Triglav Circle – 18 January 2025 – Arthur Dahl
Revised 21 March 2025

Scientific discoveries have built our modern world, but science is neutral in the purposes for which its discoveries are used, as in nuclear energy or nuclear bombs. In the sciencebased materialism of today within our economic system, profit counts more than human
well-being, and greed is institutionalised.

We need something more to provide an ethical framework for science to contribute to good rather than evil. With the decline of religion in the West, that role has been played by the secular humanities, but as many intellectual traditions have shown, with mixed success.
Much of what we appreciate in the humanities has its roots in higher dimensions of human experience, in finding ways to express spiritual qualities as our true reality. Even the environment can be seen as reflecting higher qualities of cooperation and reciprocity, and the experience of nature is often defined as spiritual. This reality does not contradict the reality studied by science but is complementary to it.

In their times, as shown by history, the major religions provided the ethical basis for great civilisations by promoting selfless service to the common good. Belief in a greater power (God, Allah, etc.) associated with reward and punishment motivated good behaviour. In the secular perspective of today, when humanities are seen only as an intellectual or scholarly pursuit by human beings, that motivation is lacking.

The real challenge for us is whether to accept a higher authority than that created by humans, as claimed by religious “revelation”. Such an authority provides a “touchstone of truth” beyond fallible human conceptions. If religions are seen as a progressive process of revelation, with both a core of universal basic values, and social laws adapted to one particular time and subject to change, their authority is relative to human needs and consistent with social evolution.

The traditional beliefs of Indigenous peoples played the same role as major religions in establishing the rules of community life and unity, within a framework of duties to ancestors and responsibility for future generations.

While there is a general acknowledgement of the need for transformative change to save us from coming catastrophes (IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, Earth4All), few intellectuals today see any role for religion in this process.

Yet there is a new religion, or religion renewed, in the Bahá’í Faith, that may hold the key to a successful transformation by harmonising science and religion as complementary forces, seeing religion as a process of progressive revelation validating all the traditions of the past, and proposing a modern set of principles and institutions suited for the next stage in human social evolution as a single global community with world citizenship and unity in diversity. It warns both of excessive materialism driven by science without ethics, and religion without science falling into superstition. It calls for the elimination of extremes of poverty and wealth, protection of nature and the environment, a world federation with collective security to eliminate war, and democratic governance without individual power or authority. It provides the basis for harmonising the sciences and humanities in defining a higher human purpose both to refine our characters to express spiritual qualities and to advance civilisation.

For scientists working on the quantum dimension, “reality” becomes ever more abstract and far from our direct experience. Recent scientific papers explore pure mathematics behind quantum theories or ask if there is a quantum theory of consciousness. The noosphere, on the other hand, looks at all the intangible dimensions of culture, from emotions and arts to philosophy. This could be extended further into what could be called spiritual reality. From a systems perspective, the Noosphere includes all the knowledge, information and values of cooperation and reciprocity, hopefully including religion, that determine the dynamic functioning and evolution of our global human society.