Week 7: Christina Lukban

In the reading "A New Theory of the Universe" by Robert Lanza, we discuss this week's theme of science finally catching up to the spirit realm. To start off, I greatly appreciated the way this week's theme was phrased of "SCIENCE catching up to the SPIRIT REALM" rather than vice versa. Often times, many people see concepts of spirituality and the spirit realm as a recently discovered, "new age" idea, when in reality, spirituality has been a part of many cultures, religions, and lifestyles throughout the world for LIFETIMES even before our westernized culture today became so intertwined with the ideas of science. Science in our culture always overpowers or invalidate the ideas of spirituality but even in Lanza's reading he states that "A full understanding of life cannot be found by looking at cells and molecules through a microscope." Growing up, I was always confused with the conflicting views of how we came to be through religion and what I am taught in school, but I often looked at science as "more right." Our culture has always been so dependent on science that we often always agree with ideas that can be backed up through scientific experiments and research. But are these ideas enough to look beyond our Universe? Can science answer the questions we really want to know? The article acknowledges that science lacks the true way we should look at life. With science, we look at humans and everything in nature as working parts to a mechanical machine like a computer to answer the question of why things are the way they are, but we ignore the idea that we are human with experiences, relationships and a consciousness that gives us our individuality. This is where spirituality can play a part in answering our deeper questions of life beyond just science.

Question: How can we integrate the ideas of spirituality even more into science? Especially in an academic setting?