Big Spiritual Science

A lot of the language around science seems to want to provoke a feeling in the reader/listener akin to the ‘spiritual’. It is found in mild form in authors such as Dawkins and Hawking, and especially Sagan, who use poetic turns of phrase which seem crafted to infer spiritual sensations such as awe, connection with eternity or the infinite, purposiveness, mindfulness etc. This spiritualisation of science is very present in many Youtube videos, which combine aphorisms and ideas appropriated from the sciences, often accompanied by inspirational images taken by the Hubble space telescope or of the Large Hadron Collider with an appropriately ‘cosmic’ musical soundtrack. In general this is all well and good. Science isn’t made any more or less valid by its spiritualisation so if it helps with understanding or appreciation then that’s fine by me. What does concern me is the type of science that tends to feature in these epiphanies and the version of spirituality which is thereby implied. The most iconic images for spiritual science (apart from QM) tend to come from those scientific endeavours I mention above; the Hubble Space Telescope and the LHC, both examples of ‘Big Science’. The LHC has cost in the region of £5.6 Billion, ($9 Billion), and the Hubble slightly more so far; money which could have been spent elsewhere, possibly to better effect. As a point of contrast, suppose that amount had been invested in human welfare, perhaps the feeding of starving children (£0.82 per …