I had an interesting conversation with a couple people at a birthday party. I'm not sure how but the topic of spiritualism came up and with it the pseudo-scientific studies of Mr. Emoto's studies on water crystals and the power of thought and spirits and all that, and like the trouble causer I am I had to pipe up that Emoto's studies were seriously scientifically flawed and did not really prove anything about the "power" of love and all that. One woman mentioned how she believed that some thing just couldn't be explained any other way other than the spiritual way such as her mentioning the day before an event that her dead friend would make "an appearance" at a wedding. Then there was a particularly awkward toast at the wedding which mentioned the dead friend and the woman said this was definitely her dead friend causing a disturbance. I mentioned that a lack of explanation did not justify a jump to a paranormal explanation to which she replied that there were many other events in her life which had "no explanation". She didn't seem to understand what I was saying but I decided not to push it. People get weird when you challenge their beliefs, especially when they're strongly emotional beliefs.

Anyway, the conversation continued with the other woman and I asked her if she considered herself a Deist. After some thought and conversation she concluded that she wasn't, because Deism did not have enough of a spiritual impact on her life. She described something much closer to Jung's theory of collective consciousness which seemed much more ambiguously spiritual than Deism, which is a little different to me. She said that basically Nature was God, which I have heard before but never really understood. It was to me like saying God is Love or Earth or Essence, not very specific and in the end it doesn't help describe god or clarify what he/she/it is. I decided to ask her exactly what she meant by "spirit" and "soul", a couple words she had mentioned several times, and the best I could get from her was that it meant that "what we did mattered" and briefly she mentioned quantum theory but admitted she didn't know much about it (I think she's seen What the Bleep Do We Know). She couldn't be any more specific about what those words meant to her, other than she "knew" that they existed. She mentioned to me how a friend of hers had debated with her regarding the existence of the spirit, where her friend insisted that logically and scientifically there was no such thing. The conversation had upset her and made her feel very emotional, and she was glad that our conversation (though I did not agree with her) was not that way.

Overall the feeling I got from both women was that science tried to make everything black and white, and in trying to explain everything "scientifically" it limited itself and missed out on some kind of "greater" truth. I wish I could show them how science makes life more beautiful, but I suppose some folks would rather have pseudo-science and supernatural explanations than understanding the natural and beautiful complexity of reality that science offers.

I think Dawkins puts it best when he says:

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realize that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here."

I think that is something we can all agree on no matter what we believe.

-Cailin