Spiritual meaning on materialism vs theism

[Laird]

A few days ago I read Shai Tubali's June 2, 2025 article for Big Think:

5 scientists on finding meaning in our Universe’s 13.8-billion-year story.

(Editing notes in all quotes in this post are mine).

In this story, humans are not incidental bystanders but participants in a sweeping evolutionary drama. It begins 13.8 billion years ago and arrives, improbably, on a small rocky planet in a quiet galactic suburb, where stellar remnants arranged themselves into life — then into minds capable of awe and inquiry. Telescopes, satellites, and equations became the instruments of those minds. And through us, the Universe crossed a threshold: It began, for the first time, to contemplate itself.

In their own ways, [the five cosmologists and astrophysicists interviewed by Big Think] speak of a new kind of intimate, almost sacred experience opened by the cosmic view; of a meaning drawn not from myth but from matter; of ethics born from our entanglement with all life — and of a science that, one day, may ripen into wisdom.

To enter the new story of the expanding Universe, [Brian Swimme] suggests we begin by altering our habitual orientation. Lie on your back in an open space at night, beneath the Milky Way. Then, imaginatively free yourself from 70 million years of upright perspective. Picture the Earth floating in space — but this time, place yourself on the bottom side of the globe. Now gaze down into the sky. The stars are not above you. They are far, far below. And yet, you do not fall. Suspended by Earth’s gravity, you hover in the galactic deep. In that moment of reversal, you cease to be a human looking out at the stars — and become, for a moment, the Milky Way reflecting on itself from within.

Like Swimme, [Nahum Arav] often reflects on the cosmic origin of our bodies: “All of the elements we are made of were produced in the crucible of very massive stars.” For Arav, that fact alone is spiritual. “I feel one with the Universe… I consider the stars and constellations my friends in the sky.”

This attempt to frame scientific materialism in spiritually meaningful terms reminded me of the interview with Dr. Lisa Miller that I've just shared in the thread Dr. Lisa Miller on science and spirituality. At 1:34:38 in that interview she says:

The elevated rates of suicide in our culture came through the desanctification of the public square. When we silence[d] spiritual life we lost sight of the great source that's through us, the deep inherent dignity and value in all of us, and the sanctity of who we are.

I wondered, then, what she would make of this attempt to - in a sense - resanctify the (nevertheless still materialistic) public square, especially given her later comment at 1:39:17:

It's extremely important as we move ahead with a spiritually-grounded science that we have the humility to put the source of all life who[m] I call God back into the model. I hope we don't just rewrite anthropocentrism once again, told with energy and non-locality. There's a tremendous lack of humility when we put humans at the center of the universe, and we subtly do it often without knowing in many of our scientific models.

Can "the source of all life" be framed in terms of "a sweeping evolutionary drama"? Can life otherwise be spiritually meaningful?

Given we can't get "ought" from "is", there's no morality that can definitively come from scientific investigation.

From what I understand a tiny percentage of companies are responsible for a great deal of pollution in this world? Are the CEOs going to swayed by some flowery garnish over Materialism's message that oblivion awaits not just individual humans but the planet itself? What about human traffickers?

Hard for me to believe this silly Materialism w/ Meaning movement is going to have any impact other than maybe a sub-population of online atheists.

edit: To be clear I do understand that one can make the argument that thinking God will magically fix things before the Earth reaches a point of environmental collapse is driving people to pollute, or that religions' past views of women can drive human traffickers to see them as property. But one need not choose either extreme.

[Laird]

Given we can't get "ought" from "is", there's no morality that can definitively come from scientific investigation.

This is a problematic statement, but ethics are a tangential issue in this thread, so if you want to know why I say that, then let's discuss it in a separate thread. I know we've disagreed over "Hume's guillotine" before though, so it might not be worth starting that thread given that we're unlikely to have anything new to say to each other (and to readers).

The main issue for this thread is that of spiritual meaning, and how it can - if at all - be framed on scientific materialism.

Along with the sort of "we are all made of stardust and thus are all one" sentiments raised in the article I shared in the OP, there is also the secular Buddhism approach that is popular with some these days (a relative of mine is involved in it).

Honestly I think this stuff is great. People need spirituality, regardless of whether they're athiest, religious of spiritual. The best interview I've ever read about this is from the blog The Mortal Atheist, where they interview Brittney Hartley, an atheist spiritual director , and she talks about the issues of atheist removing the spiritual framework without providing any means of replacing it, leaving people isolated and on their own with no idea how to go forward.

People look to scientists and their opinions about this kind of stuff because in today's current day and age they are the authority figures, they know the most. I think it's very unfortunate that that's the case because scientists aren't any different from the regular person, their journey and views are their own and can be as dumb and enlightened as any of ours. But then who are we meant to go to for guidance if you aren't interested in larger organized religions, politicians? It's a very solitary journey finding your own spiritual meaning. 

And how did we end up here? Is it a result of academic philosophy being anti organized religion due to it's oppressive nature that has rippled through to the current day? Is it because of the scientific establishment slowly replacing spiritual ideas because it disproves religious narratives? Or might it be because of things like the spiritual revolution during the 60s/70s/80s being deliberately oppressed due to its progressive ideas, leading to a cultural bias against new spiritual ideas entirely in favor of hardlife disbelief or hardcore traditionalism? And all of this not even taking into account countries outside of America, where spirituality is all over the place.

There's so much history as to why we are where we right now and it's sad that people find themselves in such meaningless existences where their only relief is stuff like NDEs telling them that one day their deaths won't be so bad, instead of instead reafirrming the importance of their actual lives.

This is a problematic statement, but ethics are a tangential issue in this thread, so if you want to know why I say that, then let's discuss it in a separate thread. I know we've disagreed over "Hume's guillotine" before though, so it might not be worth starting that thread given that we're unlikely to have anything new to say to each other (and to readers).

The main issue for this thread is that of spiritual meaning, and how it can - if at all - be framed on scientific materialism.

Along with the sort of "we are all made of stardust and thus are all one" sentiments raised in the article I shared in the OP, there is also the secular Buddhism approach that is popular with some these days (a relative of mine is involved in it).

To me it seems they take the language of the Sacred and abuse it by contorting mere scientific fact into sounding as if it were spiritual.

There seems to be an appeal to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good by the scientists who want to get away from "myth", according to the article. But in a universe of meaningless quantum flux why does that trinity of value even matter?

Apologies as it's a bit hard to articulate for me but what I am trying to get at it is that by even seeking meaningfulness there's an implication that there is Meaning to be found...which would at the least *suggest* the Materialist faith is false...