Science Without Religion Is Lame

12 Oct 2024

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

— Albert Einstein

I love Albert Einstein. I’ve written about him before, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here, but the way that man was able to very succinctly metaphorize complex philosophical concepts with the stroke of a pen, has never ceased to amaze me.

Here are two are my favourites:

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter”

“Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”

Talk about putting us back in our existential place. In two brief paragraphs he completely negates the concepts of matter, time and space. Taken to their natural conclusions, these statements leave us with nothing more than spirit, energy, illusion and imagination.

Or in other words, we are left with questions about mysteries which cannot be easily or logically answered.

But that was never a problem for Einstein, who as a both a scientist and a mystic, cherished mystery and lived peacefully and comfortably immersed in it.

“The eternal mystery of the world is it’s comprehensibility”

Einstein realised that human understanding is extraordinarily limited, and he suggested welcoming and accepting the unknown into our lives. That not knowing is a type of blessing.

“Do you believe in God?”, he was once asked in an interview he gave in his apartment in Vienna before WW2 and shortly after his 50th birthday, to a man who later turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser. His answer was profoundly simple:

“I’m not an atheist,” he replied. “The problem is too vast for our limited minds. We are in a position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books of many languages. The child knows someone must have written these books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of these books but doesn’t know what it is. That it seems to me is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

As you can see Einstein pulled no punches when describing his views on the limitations of contemporary science and the belief that science was never going to solve humanities biggest problems.

“Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself, and the longing to reach It, must come from another source.”

In other words, science offers us new helpful technologies and answers questions of fact, but it can never solve enduring problems relating to how best to live our lives.

So what was Einstein’s solution to that conundrum we all as human beings face?

Well Einstein’s answer was to embrace mystery through the auspices of nature and natural phenomena, which can offer us both profound awe and wonder.

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Einstein. “One is though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

To which Rabbi Abraham Heschel added: “Our goal is to live life in radical amazement. To get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed”.

This well describes an alternative path to truth. Not logical, rational or scientific truth but experiential or heartfelt truth which provides no neat theological conclusions, nor rigid dogma or doctrine, but rather a simple way of being, and the capability of accepting uncertainties, mysteries and doubts. And finally inherent to this approach are certain rituals, attitudes and practices such as meditation and the embrace of mother nature and the web of life, which open us to both unknowing and silence, but also beauty and awe.

Ultimately this way of truth seeking which reveals the passage from feeling to meaning, encourages ways of living that are intense and richly endowed with the here and now, and to lives that can be overflowing with significance, and connection.

And most importantly this is the path that can show us the way. Not the transactional, commodified, crowded, screen-dependant, nature avoidant and alienated lives so many of us live today, but rather the way of play, cosmology, storytelling, poetry, the arts and music.

In essence what blocks the path from feeling to meaning is the replacing of the thing itself with the price or theory of the thing. Or in other words cost dominating value and logos outplaying mythos.

In essence awe, as it relates to truth, is beyond the data, the figures and the hypotheses. So, what’s all this got to do with our current clinical psychedelic endeavours?

Well in a recent article in Rolling Stone magazine: People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression and Accidentally Meeting God by Cassady Rosenblum (18/8/24), a number of interesting but not necessarily new points were emphasized including the extraordinary spiritual potency of psychedelics, the interpretation that the word psychedelic means “soul revealing”, and the possibility that psychedelic substances are more spiritual tools with medical properties, rather than medical tools with spiritual properties.

Now I’ve been writing about these entheogenic aspects of psychedelics for some time. It’s not a new discussion but it’s one we need to repeat over and over again, if like me you believe that unscientific concepts like spirituality and transcendence will always be an integral part of the psychedelic story.

Big pharma, government drug regulating authorities, ethics committees, professional colleges and associations, and university departments are not in the main impressed by such concepts. Yet if what the Rolling Stone article suggests is true, then those of you who work as psychedelic therapists, and who take a holistic approach to your work, may well agree with me that what we are often dealing with here is more akin to Einstein’s approach to mystery than it is to science.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that an ethical scientific approach to our work is not part of the mix. But what I am trying to emphasize is that when it comes to psychedelics, science will never be enough.

So when Einstein wrote that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”, in the second part of an essay he wrote called “Science and Religion” in 1941, he of course was not referring to psychedelics but he might has well have been.

Because if we keep one eye closed when we as therapists work with psychedelics and consider ourselves to be adopting a purely scientific approach, we will generally not be effective. And on the other hand, if we work with only a spiritual or belief system approach with psychedelics, then we are probably missing the point, and failing to see what I would loosely describe as the psychedelic end game.

And what is the psychedelic end game? Is it a medical treatment or a sacred experience? Is it a pharmacological effect or a profound inner experience?

Of course, there are no easy answers to these questions because with every psychedelic experience context is key. But for those of us who work as psychedelic therapists our end game is not mysterious and should be quite clear, even though the psychedelic experience itself may well be full of mystery.

Apart from a mature sense of integrity and a genuine Hippocratic intention, our role as psychedelic therapists, is not to be untutored or under-informed new age pretenders smuggling in our own muddy ontologies, but rather we must act as respectful and restrained facilitators who allow the mystery of the experience to stay the mystery. Our goal therefore should be to provide scaffolding and structure to support the development of people’s own sense-making and meaning-making abilities.

I know psychedelic experiences can be challenging. But I also know they can reveal truths which are not facts or solutions, but rather joyous discoveries and the sense of liberation that comes from opening to one’s own truenature. (And if you’re blessed, the temporary experience of falling in love with the whole of creation).

To finish I’ll quote the great man again:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands atthe source of all true art and science.”

By Dr Nigel Strauss