Scientific Animism: let's invent a religion!

What Why Who How

AI-generated image for the prompt “Scientific Animism”. I love that the letters almost look like “LENS”.

Part of the "religious impulse" is probably a longing for some larger mysterious narrative in which to find purpose, to be swept up in, at which to marvel. But like, how does the actual natural world not offer an excess of that, every moment, to anyone who stops to look?

Scientific Animism is a resolutely material spirituality¹. I did not invent this term, but I am enamored with it. Just smash those two words together and wow! What a generative label.

So help me generate. What are the foundational tenets of this new religious system? What are its holy texts? Can we sing its first hymns? How does one practice?

But before we get to all that, let’s get on the same page. Define terms. What do I mean by “scientific”? What do I mean by “animism”? You might also be curious to know why I started this project, where I’m coming from. This post will cover all that.

Let’s start with the terms. I’ll describe “science” and “animism” loosely, poetically. I’ll also describe the disposition toward these that I think a Scientific Animist might have. If these descriptions resonate with you, then maybe subscribe? Comment? Help me explore, discover, and build what this religion could be.

Science

Ceaseless curiosity;
the perpetual journey
toward understanding;
toward clear-seeing.

Follow evidence when we can.
Hold loosely when we can’t.
Update our minds when new facts come to light.

“True selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment.”²

Awe in Fact

Be delighted with what is.
Find poetry and depth in what is.
Recognize the mystery
holiness
wonder
in what actually is.

The ongoing project of re-aligning awe
with the clearest emerging view,
the endless process of discerning,
how reality unexpectedly behaves.

Animism

A web: animals 🕸️ plants 🕸️ humans 🕸️ god(s)

All intermixed, all
among; all
teaching,
learning from,
caring for,
competing and cooperating and co-arising with
each other.

Acknowledge something like
desire,
sentience,
consciousness,
anima
in other creatures,
other systems,
other arrangements of matter.
Animals.
The forest floor.
Large language models.
The memetic software running on the hardware of our minds.
Evolution, endless experiment,
in all its forms.

Consciousness
is a spectrum.
A genre
with many songs.

We sing beautifully.
So do others.

We are so small.
Our senses so limited.
What can we understand of this place we share?
Of these beings, these wonders
we find ourselves amongst?

We, “the younger siblings of Creation…
have the least experience with how to live,
and thus the most to learn.” ³

All together now

How, then, do science and animism fit together?

How might being a Scientific Animist inform one’s approach to the world?

Ezra Klein asked Richard Powers about having become “something of a scientific animist,” putting the two words together for the first time, as far as I know. “There are a lot of people like me,” said Ezra, “who yearn for a religion-like force, despite not themselves being personally religious. You can’t just will yourself to believe in things. But I’ve been struck that your path has been simultaneously quite spiritual and scientific.”

Richard reflected on the researchers who demonstrated “the literal interconnectivity between different species in [the forest floor]:”

That is science. Rigorous, reproducible science, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish, ego, and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.

At the same time, the vision that results from this new understanding profoundly increases my sense of that system as having agency; having power and subtlety and anima in a way that seems less metaphorical than it did before.

The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable we are of feeling a kind of spiritual awe. It certainly makes it easier for me to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species.

I don’t think these are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think there is a kind of [co-arising] between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment, and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.⁴

AI-generated art for the prompt “Scientific Animism”

Why a “religion”?

Is this just a philosophy? A blog? A hashtag?

“Religion” carries so many implications. Like, “this is the only true way.” Like, “you must leave your existing religion and convert to this one.”

None of that is my intent, with this project. I’ll be layering Scientific Animism onto my existing faith practice. You are welcome to do the same. Scientific Animism makes few claims about the supernatural; it works with whatever you’re carrying.

Really, I’ll just be playing. This is a fun idea to play with. I want you to play with me.

Why frame it as a religion?

Partly: for marketing. It’s a gimmick.

But also: a philosophy and a religion share one aspect: belief. Religion adds maybe six more. I’m interested in the ritual, experiential, and community aspects of religion.

