Paganism is a spiritual or religious path based in reverence for the earth and all life.
As a pagan I worship life. For me all that lives is holy. I consider the world to be my lover, and daily life to be the way I make love. As with sexual love, I can be better or worse at this, more reverential and loving, or else selfish, preoccupied, forgetful.
By "the world" I don't mean only the visible world, but also the invisible, audible and inaudible, manifest and unmanifest. The world always remains something of a mystery to me, never fully known or knowable (cognitively).
As a worshipper, my way of coming to know the world differs from that of an "objective" scientist. I approach the world not by dissecting and examining it, as if it were dead matter, in order to uncover its secrets; but, rather, by participating in it, with others, to learn its patterns, including as they work themselves through me.
For me, there is no "outside" from which I can scrutinize the world as an object. Nor is there any need to posit a transcendent "heaven" or any creator who made the world once, and then left it. (I realize, though, that these might simply be different metaphors or languages to describe the same world; but I realize also that metaphors have consequences.)
Life, for me, is in its essence always here, now, and it is divinity embodied. As a worshipper, I am drawn to deepen my understanding and appreciation of this everpresent, sacred milieu. I do this with the means humans have always used: stories, myths, images, personifications, rites, i.e., modelling practices of various sorts.
As my understanding and appreciation deepens, I become more empathetic, compassionate and loving, and more appreciative of life's diverse forms of self-expression. In striving to live reverentially, I act to protect that diversity and beauty as I have come to know it.
Science, as we know it today, is an accumulated body of knowledge, and a method of gaining knowledge, about the world. It has come to be associated with ideas of "objectivity," dispassionate observation, demonstration and replicability.
In recent years, however, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have seriously questioned the common- sense, positivist ideas of what science is, particularly its pretentions to objectivity and supposed neutrality. With these criticisms in mind, is a pagan perspective compatible with science? What could a pagan science look like?
Such a science would acknowledge its own participation in the social-natural world. It would admit its own inability to stand completely apart from that world, as an "objective" outsider. It would replace dispassionate observation with compassionate participant-observation. It would aim not to accumulate knowledge about the world, for its own sake, but in order to improve its own participation in the world, for instance, by bringing about less harm to others and to life in general than it might otherwise.
A compassionate, participatory science has begun to be practiced
by some of those involved in the "human" sciences,
where objectivity is no longer held with the reverence it still maintains in the "hard," "natural"
sciences. Thus, the question
becomes: Can we remodel the natural sciences after the post-positivist, post-objectivist ideas that
have been spreading in
the human sciences? Is the division between the two branches of science themselves not simply a
division of
convenience, which allows natural scientists to pretend the nonhuman world were dead, inert
matter?
A pagan science would assume, from the outset, the following points:
(1) The world is fully animated, enspirited, and alive, and ought to be treated at such. The game of "let's-pretend-it's-dead" is over.
(2) All our activities, including those of science, are ways of participating in that world, interpreting and telling stories about it, feeling, imagining, and co-creating it into existence -- which we do with all sentient beings.
(3) Our interpretations and stories have consequences. Interpreting the world as a machine, for instance, leads us to treat the world as a machine. Interpreting it as a vast computer or cybernetic system, leads us to treat it, and ourselves, as circulating bits of information. Interpreting it as a pluralistic commonwealth of subjects, leads us to treat ourselves and all others with respect and through dialogue (however this dialogue is rendered). Interpreting it as the passionate love play between Goddess and God, or Shakti and Shiva (as would Wiccan neo-pagans, or Tantric Buddhists and Hindus, respectively) leads us to treat it, and ourselves, as passionate lovers learning how to participate in divinity.
Let us free up our metaphors and models, and envision a pagan science that is compassionate, participatory, imaginative, critical (where criticism is due), and joyful! It may be the only hope for transforming the trajectory of contemporary civilization.
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