Introduction

This Forum is designed to be a meeting place for leading scientists and renowned spiritual leaders. It will consist of sequential rounds of debate/discussion, each including posts by two scientists and two spiritual leaders. Once the four have had a chance to express their views, it will be my task to provide an overview of the principal ideas they’ve brought to the table. We call these overviews state posts, and their intent is to orient both you, the reader, as well as the contributors of the next round. In this way, each set of posts will build on the insights of the previous set, and we will also have a record of the flow of the dialog.

Why a Science & Spirituality Forum?

A deep gulf separates science and spirituality today. This is an unfortunate development: in classical times the dominant culture encompassed both rational and spiritual elements. In Eastern and in traditional societies it does so to this day.

In modern society the gulf between science and spirituality has given rise to a dialogue of the deaf. It involves what English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow called “the two cultures”: the culture of the scientists, and the culture of the humanists. The scientists consider the ideas and world-views of the humanists armchair philosophy and mere wishful thinking, while the humanists believe that they have access to a dimension of reality about which scientists have nothing to say. The positions have hardened into a veritable war where neither side is willing to cede an inch, or even listen to the other.

This situation fragments the contemporary world and produces animosity and tension, culminating at its worst in fundamentalism and violence. And it gives us blindfolds that prevent us from seeing a wider, fuller picture, a reality sourced in the best insights of science as well as spirituality.

What the Science & Spirituality Forum hopes to accomplish

The Forum intends to open a conversation between leading exponents of the scientific and the humanistic cultures.  It does not intend to convince one culture of the truth of the other. It grants to the humanists that scientists cannot explain the full dimensions of genuine spirituality, and may never do so. But it grants to the scientists that their theories are not as irrelevant to the spiritual experience as humanists tend to claim. All we know of the world comes to us through experience, and human experience has more facets than either side is willing to grant to the other. To grasp a little more of these facets would go a long way toward a meeting of the minds—a meeting that is not the victory of one side over the other, but the victory of insight and understanding over dogma and prejudice.

The gulf between science and spirituality need not prove unbridgeable. But like bridge-building in the real world, construction has to start on solid ground on both sides of the divide. For this reason the Forum invites open-minded and credible scientists and humanists to describe their own view of the world, and the experience on which it is based. Their conversation could lead in time to a broader dialog that substitutes understanding for prejudice, and makes a meaningful contribution to healing the rift that fragments the modern world.

Ervin Laszlo
Summer Solstice, 2010