I want to get together regularly with other people who share similar deeply-held convictions. I want to talk about our beliefs. I want to partake in rituals that orient my thinking. I want to spend regular time cultivating wonder, poignancy, solidarity, gratitude, humility.

My existing faith practice is my home, but it’s also fraught for me anymore.

My religious background

I grew up Christian Protestant evangelical, zealous for the Creationist cause. It took about seven years for me to deconstruct and fully leave behind the worldview that God created the world in six days about six thousand years ago.

Christianity is still the faith practice with which I’m most familiar, in which I still participate. I’m happy to pass on these traditions + culture to my kids. We attend a Mennonite church; we celebrate Christmas; we have many copies of the Bible.

An aside for the triggered

Is my comfort with Christianity troubling to you?

I have a friend who grew up quite a bit more fundamentalist than I did. Went to Liberty University, epicenter of Religious Right ideas. He became an atheist at some point; left it all behind. Years later, young kids of his own, became curious to find a faith expression that better fit his current mindset. Started going to some more relaxed & open churches. But always the old voice in his head whispers, “these aren’t real Christians!” He, a years-long atheist, still holds Christianity to his old standards, doesn’t know another metric by which to measure The True Faith. Never worked through his trauma, just ran from it.

A Unitarian Universalist minister shares a similar story. Told me there are “UU Christians,” and that some other UU people get quite bothered by them. The Bothered Ones, typically, are ex-Christians who haven’t worked through their own baggage yet.

So if you’re troubled, maybe work through your own issues? The book that helped me reach the end of my deconstruction journey; got me to the point where I could start rebuilding; was Finding God in the Waves. Maybe it’s your thing, maybe it’s not, but there’s a whole cottage industry of what I think of as “off-ramps for fundamentalists.” Go explore; see what resonates; get free.

The Christians around me today don’t expect or require belief in literal six-day Creationism. They prefer to emphasize different parts of the text & tradition, parts that I still find poignant and inspiring. Even so, there are aspects of this religion that now feel unnecessary and complicated.

My current beliefs about beliefs

• All biblical interpretation, or understandings of other religious texts, is cultural. There is no True Reading.

• Attempting to have Correct Belief in the supernatural is at best benign, often harmful, and at worst traumatic.

• God, or the supernatural more generally, is a poem we all co-author.

• Religious narratives are used to rationalize morality, not construct it.

• Religions are good for inspiration, for self-analysis, for community, for framing the world. They are bad for explaining why things are the way they are, for making predictions, and for legislating Can vs Ought. As Robin Wall Kimmerer put it: good for orientation, bad for mapping.

• All religions can be used well or poorly. Different religions will resonate more or less with different people. Many aspects of Christianity resonate with me. I find Astrology shallow. Certain probably-Western understandings and practices of Taoism and Buddhism fascinate, inspire, and ground me.

• This belief is still a little fuzzy for me, and the medium of writing doesn’t lend itself to unformed thoughts, but it’s relevant enough that I think I need to mention it. Sorry for the long, messy thoughts!
  
  A goal of religion seems to be to align human status-seeking behavior with pro-social goals, or at least what was seen as pro-social goals in the era during which the religion was born. That is, to make people behave better.
  
  In general, though, it seems like religions have been bad at this. One way of comparing them might be to do a rough comparison of various world cultures based on their dominant religions; the societies shaped by different religions. I’m not familiar with any societies that seem particularly more virtuous or kind, given their dominant religious worldviews & mindsets. This may be partly my own ignorance of many religions + cultures, especially indigenous ones, and I’ll probably explore this idea more in future posts.
  
  But I do think it’s interesting to contrast the power of this status-seeking-subversion system, religion, with the status-seeking-subversion system of science, in which we align status with data. Science gave us antibiotics, smart phones, space probes, birth control, low-cost consumer goods, broadly-shared affluence, and so much more. And of course it’s not all straightforward or clean or pure, but when I hold the clear advances science has gifted us next to the mixed bag of religion, the differences seem stark.

Given all of this, you can see why my relationship with Christianity feels a bit complicated. Scientific Animism better matches my current deep convictions.

I expect my beliefs to continue changing, as they have my whole life. You certainly don’t need to share these beliefs to join me in this exploration.

