Awe and Wonder
On August 21st, the Moon will pass between the Earth and the Sun. This is something that happens about once a month, but this month, for people living in the contiguous United States, the Moon will travel just the right path to block out the Sun. The sky will darken and stars that you usually would have to wait months to see will shimmer faintly for the two and a half minutes it will take for the Moon to pass in front of the Sun. Birds will go to sleep. The temperature will drop. The Earth will hush. A glowing ring will appear in the sky, visible only during these moments, in the thin strip of land where the Moon is casting its shadow on the ground.
Get your glasses, get inspired.
And then time will move on. The Earth will continue to spin and the Moon will continue to orbit and the Sun will reappear as if it had never gone anywhere at all, which, of course, it hadn’t.
Our point in describing this particular celestial event is that an eclipse induces a feeling of awe. It's the same feeling you can get when you stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon or the edge of the ocean, beneath a clear dark night sky or the skeleton of a blue whale or dinosaur in a natural history museum. In awe-inspiring experiences, we get a sense of the beautiful and profound and often feel connected to the world around us in a deep, unnamed way, no matter who you are, where you’re from, what you think, or what you believe. (1)
In discussions by scientists, especially science popularizers, awe frequently plays second fiddle to scientific wonder. Perhaps this is because the connotation of “awe” often moves away from a reasonable aesthetic appreciation of the world and approaches the realm of spiritualism. Awe, if processed negatively, can lead to a forced acceptance that there are truths which humans are not meant to know, a near opposite of the scientific endeavor.
At the same time, awe and wonder are related emotions that share deep roots in both science and religion. Awe has been theorized to be at the root of religion, very much like wonder has been attested by science writers across the decades to be at the root of their interests in their fields of study. Such experiences and emotions are interlinked and inspirational for many; the difference lies in how the experience fits into your attitude toward how the world works and how your beliefs influence that understanding.
As with many of the topics we’ve covered, the issue eventually comes back to how we make meaning. Should we accept the world as we perceive it through our senses or should we be open to the possibility of something more? How does this change how we understand nature and human endeavors? What is real? What is true? How do we know? What can we know? And how do any of these questions change how we live?
None of these are small questions, but we hope to offer one last angle to approach these conversations in this, our last post of this blog series.
Recent Psychological Research
The past fifteen years or so has seen an uptick in research on awe. This is in large part a response to a 2003 paper by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in which they lay out a conceptual framework for awe. They suggest that two things define an experience of awe: perceived vastness (encountering something bigger than yourself) and a need for accommodation (having to change how you think because of new information). (2) These two factors are then “flavoured” by five additional facets of the awe-eliciting object: threat, beauty, ability (meaning “exceptional talent”), virtue (meaning exceptional goodness or morality), and supernatural causality. (3)
This definition is broad enough to cover a whole host of different awe experiences. Encountering awe-inspiring natural phenomena, leaders and celebrities, human achievements, and cognitive events, such as the discovery of a new scientific theory, can all give you a sense of vastness. Accommodation can look like a change in belief systems, developing a new understanding of the world, or looking back at old ideas you had never really understood before and incorporating them into your current understanding. This definition also allows for both positive and negative accommodation, meaning that an experience of awe can result either in negative emotions, like terror or more positive ones, like amazement and admiration.
Researchers have found that have found that awe leads to generosity and pro-social behavior, (4) including an increased willingness to volunteer to help others. (5) It also increases agency detection, which is our human tendency to look for an intelligent force behind an event. (6) Commentary on studies like this can play into arguments both for and against religion, but there is general agreement that profound experiences, such as experiences of awe, can have a positive impact.
Awe and Religion
Though most studies do not select for religious preference, a 2010 study compared Christian, Buddhist, and atheistic thoughts on awe-like experiences to show that, while not spiritual, self-reported atheists do report experiences of awe. (7) Of course, awe is not a new phenomenon, nor should we be surprised that many people report experiences of awe. Thinkers over the centuries have pondered awe experiences and attempted to connect them to the awe-inspired person’s belief structures.
While the most direct precursor to the work done on awe by modern psychology is psychologist and philosopher William James, much of the theological work on awe of the last century echoes ideas found in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. The source for the empirical phenomenon of awe is, for Otto, the Holy One of Christianity. (8) He introduces a non-rational or supra-rational side to religion and names it the numinous, the “‘extra’ in the meaning of ‘holy’ above and beyond the meaning of goodness.” (9) The numinous is discovered by the emotion it induces, which Otto names the mysterium tremendum. So for Otto, the ineffable awe, admiration, inspiration, mystery, fear, and trembling that we experience in the face of awesome events is evidence of the One worthy of such awe and beyond rational comprehension: God.
Mircea Eliade expands on Otto’s ideas about the source of religion and holiness in The Sacred and the Profane. For both Otto and Eliade, the source of awe is self-obvious and spiritual in nature. But Eliade finds in modernity an “atheistic desacralization” of nature that blinds people from seeing the charm, mystery, and majesty of nature that they once saw. Scientists, Eliade argues, in their work are especially susceptible to this irreverent lack of awe. (10)
Awe and Science
Needless to say, scientists, and atheistic scientists in particular, have reacted against the idea that they are not awed by nature, as they should. Take, for example, Richard Dawkins in one of his earlier books, Unweaving the Rainbow. He writes that the “feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.” (11) For Dawkins, awe or wonder may find its elicitor in nature, but nature does not presuppose the sacred. Someone with an awe-prone disposition may find themselves either lead to mysticism, which for Dawkins knells the end of curiosity, or to scientific investigation, which Dawkins argues is the better use of sensitivity to awe.
