In a 2006 article for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris identified 10 myths about atheism, among them the idea that "atheists are closed to spiritual experience."

Harris explained: "There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly."

And in a post last week, my fellow 13.7 commentator Barbara J. King also wrote about atheism and awe. "Atheists feel awe, too. Everyone does. That wondrous sense needn't be described by invoking the sacred."

Yet the idea that atheism and awe are at odds is a common one. In a 2013 interview, for example, Oprah Winfrey refused to accept a woman's self-ascribed atheism after the woman shared powerful experiences of awe and a love of humanity. Winfrey controversially responded: "Well, I don't call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is."

Of course, "the awe and the wonder and the mystery" could just as well describe what motivates many scientists, whether or not they believe in God.

So why the persistent idea that awe is inextricably linked to theism? And are "scientific awe" and "religious awe" fundamentally different, or deep down one and the same?

To be sure, awe is a multifaceted emotion, and one that's only recently become the target of systematic psychological research. In an influential 2003 paper, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argued that awe is characterized by two central features: vastness and accommodation. Vastness describes the experience of something larger than the self, whether that vastness is a matter of physical size or of metaphorical size, such as great power. Accommodation refers to the need to modify one's current mental structures to make sense of the experience whether or not such modification is actually enacted or succeeds.

These features of awe can help us understand how science and religion both elicit awe, and also how either theism or atheism could ensue.

When it comes to vastness, the natural world provides no shortage of material. In fact, studies have typically used nature documentaries, a full-sized replica of a T. rex skeleton, and even commercials depicting waterfalls, whales and astronauts in space as elicitors of awe. In one study, more than 70 percent of card-carrying atheists reported feelings of awe ("as if you were part of something greater than yourself"), with nature (54 percent) and science (29 percent) identified as the most frequent triggers.

On the other hand, religious spaces and rituals are often designed to encourage the sense that there's something larger than the self, and an omnipotent God is by definition vastly powerful. So in their own ways, both the natural world and human representations of the supernatural can create a sense of vastness.

Read the original here:

Awe, With And Without The Gods