Finding the Sacred in the Secular

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For the most part, the sociology of religion has been concerned with understanding how religious people think about faith and spirituality. Yet in recent years, Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University, has turned her attention to scientists at America's top research universities, a group that has a high proportion of atheists and agnostics. In particular, one finding surprised her. According to her survey of 1,700 natural and social scientists, 22 percent of those who describe themselves as atheists also consider themselves to be spiritual.

Indeed, when Cambridge University astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees won the 2011 Templeton Prize, some expressed puzzlement that a prominent scientist who is also an open atheist would receive an award associated with religious progress. Yet Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr., president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation, explained in the formal announcement that Lord Rees, though not formally religious, had contributed profoundly to humankind's spiritual and moral understanding through his scientific work.

“By peering into the farthest reaches of the galaxies," Dr. Templeton said, “Martin Rees has opened a window on our very humanity, inviting everyone to wrestle with the most fundamental questions of our nature and existence.”

The case of Lord Rees highlights something particular about what one might call “atheist spirituality.” As sociologist Ecklund points out in a new paper, co-authored with fellow sociologist Elizabeth Long and published in the journal Sociology of Religion, spirituality in the general population “is almost inherently linked to some conception of God.” Which means atheist scientists must have a notion of spirituality that is different from that of most other Americans.

In open-ended interviews with 275 scientists, Ecklund dug deep into their spiritual beliefs and the ways in which they find meaning and purpose away from faith. She spoke with Big Questions Online about what she learned.

You found that almost 67 percent of scientists have a spirituality and 22 percent of atheist scientists consider themselves spiritual. What do they mean by “spiritual”—a word that tends to be defined differently by different people?

They meant a variety of things. So what I tried to do was figure out what would be the most consistent definitions that they all have. For them, spirituality was something really that’s outside of themselves. It’s not just self-actualization, but wanting to see something larger than themselves that directs what they actually do. A lot of them talked about caring for students better as motivated by their spirituality. And it was very consistent with the work that they do as scientists.

They’re really sincere about it. When I did the in-depth interviews, that’s what convinced me—when I sat with them in their offices and talked with them for a couple of hours about it. They were very sincere, and they had a codified way of discussing it. They had exact things that they believed. I did not count as “spiritual” [those] people who said: “Well, if you really press me to the wall, I guess I would say I’m spiritual,” and had not thought about what it really meant to them.

As is clear from your paper, atheist scientists are not using an interpretation of spirituality that most of us are used to. Their spirituality is totally secular; it is not linked to theism, and they don’t use traditional religious language to describe it. In fact, they view spirituality and religion as distinctively different. What is their spirituality based on?

Their own individual pursuit of truth that is consistent with and outside of science. And something that has a life ethic. The spiritual scientists, especially those who are atheists, consider themselves different from atheist scientists who are not spiritual. They establish a strong boundary between themselves and atheist scientists who are not spiritual. … They principally talked about the difference in how they teach. So they tend to care more about students’ needs. They tend to care more about making sure that students get jobs that are good for the student rather than good for the adviser. They are really trying to help their students be whole people, outside even of what it means to be a good scientist. Those kinds of things.

The spiritual scientists also appear to draw a boundary between themselves and nonscientists who are spiritual.

There’s a big boundary between themselves and the general public’s sense of spirituality. That’s how they see themselves. There are a couple of people I quoted [within the paper] that are very characteristic of the others, and they said things like, “I sense the general public’s spirituality as being all about God and a belief in God and I don’t see it that way.” And that is true, from survey data and other kinds of data that we have of religious life in the general public. Most in the general public, even if they’re not attached to an organized religion, see spirituality as being synonymous with a belief in God.

