Science Musings Discussion
I don't have a comment about prayer, but I do have a comment about The Natural History of the Senses. I teach 8th grade Earth and Physical Science. The first lesson I do with my students in our "Motion" unit is to take them outside and "observe" motion with each of their senses. It gives them a whole different perspective on what an observation really is!
Chet,
Q: "Can a skeptic pray?"
My answer: If an atheist, no! If an agnostic, yes! "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief," Mark 9:24 KJV.
Barry
But what would prompt him to do so? Appreciation for the wonder around him?
Why not leave it at a sigh?
Sigh.
In response to Barry... If one accepts Emerson's definition, why can't an atheist pray? Speaking as an atheist, I find that there is more to it than simple wonder: a feeling of connectedness to all that is, in that I am composed of the same stuff, (as Chet so eloquently noted recently) born in the fusion of suns.
My most ardent prayer happened late, late one sparkling clear moonless summer's night on a rock on the coast of Maine, surrounded by the high tide. The exposed rock was just enough to sit on. The sound and smell of the ocean and trees was intoxicating. The starlight was dazzling and the planets were ablaze, with the Milky Way wheeling overhead and even the smudge Andromeda visible. I was overwhelmed by a sense of scale: the infinitely large and distant above me and the infinitely small within me. Thinking of our universe as but a bubble in the froth of being. Thinking of each atom in me, around me, flowing through me, as a bits of matter that can be parsed (if that is the right word) into the infinitely small.
I put my hands into the water I was overwhelmed by a sensation of connectedness that I cannot forget.
***
That night is recalled whenever I read the following my to my three year old daughter from 'A Child's Garden of Verse' by Robert Louis Stephenson:
Escape at Bedtime
The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.
Steve Higgins
I'll always remember the first time I went stargazing on the Maine coast. It was as though someone had strewn jewels across the black velvet of the firmament above, jewels which now reflected the brilliance of some unseen lamp. So many stars were visible that I could scarcely distinguish the constellations among the profusion. Mars burned red in Scorpius. I really saw the Milky Way for the first time, a river of light running across the sky. I saw meteors plunge into oblivion and satellites follow stately paths overhead. I felt that I had, in the words of Lucretius:
...strode far
Beyond the fiery battlements of the world,
Raiding the fields of the unmeasured All.
Commenting by HaloScan
