Spirituality and the
Scientific Temper
by Soni Kachroo
Spirituality
is a term that means many things to many people, to some it means devotion to
spiritual things and to some others it signifies the mystical and the religious
ways. However, in its broadest scope, it embodies certain postulated virtues,
philosophical speculation, ethical and moral attitudes, and the belief that
spiritual existence is more important than material existence. It stresses
belief in transcendental entities, in religious and moral ideas in terms of
which our fathers could rationalize their feelings. We talk of our present age
as a spiritually impoverished one in which we act not in terms of postulated
divinities, virtues and goodness but in terms of mundane realities like the
'right to happiness' and the 'right to a better material life'. We justify our
feelings and actions by an appeal to human welfare; we are doubtful regarding
some supposed absolute good. Instead we believe that what is good is so in
itself. Many of the ideas which our forefathers accepted without questions are
now rejected outright by us.
Our pre-occupation in
contemporary times is with the humanitarian idea of universal welfare, the
upliftment of material life and social well-being. We aim to fight for progress,
for social prosperity. We look at a thing pragmatically and have less time to
occupy our minds with philosophical postulations about the mystical; we have
little time to ponder on the belief that the knowledge of God and of the real
truth may be reached through meditation or spiritual insight, independently of
reasons and the senses. If there are truths beyond human understanding, they are
better left to themselves for the moment; instead, we should concentrate on the
immediate problem of human weal and woe.
If we strip spirituality
of its mantle of the mystical and look at its ethical and moral relevance, we
are on better terms with it then. Judged in this light there is no conflict
between spirituality and the 'scientific temper'. It is, in fact, the
interaction between man's soul in quest of the good and man's actions in that
direction that has resulted in an ever-widening horizon of human endeavour.
We cannot drive away an
attack of indigestion or migraine by 'talking' to it; we have to do something
more than merely talking about it. We have to take some medicines. We cannot
fight Aids or Cancer ( to name a few killers only) by merely sitting up, closing
our eyes and meditating. We did so in the past and died in good numbers and in
quick time. Let us remember that God gave us grain but we have to make the
furrow; God has sent us flax but we must make the spindle. Well, the man who
made this instrument for the furrow or who made the spindle was the man with the
scientific temper. It is a long-long way from the earliest and the simplest tool
to the modern computer controlling giant machines, but it is a story of man's
restless soul in pursuit of happiness; it is a story of how his scientific
temper guides his pursuit of knowledge.
Imagine a world where
everybody sits up, gazes at the stars, meditates with legs locked, occasionally
waiting or reciting a few lines of sublimity. Could it be possible for such a
monk-infested world to have even a simple tincture iodine for a cut, let alone
special medicines for serious diseases? What I want to emphasize is that
progress is unthinkable without the scientific temper. We have progressed far in
many fields of human activity and the horizon is ever-widening. The scientific
temper is pervasive in all fields and everywhere there is a climate of research
and enquiry. The modern age is aptly called the age of science. The only fly in
the ointment is the misconception that the scientific temper is at logger-heads
with ethics and morals. It is wrong to judge things in such a fashion because
then we fail to see the real connection at is there between spirituality and
science. It is actually ethical and moral considerations that prompt a scientist
to spend weary hours in finding a new drug, a new cure, a new machine. Wasn't
Louis Pasteur, who spent a whole life finding cures for agonizing and deadly
diseases a truly Spilitual person? How many million lives have been saved by the
pioneers in the field of medicine.
There are, of course,
abuses of our scientific achievements and it is against these abuses that we
have to wage a moral and a spiritual struggle. No scientific innention is bad at
its original source; it is only later that the politician turns it into an
instrument of wickedness. If the scientists discoveries are utilized by those
who wield power to terrorize man we wrongly infer that the scientific approach
has led us to such a sorry pass. It is the politician's lust for power, his evil
designs to dominate others, that distorts human discovery into a nightmare. And
paradoxically enough it is the scientists themselves who warn the world about
these abuses. It is the scientists who try to inject into us all ethical a moral
and a spiritual discipline. Thus the scientific spirit cannot be in opposition
to the moral and the ethical spirit.
But at the same time it is
true that the world today has become a funny place; we boast of the universal
spread of education and enlightenment, yet there is an astonishing spread of
ignorance and helplessness. To quote G. B. Shaw, "there are millions of
workers, none of them are able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do
until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is
that they find people paying them money with which to buy things in the
shops" there is a universal ignorance of how things are made and done while
at the same time things are made and done on a gigantic scale. It only shows
that we have to pay a price for our material progress. We have only to narrow
down the gap between our scientific temper and our spiritual perceptions. It is
really not necessary nor really possible for every man to know everything. What
really matters is the ability to utilize the native power that gives us the
power to act, the power to go on acting ceaselessly. Our world is a world of
actions in which ideas are so very important. And ideas become our guiding
stars. It is true that feelings are equally important but they go on changing
all the time. An idea, however, persists and it leads to actions which it is our
duty to perform. The man with the scientific temper is motivated by ideas and
these ideas concern human happiness and welfare. Spirituality too is concerned
with human happiness and welfare.
| 
Previous
