Part two- Loren Eiseley

Continuing with some thoughts and reflections on the lecture I attended just a week ago tomorrow.  In his essay “Science and the sense of the holy,” Dr Eiseley mentions that science has two basic practitioners: one the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery and the second practitioner is the extreme reductionist who is busy stripping things apart- where the tremendous mystery is reduced to a trifle. He then points out a serious difference between the two in ethical situations. I will quote from two passages:

The reductionist too frequently claims that the end justifies the means…asserting reason as his defense and the mysterium which guards man’s moral nature falls away- a phantom without reality…

If you have the feeling that all animals – all living things have a common ancestor- that we are all “netted together” then you come to your scientific work with a much different sensibility than the person who blithely wields the scalpel- you will be less inclined to “murder to dissect” because you will feel a sense of kinship with what you are murdering…

Remember, Dr Eiseley is not talking about sensing a person God- but a sense of oneness with all creation- an essential oneness to life, a sense of awe and wonder. And that “sense of holy” has a ethical barrier to it.

Blaise Pascal, the 16th century mathematician wrote this ”

There are to equally dangerous extremes:  one, to shut reason out and two- to let nothing else in.

That is something to think about.

Dr Loren Eiseley also reminds us that it was not the logical inductionists who solved the problem of evolution, it was what Darwin choose to call “speculative men” – men with a touch of the numinous in their eyes, a sense or marvel.”

I like his thoughts. I think a person who has this “sense of holy” or sense of wonder – sense of being one with animals is more in tune with what it means to be a human being and more in tune with every other living creature.

There is an ethical sense here that having a “sense of oneness with creation” should make me more responsible for the environment.

What do you think?