My Thoughts on Science, Religion, The Great Chain of Being, and Universal Truth, by W.B. Robert Herd

The purpose of this paper comes strictly out of my desire to write down my current thoughts on these subjects and how they relate to one another in my mind. Writing to me is somewhat of a method of thinking out loud and strangely enough allows me to understand more fully a subject that I have been reading or contemplating. I also hope that fellow Brother Freemasons who are starting their journey of study and understanding can use my works as easier stepping stones so as not to have to read the piles of materials that I have to get those coveted bits of knowledge or inspiration.

In Masonry we hear a lot of references regarding Science and Religion as opposites on different poles or different ends of the spectrum from one another. We hear of this rift almost daily in the news, articles and even popular fiction books recently. In our everyday lives we see countless instances of people choosing sides and the numbers of people who find that regardless of what “side” they choose, be it a religious stance or scientific view, they end up finding they are still not supplied with any complete answer. They are unfulfilled and are unsatisfied whichever end of the spectrum they choose. In Freemasonry we are constantly taught the lesson of balance and equilibrium. What is, or what should, be the balance between Religion and Science? Where is it that they both go wrong in failing to answer or fill this vacuum of understanding that we need to fill? What was it that sent them expanding apart from each other? Can there be a “Universal Truth”? Well my friends and Brothers, my opinions on that are just what I want to discuss.

Listening to recent interviews with physicists and astro-biologists, one might imagine that the scientific perspective is similar to the spiritual one that inspires the perennial wisdom tradition, or simply that they also are seeking a Universal Truth. Unfortunately this is not the case, for despite the willingness to search for alien life-forms or multidimensional super-string theories, mainstream science still defines consciousness as a phenomenon of matter rather than as any sort of primary, causative, and unifying being. While ecological interconnections are understood and acknowledged by the scientific community, and some biologists are pursuing signs of intelligence in "mindless" beings, notions of spirit or any Deity as the fountain-source of consciousness are generally dismissed as irrelevant, naïve or even ignorant. For traditional science found in most research labs, schools, and college classes, the true picture of reality is only what sensory data can detect, in other words things that can be seen, touched, taken apart and studied. Every other perspective has been so marginalized and devalued that this materialistic approach is now largely unquestioned even though many people, maybe even a majority, do not believe it adequately describes the whole picture. What I believe needs to happen is an integration of the visions of both science and religion. This type of endeavor I believe is very much welcome in today's climate, where sensory or materialistic data and information are so loudly persuasive that it is hard to find a scientifically acceptable forum even to debate their value, let alone question their supremacy. Spiritual experiences are dismissed as anecdotal, unverifiable, and a spiritual perspective is deemed inadequate or unnecessary to explain how and what life is. But it hasn't always been this way. A few centuries ago our forefathers lived in a universe alive with great spiritual interior connections, and the Great Chain of Being theory was a basic assumption for most of humanity. It was somewhat of a common knowledge subject that today many people have not even heard of. Arthur Lovejoy wrote early last century that the Great Chain of Being was "probably the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things, and of the constitutive pattern of the universe" (The Great Chain of Being, p. vii). He traced its idea back to Plato and Aristotle and explained that…

“through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question the conception of the universe as a 'Great Chain of Being,' composed of an immense, or by the strict but seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of continuity of an infinite number of links, ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through every possible grade up to the ens perfectissimum or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which the Absolute Being and the disparity was assumed to be infinite every one of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the least possible degree of difference.” Ibid., p. 59

This structure, also known as the Hermetic Chain, has also been pictured as a ladder or stair of life, as well as a web connecting every point of life on every plane of being. Below are a few various depictions of it.





Author Ken Wilber elaborates: "According to this nearly universal view, reality is a rich tapestry of interwoven levels, reaching from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. Each senior level 'envelops' or 'enfolds' its junior dimensions a series of nests within nests within nests of Being so that every thing and event in the world is interwoven with every other". To Wilber, the Great Chain is more like a Great Nest, a more organic metaphor for an essentially natural and living process. He explains the hierarchy this way:

“Each senior level in the Great Nest, although it includes its juniors, nonetheless possesses emergent qualities not found on the junior level. Thus, the vital animal body includes matter in its makeup, but it also adds sensations, feelings, and emotions, which are not found in rocks. While the human mind includes bodily emotions in its makeup, it also adds higher cognitive faculties, such as reason and logic, which are not found in plants or other animals. And while the soul includes the mind in its makeup, it also adds even higher cognitions and affects, such as archetypal illumination and vision, not found in the rational mind. And so on.”

In other words, each higher level maintains the essential features of the lower levels but also unveils or brings forward elements not found on those levels. Each higher level, that is, transcends but includes its juniors.

