Science, Religion and the Perennial Philosophy

"We need religion, yes assuredly, but we need it free from superstition."

-- Paul Brunton --

("The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," Vol. 1, p. 209.)

While the target of all science is the discernment of truth, observes integral philosopher, Ken Wilber, the goal of all religions is meaning. In a post-modern world, Wilber notes, what is needed is a synthesis of religion and science so that we can ascribe meaning to the vast truths that science has uncovered. Yet, he notes, now, perhaps more than ever, religion is seen to be the antithesis of science, and vice versa.

"The reconciliation of science and religion is not merely a passing academic curiosity," Wilber points out. "These two enormous forces - truth and meaning - are at war in today's world. Modern science and pre-modern religion aggressively inhabit the same globe, each vying, in its own way, for world domination. And something, sooner or later, has to give."

"Science," Wilber notes, "tells us what a thing is, not whether it is good or bad, or what is should be or could be or ought to be. Thus this enormous global scientific infrastructure is, in itself, a valueless skeleton, however functionally efficient it might be." "Within the scientific skeleton of truth," he observes, "religious meaning attempts to flourish often by denying the scientific framework itself - rather like sawing off the branch on which you cheerily perch." "The disgust is mutual," he points out, "because modern science gleefully denies virtually all the basic tenets of religion in general."

[Ken Wilber, "The Marriage of Sense and Soul," pp. 3-4)

In the early 1940's, Einstein famously made the observation that "(s)cience without religion is lame, (while) religion without science is blind." What then is necessary for a reconciliation of these two eternal strains of humanity's intellectual and spiritual quest? Wilber suggests that the key to the problem lies in the contradictory claims of the world's great religious traditions. "(I)f we cannot find a common core of the world's great religions, then we will never find an integration of science and religion."

Fortunately, however, there have been innumerable attempts - some more successful than others - to reconcile the core teachings of all the great wisdom teachings, the most successful of which may be the following four-part description of the "perennial philosophy" put forward by the philosopher, Aldous Huxley:

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground." 

[Prabhavananda and Isherwood, "The Song of God," Intro., p. 13.]

Taking consciousness itself as being the key to religious experience, a position vigorously advocated by William James over a hundred years ago, and examining those contemplatives and mystics who have achieved  higher states of consciousness  through "direct intuition" could, many advocate, be the key to a reconciliation of science and religion. A failure to do so, it is well argued, will result in a continuing "retinal blindspot" in the Western scientific vision, and will thus preclude any true synthesis of science's truths with religion's meaning.

From the Information Age to a Transformational Age

Ultimately, the greatest effect of the newly-born Information Age may well be the birthing of an Age of Transformation in which cultures, spirituality and human consciousness itself all evolve to face and overcome the existential challenges we face.

As transformational philosopher, Ken Wilber points out in the attached video, never before have all of the fruits of the world's great wisdom traditions - East and West, ancient and modern - been available (or potentially available) to all of the world's people. It is, perhaps, this largely unheralded potentiality for a radically new understanding of each other, the wisdom traditions which are our common heritage, and ourselves, which has triggered the rise of religious fundamentalism that we now seen in all traditions. History shows that inevitable change often provokes a reactionary response before it is widely accepted.

"This is the first time in history," Wilber observes, "that we actually have access to all of the world's cultures, to all of their forms of transformation. We have stuff from all the way back to shamanic techniques, all the way through the great axial wisdom traditions. We have various yogas East and West. We have some of the most profound contemplative traditions of all of humanity. They are all available to us, certainly at least in terms of study. But also increasingly. . . we have transmitted, realized teachers in virtually all of the great contemplative and meditative traditions. This has never, ever, ever happened in history."

"So, on the one hand," he notes, "we can put all of these things on the table and look at them, and say what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses. There are important truths in all of them. What we want to be able to do is sort of look at this, without diluting any of them or getting any of them to change, but simply putting all of them together in a way that they are mutually reinforcing (and) mutually beneficial. And then we can start to discern the key ingredients of transformation by studying what all of them have in common, using some of them to fill in the gaps that are perhaps not present in others. And that is just from the great wisdom traditions."

"A profound understanding of human growth and development has been contributed by the modern West," he points out. "And there are aspects of consciousness that modernity and post-modernity have spotted that you can find in no sutras, no tantras, no Kaballah texts, no Sufist texts, and so on. So, for the first time in history we really have a chance of putting all these things together, and not in a way to put them all down, but in a way to mutually enrich them. And that is what is extraordinary."