His father was a scientist and atheist, his mother a spiritual seeker. As a boy, he could sense magic, even God—in the woods that surrounded their rural New Hampshire home, in the music of the Beatles, and in the mystery of dreams. But how could any of that really be real?
Surely, the science his father believed in told us what was really real: Our sense of having a soul is just chemicals. Our presence in the universe is just the result of impersonal laws and natural selection. And all our hopes are ultimately doomed in the eternal extinction of death.
That last one was the biggest gut-punch. As a boy, Chris would sometimes lie in bed and contemplate that awful and seemingly certain fate—until it became unbearable and, with a shudder, he pushed it from his mind.
But over the years, as he read, contemplated, and experienced more, he began to see things differently. He began to realize that you could be intelligent and open-minded—like scientists are supposed to be—and also embrace the reality of realms beyond.
In fact, he came to see that the more intelligence and open-mindedness we bring to the question of ultimate reality, the less our conventional science looks like an authority on the topic.
The essays in The Science Spell don't question the value of science. In fact, they push its critical thinking further than most scientists are used to. In easy, playful prose, these essays go where our most educated and well-respected citizens generally don't.
In doing so, they explore a paradox:
The idea of a universe devoid of magic may itself be a kind of spell.
Want to wake up?
Essays include:
The Science Fiction: How Scientific Are Scientists?
Who Should We Ask About God?: Do Scientists Know What Reality Is?
What You See Is What You See: Common Sense & Ultimate Truth
Where Scientists Fear to Tread: Science, Taboos, Magic, & Meaning
The Science Spell: Science & the Big Picture
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Summa cum laude Harvard graduate, comedy screenwriter, math and science teacher, philosopher, and published poet, Chris Spark has been a lifelong seeker of truth, without regard for the conventional ways our culture tends to divide up reality.
The Science Spell is the first collection of essays in the series Making Belief: Essays Towards a Natural, Magical, Intelligent Faith.
In these essays, Spark explores deep, life-changing ideas in lively, down-to-earth prose. What are the hidden connections between geometry and Jesus, reason and revelation, the paranormal and the pedestrian? Is there a boundary between the impish and the important? Between the sensual and the spiritual? Between the everyday and the exalted?
Refusing to stop at border crossings or check points, Chris Spark roams coyote-like through the terrain of science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, myth, religion, the supernatural, and our own direct experience of the world.
By blending what we tend to keep separate, Spark's essays offer us perspective on the ways our culture has conditioned us to feel divided and confused, buffeted by competing ideas about existence. In these essays, you'll discover a way to feel yourself more wholly, as part of a coherent, meaningful cosmos—one in which Western civilization is but one of many stars.
