Hi Reader,

When I was younger, as I was "losing my religion" (so to speak), I was quite taken with the idea that science was steadily "taking ground" from religion. An example that probably won't be contentious is Galileo, who was accused of heresy by the church when he advocated the idea of a heliocentric solar system.

The thought was that "God's Truths" were being discredited again and again by the scientific method, so eventually the whole structure would fall down.

That makes a kind of sense. We've repeatedly seen science give us better and better explanations for things that used to be the sole domain of religion: the Big Bang, germ theory, evolution, genetics. I thought back then that science might eventually explain everything that could be explained.

I don't really think that anymore.

The last couple newsletters I've touched on the division between empirical and spiritual. And when we look at the world today, it does feel like empiricism is taking over, encroaching on the realm of spirituality. Perhaps science will even discover an explanation for consciousness soon, which feels to me like the last bastion to which spirituality could retreat. Surely my very experience of being, my soul, isn't merely a chemical/mechanical process my brain is doing?

Well, it's funny. The more I read and talk and think about this, the more it seems completely wrongheaded. Empiricism isn't encroaching upon spirituality. If anything, it's the other way around.

(While scientific and empirical are close to synonymous, I admit I made a shift here from religion to spirituality. There may be some disagreement with that, and/or it may impact my points in ways I haven't yet seen. Perhaps it's a topic for future newsletters, but for now since religion is very much not my interest I'm going to treat the two things as approximately equivalent. I'm sure my younger self would be offended.)

Let's talk about gravity.

Here's what I used to think: Newton discovered some things about gravity. Then Einstein came along and figured out how gravity really works. His scientific theory of bendable spacetime is an actually how the universe works.

But at some point I realized that's hogwash. People after Newton but before Einstein may have been thinking the same thing: Newton's gravity is actually how the universe works. And if they were wrong, then I'm probably wrong, too. Einstein's gravity isn't how the universe works. It's just a description of how the universe behaves.

When I realized that, I realized that's also the case with everything empirical. None of it tells us what IS. It only tells us how things behave. Actually, nobody knows what gravity is or why it works the way it works. All we know is what it will do. Furthermore, we only know what it will do in the specific scenarios where we've been able to observe it, like in our solar system and around distant massive objects like stars and black holes and galaxies and stuff like that. For all we know, gravity might behave differently in scenarios we've yet to see or imagine.

This realization was very interesting to me because it flipped this whole "spirituality on the retreat" thing on its head. If something like gravity, one of our most bedrock scientific principles, is nothing more than a high-precision description, then science can never tell us what IS. Which means the only thing that can tell me what IS, is my experience. More specifically, my experience right this moment—which is spiritual. Non-measurable. Requiring interpretation.

I experience gravity because gravity IS. And (this feels more controversial but I'm going to say it anyway) gravity IS because I experience it.

Taking it yet another step: Einstein was able to create his general theory of relativity because he experienced gravity. In other words, the empirical (or at least the ability to define and measure it) proceeded from the spiritual.

Everything anyone has ever noticed used to be beneath notice. It's impossible to say if it existed prior to being noticed. Even if it did, that's not empirical. It's just... nothingness.

So the spiritual is not on the defensive. Really, there's no opposition between it and empiricism. Every remarkable new thing we learn from science appears to us inside this spiritual realm we all inhabit.

These days I find myself forced to contemplate, what if it really is all inside my head?