I’m not surprised that there are scientists that think that there is awe and mystery in the world and that science brings a sense of beauty. I do think it’s surprising that atheist scientists think these things. Because atheists, they prize themselves on having a completely modernistic view of the world. Science is all that there is, all there was, and all that there ever will be. Science explains everything. There’s nothing outside of science. That, to me, seems to be a very different view than the atheist scientist who thinks there is potentially something outside of science, that there’s something out there that’s larger than themselves that has a hold on them. Now, that may be God and they just don’t realize it—that’s not really mine to judge as a researcher. But they don’t see it as God. They see it as this sense of spirituality that’s different than the general public and that’s different than other atheist scientists who are not spiritual.

What do they find attractive about spirituality, as they interpret it?

That it’s individualized. There’s a huge desire among these scientists to be pursuing truth individually, truth that’s untrammeled by unthinking community life. They don’t want to believe something just because some religious authority figure tells them to believe it; they want to know it’s true for themselves. They really do want to know for sure, individually, rather than being brainwashed by a religious authority. And they feel like that’s very different from the general public. Now, some of them have an unthinking, pejorative notion of religion; they haven’t been exposed very much to different types of religious traditions. But they want that kind of individual pursuit of truth and they see that as being very different from what the general public does.

They also see this kind of consistency with science as different than the general public—and I think that’s true, too. When we study spirituality in the general public, there isn’t a rhetoric of being consistent with science. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—that a hallmark of spirituality in the general public is that it can be self-made, that it doesn’t have to be consistent with anything. There’s a kind of eclecticism to it. And among scientists, that’s not comfortable to them. They want a consistency, and especially a consistency with science. These are people who really prize rationality. So they don’t want to do anything that seems irrational, but they can’t stop seeing in their own minds and in their experiences that there seems to be something out there beyond themselves.

For scientists, they really did prize that kind of consistency. They didn’t want to be doing something that was inconsistent with their identity as a scientist. So they didn’t want to be a scientist in one part of their life and then have this other kind of loosey-goosey spirituality over in this other side of their life.

They view their spirituality as congruent with science, yet they still see a conflict between science and religion.

They do. They do. And they see spirituality as a way out of that.

What do you mean by “a way out”?

They see it as a way of understanding the sense of awe and mystery that they get from their science, that they get from being parents, that they get from just living in the world, whereas there is a whole group of scientists who are atheists that see themselves as strict modernists. This would be a typical response from the atheist scientist who is not spiritual when I ask, “So how do you answer questions that have to do with the meaning of life, big questions such as why are we here, what’s the purpose of my life?” They would answer, “I don’t think those are important questions to be asking.” Those questions just don’t matter. It wasn’t that they had an answer that was different from the general public. They just didn’t think those were important questions. Now, the atheist scientists who are spiritual would give answers to those questions, and they would give them through the sense of being spiritual. They would talk about how they found awe and beauty in nature, they found awe in the birth of their children, they found awe in the very work that they do as scientists. They just couldn’t see that as being explained only by science—there has to be something else out there beyond themselves. But then they did not see that as being God, or needing to name it as theism of any sort.

So what should people take away from your study?

Many of these scientists who are atheists are not hostile to big questions of the meaning of life. I thought there would be scientists who were religious. I thought there would be probably a lot fewer scientists who were religious than people in the general public who are religious. None of those findings were surprising. But this spiritual atheist finding has really been surprising to me personally. And that’s a nice thing about research: It can kind of dispel some of our stereotypes. I think dispelling stereotypes is very consequential. This kind of research has a lot of public consequences for how we have dialogue about these issues, or don’t have dialogue.

For some groups, it will bring common ground—if you care about that. Some people are just looking at this as research, and I think that’s perfectly fine, and I approach this as a researcher. If you do care about dialogue, I do think of these kinds of findings—that there is spirituality present in the groups that you would least expect it to be present in—as a way of fostering that dialogue. So religious people who are spiritual can say to scientists who are atheists who are spiritual, “Let’s talk about the differences and the commonalities in how we see spirituality.” It gives some kind of initial common ground rather than starting out a dialogue by focusing just on differences.