The Forgotten Spirit in the Age of Science
There was a time when people looked at the stars and whispered prayers, not because they lacked knowledge but because they understood that knowledge was not everything. They saw the wind move the trees and did not need equations to know that something greater than themselves stirred the world. They did not yet have names for forces, yet they sensed them, lived with them, respected them.
And then came science—sharp, precise, illuminating. It named the forces, measured the winds, weighed the stars. It told us why the sky darkens before rain and how seeds break open beneath the soil. It imitated nature, created light where there was none, extended life beyond its given years. And so we began to think we had unraveled the mysteries of the world.
But science, for all its brilliance, is not the author of existence. It is the scribe. It does not create the sun—it explains its fire. It does not weave consciousness—it maps its pathways. It does not summon life—it studies its mechanics. Science follows behind reality, tracing its lines, mimicking its patterns, never preceding them. It is a light that shows us what is, but it is not the cause of what is.
Carl Jung and Erich Fromm warned of this imbalance—the modern world’s tendency to reduce everything to logic and measurable facts while discarding the depths of the human soul. Jung saw that, having cast aside religion, people often replaced it with rigid rationalism, turning science into a belief system rather than a method of discovery. Fromm spoke of a society that had become alienated, disconnected from meaning, treating life as something to be controlled and explained rather than experienced. Neither of them rejected science; they saw its value. But they also knew that human existence could not be reduced to numbers and equations alone.
I grew up without religion. I was never taught to pray, never raised in any tradition that told me what to believe about the universe. But I was drawn to the wisdom of Zen, to the words of Jesus stripped of dogma, to Plato’s vision of an unseen world of ideals, to Heraclitus’ understanding that life is in constant flux. I never needed a structured faith to recognize that life contained something deeper, something unmeasurable. Science, for all its wonders, never felt like enough to explain what it means to be human.
Science Follows—It Does Not Cause
In academia and research, causality is a precise concept. It refers to a direct cause-and-effect relationship: if X causes Y, then changing X will alter Y. This is the foundation of many scientific fields, especially in medicine and experimental research. But if we apply this logic to science itself, an important truth emerges—science does not cause nature. It does not create the universe, life, or the laws of physics. It does not bring things into existence; it merely observes them. There is no causal effect between science and the world—it is not X, the source of all things, but a method we use to study and understand Y, the reality that already exists.
This is why science cannot take the place of "God" or of any ultimate creative force. It does not explain why existence happens; it only describes how some of it happens. We know the mechanics of evolution, but we do not know why life began in the first place. We understand gravity’s effects, but we do not know why it exists at all. Science can mimic nature—cloning, genetic modification, artificial intelligence—but it does not originate it.
Even within science itself, explanations are not absolute. Theories are constantly evolving. Newton’s laws described the physical world well, but Einstein’s relativity later refined them. Quantum mechanics introduced phenomena that defy classical logic. Scientific knowledge is always after the fact—it follows the phenomena, never preceding them.
Yet, many have come to treat science as if it were a god—something that holds all the answers, something unquestionable. But true science does not claim to be absolute. It does not say, this is how the universe must be—it only says, this is what we have observed so far. And there are still many things we have not observed, many questions that remain unanswered.
We have not outgrown spirituality—we have merely silenced it beneath the hum of machinery and the glow of screens. But to erase the unseen is not to prove it false. Just as science once dismissed the existence of microbes before it had the tools to see them, so too does it turn its back on the mysteries it cannot yet touch.
Perhaps wisdom is not in choosing between science and spirit, but in knowing that both speak of the same world—one through numbers, the other through wonder.
