Stephen,
Thank you for that fine Whitman poem.
You caused me to remember the day I discovered a Van de Graaff generator. I
was with my three children, who were all independently educated--to a very
large extent in museums of all kinds. It's hard to say who was more excited
that day--me or them--but their hair looked better standing straight up in
spikes. It was a magnificent sight: a lightning storm in a glass ball!
Dozens of times, we thrilled to the sight of dinosaur bones, bugs, bats,
and brilliant minerals, all in museums. These were spiritual experiences,
and meant to be so. To embrace a more atheistic view, we are a part of
everything else and at some intrinsic level we have joy in our
connectedness to the world and to the cosmos. Sagan veritably glowed when
he mentioned things that more traditional scientists could only describe
with tightly measured words, even if they felt as impassioned.
History museums quicken our spirits, too. They show us the complexity of
the mind and spirit of a dominant life form or one made in "the image of
God," if you will. In considering our own evidence, through either door, we
enter a mystery as deep as any theological quest. In art museums, of
course, we enter the mystery of our own creation.
Having said this, humans are always busy quantifying, making industries,
and trying to get control of things, aren't we? Museums are one expression
of this, and I guess ID organizations must be, too.
Rebecca Trussell
> [Original Message]
> From: Stephen Nowlin <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 7/1/2005 9:40:54 PM
> Subject: Re: For those interested in evolution AND Intelligent Design . .
.
>
> On 7/1/05 3:48 PM, Rebecca M. Trussell's electrons arrived as:
>
> > My appreciation of science's unfoldings is reflected in my
> > spiritual awakenings and requires no further explanation.
>
>
> There's a wonderfully apropos Whitman poem, with which all of you are no
> doubt familiar...
>
>
> WHEN I heard the learnıd astronomer;
> When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
> When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure
> them;
> When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause
> in the lecture-room,
> How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
> Till rising and gliding out, I wanderıd off by myself,
> In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
> Lookıd up in perfect silence at the stars.
>
> Walt Whitman (18191892)
>
>
> Who gets to claim this poem for their own world view -- believers or
> atheists? Since most people on the planet are believers in one
supernatural
> notion or another, I'll put words in their mouths and guess that they
might
> interpret the poem as elevating spirituality over materialism as a path to
> truth -- confirming the ability to "simply know" something deep and
timeless
> about reality, something profound and permanent beyond the threshold of
> those dry facts, figures, and data that are subject to all sorts of
foibles.
>
> Since I am a naturalist (philosophically anyway -- as opposed to being a
> supernaturalist) and, I guess, by default therefore an atheist or at least
> agnostic, it may seem surprising to some that my reaction to the poem
would
> be almost exactly the same. I think that science does not do a very good
> job -- or does a terrible job -- of translating its findings into terms
that
> resonate on the level of human emotion. That is largely a task scientists
> delegate to the less (in their minds) serious activities of "outreach."
(A
> job for museums!) But it is where they should put effort, because it is
> there that they can capture the understanding and passion of a broad
public
> audience. And, it is where a simple but perhaps startling fact is best
> revealed -- that one does not need to "believe" in anything beyond the
> natural world to be filled with the weightless euphoria of spirituality --
> spirituality in all its fullness, yet secular and in search of no gods to
> span the gaps.
>
> Oh, and by the way, that's exactly what the activists of Intelligent
Design
> fear the most -- a spreading secularization (democratization) of
> spirituality.
>
>
> _____________________________________
> S t e p h e n N o w l i n
>
> http://xrl.us/stephennowlin
>
> Vice President,Director,
> Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
> Art Center College of Design
> 1700 Lida Street
> Pasadena, CA 91103
> 626.396.2397
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.williamsongallery.net
> http://www.artandscience.us
> http://www.pasadena-culture.net
> _____________________________________
>
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