This vision of each level becoming increasingly more complex as it transcends and includes all lower levels is fundamental to Hermetic philosophy, which describes the constitution of entities generally as multidimensional, with infinite gradations of varying degrees. For example, every human being is a compounded entity. There is a god in him, a spiritual ego, a human ego, an animal nature, and the physical body which expresses as best it can the bundle of energies surging through and from within it. Now each of these elements is itself a learning entity on its upward way. The self-consciousness, and the sense of ego, is there; but above that is the vast sense of universal unity, which is the atmosphere and consciousness of the inner god, or a spark of celestial Divinity.

So what happened to this grand vision of interconnected, interdependent life? Western Science, embracing materialism in the process of shaking off the dominance of the narrow Christian religious view, fell on the Great Chain and flattened it. But still, how could such a fundamentally commonsense vision as the Great Chain become irrelevant? One of the problems had to do with how the Great Chain idea was misunderstood. The pre-Enlightenment world saw Divinity expressed everywhere, but this vision united art, morals, ethics, science, religion, and secular processes into an exclusive and often oppressive worldview. Galileo could not freely look through his telescope and report the results because art and morals and science were all fused under the Church, and thus the morals of the Church defined what science could -or could not – do. Artists were not free to explore creativity, people were not free to choose different churches, and scientists could not freely research; their domains were strictly monitored by the Church and policed by the state, each reinforcing the other.

Modern liberty and freedom brought with it the ability to differentiate among these arenas. Anyone can now go to any church or temple, or look through a telescope without being charged with heresy or treason. People are free to distinguish art from ethics, science from religion, and philosophy from both. The upside to the modern scientific perspective is the ability to differentiate various links of the Chain of Being (which helped usher in a much more democratic, less exclusive and oppressive way of life), but the downside is that it declared valid only the bottom link which could be accessed and verified by the senses. Speaking of the collapse of the Great Chain perspective around the late 18th century, author Huston Smith wrote: "Why did the hierarchical outlook then collapse? As it had blanketed human history up to that point, constituting man's primordial tradition and what might almost be called the human unanimity, the force that leveled it must have been powerful, and modern science is the obvious candidate. . . . Modern science requires only one ontological level, the physical . . . [and] challenged by implication the notion that other planes exist" (Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition, pp. 5-6).

It wasn't so much that modern science rejected spirit as that it just didn't need interior or metaphysical domains in order to do its work. In dismissing all subjective interior processes as insignificant, Spirit and Spirituality were simply a couple of the numerous casualties. As technological breakthroughs captured the hearts and minds of researchers, the vision of a living and interconnected universe seemed irrelevant or, worse, superstitious. Take the well-known comment by biologist Richard Dawkins, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

And so, it came about that the modern West was the first major civilization in the history of the human race to deny substantial reality to the Great Chain of Being. That denial caused a profound and rapidly spreading shift in our view of what's "real," but humanity's universal and historical understanding of the Chain didn't disappear quietly or without notice. There have been repeated attempts to reintroduce spirit into the modern world.

Freemasonry continues to try and rekindle the spirit and the spiritual, as do the efforts of some other postmodernism schools of esoteric studies to reframe the world with spirit at its center. There seems to be even a bit of resurgence recently in the desire for this type of spiritual rekindling separate from Religion. The problem is how might we shift the current popularity of reductionism and strictly logical scientific view? One step is to recognize the flaws and often self-defeating weaknesses inherent in most of our philosophical approaches, including the most important in my mind in that none of them rarely if ever challenge empirical science on its own ground. To do this, one must understand current scientific methodology and then use it to determine and establish the existence of spiritual planes, or what some call the value spheres or those vertical dimensions of depth that give value to our lives.

Science believes itself to be value free. It tells us what is, not what should be. It tells us what we are, not what we can be. It describes the world factually without ascribing any meaning to it. That is why we look to the value spheres of philosophy, art, religion, morals and ethics for that. Science accomplishes its wonders because it utilizes a solid method for discovering fact, (which is not necessarily ever a whole truth), a method that is empirical and experimental and based on evidence and this is the very prescription and method I offer to you to explore and validate authentic spiritual truths. Current science may claim to use only objective data, but I can tell you that it hypocritically does also demonstrate convincingly that it continually relies on intellectual processes, theories and the unproven assumptions of materialism to interpret data itself. It is both naive and wrong to accept the idea that science merely reports what already exists in the material world because science approaches the empirical world with massive conceptual and assumptive apparatuses. Mathematics for a perfect example contains everything from tensor calculus to theoretical numbers to extensive inter-subjective linguistic signs to differential equations. I don’t expect you all to know what all of those are, I barely have just learned of them myself, but let me tell you that virtually all are non-empirical structures found only in interior spaces of theory, not the material world. So science grants validity to some interior modes, but only those that support its own biases. Therefore, to actually fulfill its own empiricism, it must also grant the possibility that there are interior states other than those it uses, states that can be investigated empirically, (though not necessarily physically), and that can be evaluated by specially trained researchers.