I’m curious to see what we can make of Scientific Animism if we give it the time, attention, community, and practice befitting a religion.

Why? Because it already exists.

As I became captured by this thought experiment, what would Scientific Animism look like if formalized as a religion?, I started to notice it everywhere.

People have been talking about Scientific Animism for years. Maybe decades. There’s already a rich philosophical discussion, rich religious traditions, from which to draw and learn.

There are already songs, I realized. I sing one of them to my children as a lullaby.

The books referenced in this post are obvious contributions. I’m sure there are more.

At a discussion I hosted, one of the participants said they’ve been a lifelong Scientific Animist; just hadn’t had the label.

A term can tie together cultural artifacts that had seemed like separate projects. A name can enable and accelerate conversation.

This is one fruiting body of an already-robust mycelium network.

Something that wants to be born.

Why? Because the moment is right.

As more and more people fall away from religions of old, but still long for lost connection and wonder,

As more and more people grieve our ongoing climate catastrophe, and long for a better relationship with our world,

As more and more people feel disconnected and alienated from the places where we live, and long for deeper connections to nature,

As thinking machines throw us into a collective identity crisis, but we still treat feeling beings worse than our computers,

As our societies spasm, and “old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters,”⁵

Scientific Animism has something to say. Offers a way to approach and frame these problems. Suggests a path through.

Why not part of something else?

Maybe this should just be part of some existing tradition.

My UU minister friend tells me similar ideas are percolating in their congregations.

Quakers have space in their philosophy.

The traditions of various indigenous peoples could probably contain this.

It might start off looking like an homage to certain versions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintoism.

But I think it works better on its own. It’s a stronger brand. A catchier meme. It can go further, be more nimble, adapt to the needs of our current moment without needing to contort itself to an existing framework.

AI-generated art for the prompt “Scientific Animism”

How might we practice?

When we get together regularly, what do we do?

Perhaps:

• Something akin to post-enlightenment Protestant church service: sermon/lesson (on Science, or Animism, or poetry inspired by either?), singing together

Perhaps:

• Something akin to group meditation

  • with introductory & closing thoughts by a leader, or

  • with intermittent, spontaneous sharing by anyone present, similar to Quaker meetings

Perhaps:

• Lying on our backs, cloud-or-star-or-tree-top gazing, finding patterns and making stories, or just listening, breathing, and being together. This could pair well with meditation.

• Some sort of movement: qigong, yoga, dance, neighborhood walks

• Foraging, gardening, forest bathing, helping on a permaculture farm, bird watching

Perhaps:

• Recovering & preserving animist traditions, especially those of the people where we live, especially when we can join, follow, and learn from existing indigenous communities. But only if they want that, and only if the newcomers don’t try to steer.

Perhaps something else.

I’ll set up a recurring meeting in my area. Maybe every new and full moon. If that’s too hectic then just the full moons. I doubt I could personally coordinate anything more frequent.

We’ll get a group of people together and play with one of these ideas or another, or come up with new ones.

Go ahead and set up a similar meeting in your area. I’d love to hear how it goes!

Will you be an Animist with me?

If you’re still reading and you haven’t hit one of the “Subscribe now” buttons yet, what are you waiting for? Subscribe, leave a comment! I look forward to meeting you. I really do view this as a shared project; something to explore and play with together. The comments are one place we can do that.

I’ve added a paid subscription option. If people start paying, I’ll just let the money accumulate for now. I don’t need it; I’m not trying to make a living as a writer (or as a religious leader, lol). But as it accumulates, I may pay actual writers with it, for contributions to this newsletter. And if larger sums accumulate, then I will set up a way for all paying subscribers to propose and vote on art projects that promote and celebrate Scientific Animism in our regions. Maybe: public art that teaches people about the native birds, bugs, or trees in their bioregion. Maybe: naming noteworthy trees in our cities, and having writers create first-person narratives for them, which get mounted near the tree. Maybe something else; I’d love to hear your ideas!

1. adrienne mare brown used this phrase in her description of Emergent Strategy

2. Richard Powers, being interviewed by Ezra Klein

3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

4. I’ve lightly edited this passage for readability

5. Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark