Can Atheists be Spiritual? Scientists Say ‘Yes’
By Heather Wax — Special Contributor
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Photo: Tommy LaVergne
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Elaine Howard Ecklund |
Today in London, Cambridge University astrophysicist Martin J. Rees was awarded the 2011 Templeton Prize at a private Buckingham Palace ceremony. To some, Rees, who is Britain’s Astronomer Royal, remains a surprising choice for a prize that rewards positive contributions to spiritual progress. Not only is Lord Rees a scientist (like the three successive Templeton Prize winners before him), but he is also an atheist.
While Rees says he has no religious beliefs, the John Templeton Foundation feels the “big questions” raised by his work on the emergence of the cosmos, the size of physical reality, and the idea of the multiverse are, according to a statement released by the Foundation, “reshaping the philosophical and theological considerations that strike at the core of life.” Yet many can’t help wondering: Can you be an atheist and still affirm life’s spiritual dimension?
According to research by Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, the answer is yes.
A few years ago, under the Templeton-funded “Religion Among Academic Scientists” study, Ecklund began investigating how natural and social scientists at America’s top research universities think about spirituality. She surveyed nearly 1,700 of them, and interviewed 275 in depth. She published her initial findings in a 2010 book: Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, which documented a surprising openness to religious faith and experience among an intellectual class wrongly thought to be implacably and uniformly hostile to religion.
Now Ecklund returns with more analysis from her study—and this time, she finds that a significant number of scientists who don’t believe in God at all nevertheless affirm a personal spiritual sense. According to a new paper co-authored with fellow sociologist Elizabeth Long and published in the journal Sociology of Religion, of the 60 percent of scientists who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic, a startling 22 percent of the atheist scientists say they have a spirituality. What’s more, these atheist scientists see their spirituality as more congruent with science than with religion.
“Many of these scientists who are atheists are not hostile to big questions of the meaning of life,” says Ecklund. “I thought there would be scientists who were religious. I thought there would be probably a lot fewer scientists who were religious than people in the general public who are religious. None of those findings were surprising. But this spiritual atheist finding has really been surprising to me personally. And that’s a nice thing about research: It can kind of dispel some of our stereotypes.”
But, as Ecklund makes clear in her full-length interview with Big Questions Online, the spirituality of atheist scientists differs in kind from the sort held by the general public, which tends to see spirituality “as being synonymous with a belief in God.” Rather than describing their spirituality using traditional religious terms, atheist scientists, she says, “would talk about how they found awe and beauty in nature, they found awe in the birth of their children, they found awe in the very work that they do as scientists,” with no reference to the supernatural. Their interpretation of spirituality, she explains, is that “there is potentially something outside of science, that there’s something out there that’s larger than themselves that has a hold on them. Now, that may be God and they just don’t realize it—that’s not really mine to judge as a researcher. But they don’t see it as God.”
In their view, they have alternate sources of finding meaning, away from theism, but it is spiritual meaning nonetheless.
As Ecklund further explains in her paper, “scientists who see spirituality as important often view spirituality as, at its core, about ‘meaning-making without faith,’ which nicely conforms to their perspective on science.” They frame both science and spirituality as an individual pursuit of truth, she says, and this congruency is highly important to them.
“They didn’t want to be doing something that was inconsistent with their identity as a scientist,” Ecklund says. “So they didn’t want to be a scientist in one part of their life and then have this other kind of loosey-goosey spirituality over in this other side of their life.”
The great lesson from her research, she says, is that spiritual atheist scientists see themselves as different not only from spiritual nonscientists, but also from atheist scientists who are not spiritual.
“I thought there was kind of one way of being an atheist—you just don’t believe in God and that’s the end of the story—whereas I would have told you as a researcher in religion that there are lots of ways of being religious, that it can mean many different things,” says Ecklund. “Well, I’m finding that there are many different ways of being an atheist, too.”
Pop Culture and Modern Mythmaking
Contemporary popular culture has provoked a great deal of criticism, some of it well deserved. Yet for many Americans, and particularly for younger Americans, popular culture is culture. It is the only kind of cultural experience they seek and generates the ideas that help them think and act in the world.
In Acculturated, a new essay collection from Templeton Press, 23 thinkers examine the rituals, the myths, the tropes, the peculiar habits, the practices, and the neuroses of our modern era, as manifested in popular culture. Dig beneath the visual excess and hyperbole, you often find the makings of classic morality tales, re-imagined for moderns.
Acculturated editors Christine Rosen and Naomi Schaefer Riley have tasked the book’s contributors—both social critics like Caitlin Flanagan and pop-culture insiders like What Not to Wear host Stacy London—with taking a step or two back from the unceasing din of popular culture so that they might better judge its value and its values.
The goal? To help readers think more deeply about the meaning of the narratives with which they are bombarded every waking minute, and to foster a wide-reaching public conversation about the complex phenomenon that both expresses and defines our common life. “If we don’t like what we see in the mirror of pop culture, we do have the power to change it,” the editors write in the book’s introduction. “This book is a modest attempt to do just that.”
Foreign Policy and Internet Freedom
The revolution may not be televised, but if the Arab Spring has anything to teach us, it will be Tweeted. Social and political upheaval across the Arab world in recent months highlights the power of electronic social media to overthrow governments and create dramatic new political realities. A new Center for a New American Security report, Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age, argues that American policymakers should not only take the Internet seriously from a strategy perspective, but should also make advocating for Internet freedom a key component of U.S. foreign policy.
Authors Richard Fontaine and Will Rogers contend that a free and open global Internet will help people living under illiberal governments to push for democratic change. In that sense, embracing Internet liberty not only serves U.S. foreign policy goals, but is also consonant with basic American values. Fontaine will discuss the report and take questions via Twitter (@CNASdc) during the CNAS Fifth Annual Conference on June 2. Watch the conference live at www.cnas.org/live.
CNAS, an independent and nonpartisan research institution, produced the Internet Freedom report in part with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
