Spiritual seekers today often look to sacred texts, gurus, revelation, and psychic intuition to find sacred knowledge. The Buddha points out in the Kalama Sutra, however, that sacred texts and spiritual teachers are fallacious sources of knowledge, as is mind projection, which corresponds to revelation and psychic intuition. Each of these dogmas are easy to fall victim to as they present themselves under the guise of sacred knowledge, despite having no basis in anything evident.
Nevertheless, we can access sacred knowledge through a method that is reliable and accurate. The method I’m referring to, of course, is science.
Through scientific method the universe communicates us. Unlike dogmatic approaches to sacred knowledge, predictions grounded in science are highly likely to come true, often to precise degrees of accuracy. We can therefore liken the scientists of today to evidence-based prophets. They are oracles, divining correlations among observed phenomena through hypothesis formulation and experimentation.
What kinds of spiritual insights can we gather through this approach? In other words, what sacred knowledge does the universe reveal when we listen to it?
One of the best examples of using science to communicate sacred knowledge can be found in the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. Sagan was a gifted prophet of the cosmos, who used the scientific method to reveal its beauty, wonder, and awe. In The Demon-Haunted World, he demonstrates the spiritual feelings that science can awaken in us:
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
Of course, there are other oracles in science (every scientist is a cosmic oracle), and we should always be skeptical of what they have to say. The key is to look for consensus, not authority nor accomplishment. In this case, Sagan provides a rather poetic example capturing what we find when we examine theories in science that are no longer disputed.
Interestingly, even some of the most notably skeptical scientists have affirmed the sanctity of science. For instance, the outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins states in A Devil’s Chaplain that “Science can be spiritual.” Professor of philosophy Eric Steinhart has dedicated an entire book called Believing in Dawkins building on the spiritual dimensions of Dawkins’ work. In this thought-provoking book, Steinhart attempts to construct what he calls a “Sanctuary for Spiritual Naturalists” by filling in the details to fragments of Dawkins’ texts, building a foundation for a Dawkinsian spirituality.
Therefore, it seems that there are honest paths to sacred knowledge; that prophets and oracles do exist, just not in the ways we imagined. Yet this insight is far from disenchanting. To the contrary, it reveals that the art of prophetic predictions has been honed and nearly perfected. We can now make predictions that are highly precise and accurate. We can now attain sacred knowledge that can be verified. It seems then that the oracles of the past had not yet mastered the craft; they were mere pioneers in its development.
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