Understanding Oneness: How Science and Spirituality See the World*

Abstract

The enterprise of science, as a disciplined inquiry into the nature and workings of the world, is coming to affirm many of the intuitively sensed and viscerally known insights long held by various wisdom traditions of spirituality. Both science and spirituality have come to affirm the essential underlying oneness of the world. How is it that these two traditions of inquiry, so different in their methodology, have come to a common meeting ground on the ontology of reality? This essay explores these two perspectives and how each of them expresses the insights they offer into our miraculously coherent universe. Each author addresses these respective views in turn. Ervin Laszlo takes the first part to explore the view from science and how it has come to an understanding of the oneness and coherence of being and the world. Alexander Laszlo takes the second part to consider how the view from spirituality relates complementary accounts regarding the unity and coherence of the world. Taken together, these two views of the world provide the understanding of science as well as the consciousness of spirituality in a holistic conception of being and the world; what Alfred North Whitehead anticipated as the possibility that ‘a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.’