Writing less polemically than Dawkins, physicist and science educator Richard Feynman responds to a friend who suggested that scientific study eliminates beauty by insisting that “science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.” (12) His full response has been animated in this lovely video:
Likewise, Rachel Carson speaks of the importance of awe and wonder as emotions to the scientific disposition, (13) which is illustrated in its beautiful entirety by this Zen Pencils comic:
There is a profound emotional depth of scientists’ appreciation for their field of study, speaking to the value of science in generating and responding to a sense of awe or wonder. At the same time, though they use the terms more or less interchangeably in their descriptions, an important distinction can be drawn between awe and wonder: Wonder reflects a need to understand a new stimulus whereas awe reflects a need to respond to a new stimulus. Awe may enable a person to change their view of the world and adapt to new experiences, but wonder leads a person to seek an explanation of what has transpired. (14) It appears that wonder drives scientific curiosity and awe drives change in the individual. Both, it would seem, are hand-in-hand reactions when confronted with the numinous.
Conclusion
The relationship between awe and wonder can serve as a metaphor of how to approach the question earlier posed: Do we see the world as it is or is there something more? Throughout this series, we’ve talked about topics from cosmology and evolution to the role of the Bible and history to modern-day controversies and ancient conundrums all in the hope of finding manageable routes in these important but contentious conversations. This work of applying scientific data, historical analysis, and reason can help to magnify the beauty of nature, God, and faith. And for us, the same is true in reverse. To seek understanding in wonder and to worship in awe are both reactions demanded of the one confronted by the holy. An imbalance between the two, or worse, the rejection of one in favor of the other, has the potential to destroy a person’s vision. One does not “see through” the other. As C.S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, "The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it...To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."
This is the gracious approach to science and religion that we advocate, one of both humility and confidence. Of course, it’s not actually as easy as we want it to be to apply such an approach. It may feel impossible in some situations to know what is right or true. With such situations in mind, we’d like to leave you with two quotes to encourage you to continue your search for truth and seek the similarities even among disparate beliefs, the first from Quaker astrophysicist, Arthur Eddington, and the second from agnostic astrophysicist and science popularizer, Carl Sagan:
“We seek the truth; but if some voice told us that a few years
more would see the end of our journey, that the clouds of
uncertainty would be dispersed, and that we should perceive
the whole truth about the physical universe, the tidings would
be by no means joyful. In science as in religion the truth shines
ahead as a beacon showing us the path; we do not ask to attain it;
it is better far that we be permitted to seek.” (15)
“I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly
understand who we are and where we came from, we will have
failed. I think this search does not lead to complacent satisfaction
that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is
before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It
goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is,
not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously
accept what our exploration tells us.” (16)
(1) NPR's Cosmos and Culture blog ran an insightful series on awe, focusing on non-religious and atheistic experiences of awe, which is well worth the read, especially as a counterpoint to the line of argumentation that assumes that atheism requires a reductionistic view of spirituality.
(2) Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt, "Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion," Cognition &Emotion, vol. 17, no. 2 (2003), pp. 304-5.
(3) Ibid., pp. 304-5.
(4) Piff, Paul K., Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato, and Dacher Keltner, "Awe, the Small Self, andProsocial Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 108, no. 6 (2015), pp. 883-99.
(5) Rudd, M., K. D. Vohs, and J. Aaker, "Awe Expands People's Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, andEnhances Well-Being," Psychological Science, vol. 23, no. 10 (2012), pp. 1130-136.
(6) Valdesolo, P., and J. Graham, "Awe, Uncertainty, and Agency Detection," Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 1(2013), pp. 170-78.
(7) Caldwell-Harris, Catherine L., Angela L. Wilson, Elizabeth Lotempio, and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "Exploringthe Atheist Personality: Well-being, Awe, and Magical Thinking in Atheists, Buddhists, and Christians," MentalHealth, Religion & Culture, vol. 14, no. 7 (2010), pp. 659-72.
(8) Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and ItsRelation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford UP, 1958), p. 178.
(9) Ibid., p. 6.
(10) Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York:Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), pp. 17, 151.
(11) Dawkins, Richard, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Penguin,1999), p. xii.
(12) Feynman, Richard P., The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, ed. byJeffrey Robbins (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1999), p. 2.
(13) Carson, Rachel, and Charles Pratt, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 42-5.
(14) Darbor, Kathleen E., Heather C. Lench, William E. Davis, and Joshua A. Hicks, "Experiencing versusContemplating: Language Use during Descriptions of Awe and Wonder," Cognition and Emotion, vol. 30, no. 6(2015), pp. 1188-196 and Saroglou, Vassilis, Coralie Buxant, and Jonathan Tilquin, "Positive Emotions as Leadingto Religion and Spirituality," The Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 3, no. 3 (2008), p. 7.
(15) Eddington, Arthur. Science and the Unseen World: Swathmore Lecture, 1929 (New York: Macmillan Company,1929), p. 23.
(16) Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. Gifford Lectures,1985. Edited by Ann Druyan (New York: Penguin Press, 2006)., p. 221.