We don't call on seismologists to evaluate claims by cardiologists, or entomologists to validate mathematical theorems. Each branch of study requires different specialized training, performs its own experiments, and generates its own data that is then interpreted by its own specialists. Given all that, spirituality can and must be able to stand up to scientific authority by announcing its own means and modes, data and evidence, validities and verifications. It can and already is being done as it has since ancient times, by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts or men who have already developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organizations to the utmost degree. In ancient times, no vision of any one adept was accepted until it was checked and confirmed by the visions of his peers or other adepts, so obtained as to stand as independent evidence of the other adepts, and by centuries of accumulated experiences.

The practice of grounding our assertions on experience and evidence is, in all actuality the enduring strength of science itself, so why not investigate spiritual dimensions scientifically as well? Empirical evidence, in the strictest sense, is that which is derived from experiment and observation rather than theory. Moving from the intensely important idea that all knowledge must be ultimately grounded in evidence and experience, many modern scientists reduce this vital insight to the absurd notion that all "real" knowledge must be limited to objective, materialistic, sensory experience. But true empiricism is not limitable to material nature. If empirical science rejects the validity of any and all forms of interior apprehension and knowledge, then it rejects its own validity as well, a great deal of which rests on interior structures and apprehensions that are not delivered by the senses or confirmable by the senses (such as logic and mathematics, to name only two). Science has effectively disregarded its own principles and acted "metaphysically" in denying that universally acknowledged and experienced spiritual or divine states have no reality without performing scientifically valid experiments.

I believe this is partly the reason that large numbers of people are losing their connection to Deity. Even within their own churches and Religious belief systems its popularity seems to be shrinking. I believe this is because science and its popularity and empiricism lead modern followers to rely too much on intellectual tools when neither sensory empiricism, nor pure reason, nor practical reason, nor any combination thereof can see into the realm of the True Spirit. I don’t mean that we should have simple “blind faith”. The intellect can point toward the spiritual, and true spiritual experiences are entirely possible and obtainable. They alone are the final evidence for its own validity and reality, just as mental experiences present evidence for the existence of the intellect. My point is that both science and Religion must address timeless spiritual concepts in a manner that acknowledges and adopts scientific methods, but eschews materialism and reductionism. In Expanding Horizons James Long made a similar point: "when the followers of any faith keep on blindingly clinging to their particular view of truth, after a while it loses its vitality; it loses its living inspiration and therefore its helpfulness. The most important thing in my opinion is not the attainment of truth, but the searching after and the reaching toward a greater and greater understanding of it”.

It has been my experience that the great and secret message of the mystics the world over and throughout all time has been that, with the eye of contemplation, Spirit can be internally seen and proven. With the eye of contemplation, G-d can be seen. With the eye of contemplation, aided by introspection, the greatness within us radiantly unfolds.

Throughout history wise and discriminating people of all lands have sought a Truth which is Universal and Eternal. Yet this has been the main quest not only of philosophers and mystics but of all of us in life's more profound moments. Deep inside ourselves we all long for an Absolute Truth through which we can transcend suffering and death and gain bliss and immortality. Many great thinkers, looking beyond the names and forms of the various religions and philosophies which have existed through history, have looked for tradition of knowledge which reflects the Universal Truth and allows people of every generation to connect with it.

We should recognize what is universal in the different teachings of the world and if we are to discard anything it should be that which is not universal, being careful however to strictly remember that the real unity is self-existent at the core of who we are. It cannot be fabricated or accomplished by removing the differences that exist at the surface. I have heard it explained that “The unity of the ocean exists at its depth, not at the level of the waves, which ever remain turbulent”.

There are others who want to create a universal tradition anew by discarding the Religions of the world, recognizing that all the Religions we possess have become limiting identities. Yet this would be like trying to create a new Science by discarding all that science has previously discovered. We must take what is universal in the teachings of the world, neither validating them at the level of their surface differences, nor discarding all that they have to offer. To do this we must recognize the tradition which has existed and the forms it has created.

I suggest that in order to reinvigorate in our lives the idea of the Great Chain, to reach equilibrium, balance, and Universal Truth, individuals must learn to use Science and its own processes to investigate and apprehend the inner as well as the outer domains common to human experience. We must also learn to be willing to apply our Religions in ways that look more toward Spiritual experience and less towards fundamentalism and its dogmas. This may be difficult for some in mainstream Religions, but I believe it to be no less important than the actual saving of civilization and the Brotherhood or Unity of man.

I believe that thru living and applying this method, the direct union or at least the identity of the individual and Spirit, a union of Science and Religion is possible. A union that is not to be thought of as a mental belief but lived as a direct experience, the very summum bonum of existence, the direct realization of which confers a great liberation, rebirth, or enlightenment on the soul fortunate enough to be immersed in that extraordinary union, a union that is the foundation ground, the goal, the source, and the salvation of the entire world.