The best science books on the universe with a spiritual inclination

Many commentators have made the observation that a great deal of the violence and nihilism of our time can be traced back to the split in Western civilization between our science traditions and our wisdom traditions. But as science deepened its understanding of the universe, there came a moment when suddenly it was possible to bring science and wisdom back together.

The genius who blazed a path to this new synthesis was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I will never forget the impact his book had on me. In a phrase, I would say the great gift I received from reading his book was to experience cosmological time as sacred. It led to an escape from dualism and an entrance into an enchanted universe.

I am recommending Alfred North Whitehead's magnum opus because, in common with a number of other philosophers, I have come to the conclusion that Whitehead is the most important philosophical cosmologist of the last four hundred years.

For the most part, American philosophy works with the assumption that the universe is meaningless. This conclusion follows from taking Newtonian science as the ultimate truth of the large-scale universe. But this depressing view of things needs to be rejected now that we have discovered quantum physics, relativity, and complexity science, all of which go beyond the view of Newtonian mechanics.

Whitehead, deeply versed in mathematical sciences, gathered up all of these new insights and presented a radically different cosmology, one rooted not in mechanical metaphors but in a keen appreciation of an ever-flowing creativity. The great benefit of studying Whitehead is the power he provides for uprooting the subconscious commitments to Newtonian views; once these are deconstructed, one discovers oneself in a flow of creativity that began fourteen billion years ago and is now alive in our hearts and minds.

In his book, Wolfgang Leidhold examines the entire journey of humanity and discovers something truly amazing: even though the human brain has not changed in structure during the 300,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens, a series of mental powers have been evoked through our conscious participation. He shows us how humans became involved in building human mentality, going through eight such transitions, including the evocation of self-reflexive consciousness, inner transcendence, and the reproductive imagination.

The great gift of this book is the conviction it awakens that the development of human consciousness is not over and that those of us alive today can become involved in what he calls "the next turn in human experience." 

The great divide between the humanities and the sciences can be traced to the power of mathematics to measure and describe the universe in a way qualitatively different from traditional humanistic explorations of reality.

The power that mathematics provided us led to what has been called a "drunken adolescence" with respect to the other, heart-centered ways of understanding. The great exception to this dualism can be found in the works of Loren Eiseley, who was as much a poet as a scientist.

When I discovered Eiseley, I found in his books a new genre of writing, one that I named "auto-cosmological." He brings science and spirit together in a unique way, one that can inspire writers and artists to join his revolution in thought.

Thomas Berry was a cultural historian who studied the cultures of Europe, China, America, India, and the Indigenous worlds with a single burning question in his mind: What is the role of humanity in the universe? Of course, this idea that humanity has a cosmic role is the opposite of the view promoted by modern science of an evolving universe that is going nowhere.

Given his professional background in the humanities, it is surprising that Berry names science as the primary revelation of the divine. He is committed to the idea that the sciences have discovered a common creation story, one that will play an important role for centuries to come. 

When I first met Thomas Berry and asked him about my personal role in the universe, he said simply, "Tell science's story of a developing universe; but tell it with a feeling for its music. That's what the spiritual traditions provide, the music of the universe."