” but instead are simply ill-informed people making invalid claims given their grounds for belief. If proponents of science and of religion are careful to make claims that are truly justified within the limits of their discourse, then most such claims will not overlap and hence have no possibility of conflicting. There are, however, a set of issues and questions in which the overlap is significant and the claims potentially inconsistent; in these cases, Barbour suggests that in addition to conflict and independence there might also be either dialogue or integration between science and religion. A great deal of interesting literature has been devoted to these issues and questions at the boundary between science and religion (see, for example, the works by Russell et al., Barbour, Peters, Artigas, and many others).
The Role of Nature
Where would we expect to find these boundary questions? Since science is a study of the natural world, and since this natural world may well have religious significance, then our conceptualization of nature is likely to be one of these boundary areas. The present work is deeply concerned with the role of nature as a crossing point between the concerns of science and those of religion. Before proceeding further, though, I should clarify what I mean by nature. I don’t mean just the beautiful areas of the earth unsullied by civilization, like old growth forests or the arctic tundra. By nature, I mean the natural world in toto, including the entire universe and also including human beings as a part of nature. We might speak of the cosmos or of physical reality, and these terms would also be consistent with my broad usage of the word nature in this context. The conceptualization of nature has varied radically in different cultures throughout the ages, and by way of example we examine how several specific cultures have thought about nature in Chapter 2.
How would a religious view of nature differ from a scientific view? There’s no single answer to this question, and strictly speaking it need not differ greatly. We’ve seen, though, that despite the lack of logical compulsion to formulate a single particular scientific view of nature, that the most common way to view nature from a scientific perspective is to adopt the mundane outlook of scientific materialism. Likewise, I would argue that after looking at a variety of religious attitudes toward nature we might conclude that a typical religious view of nature can be best described as sacred. The sense in which nature is sacred might very well differ greatly among different religions. After all, religions themselves differ: some have a single deity, some have many deities, some have no deity at all. Nature is crucially and centrally important in some religions, of only minor import in others. Nature is sometimes sanctified by the presence of deity in nature itself, but in other cases by a deity outside nature. In all cases, however, there is some sense in which nature is indeed sacred. We will discuss what this means more precisely and explore the different ways in which nature might be considered sacred in Chapter 4.
Summarizing the view of nature we have developed thus far, we find that nature is mundane (in the sense of scientific materialism) and that nature is sacred (from various sorts of religious perspective). So, nature is mundane, and also nature is sacred. I have identified nature as one of the boundary lines where science and religion intersect, where each perspective has potentially valid claims to make. These two claims (nature is mundane; nature is sacred), however, appear to contradict each other. After further examination in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, the seeming contradiction only becomes stronger. To make both of these claims constitutes an antinomy, and we might well demand to know which is right and which is wrong. The claims of science and religion conflict, and we need to resolve the problem.
The main thesis of the present work is that both claims are valid and correct. Nature is sacred. I believe that this is true. Nature is mundane. I believe that this is equally true, and furthermore I will argue that there is not necessarily a logical contradiction between these two claims.
Complementarity
In order to show that we can believe both of these apparently contradictory statements (and more importantly that we can live in both of these apparently mutually exclusive worlds), I need to introduce the idea of complementarity. Complementarity is a logical framework for the analysis of ideas in which the exclusive binary relationships between categories found in classical Aristotelian logic no longer hold. Although we will be much concerned with Niels Bohr’s famous formulation of complementarity, let’s start with a simpler example: Imagine a certain piece of music. Now imagine further that this piece of music is played by a solo violin. How would we describe the music? One option is to specify completely the overtone frequencies in the sound emitted by the violin, which in principle specifies everything we can hear and would thus want to know (it is this kind of information that is engraved on a recorded CD). But this description is solely in terms of the physical sound. Alternatively, we could specify the musical notes, i.e. each pitch and its duration; in this case, there is no sound at all associated with our description, except insofar as the notes can be played (if desired) on some instrument to create a sound. If the instrument is chosen to be a trumpet, the actual sounds will quite different from