In Woody Allen’s brilliant movie Annie Hall, his fictionalized mother brings him to the doctor because he refuses to do his homework. The 9-year-old child sheepishly explains that, according to his teachers, the entire universe is nothing but a meaningless collection of atoms expanding forever and so “what’s the point” of learning algebra? The doctor, puffing on a cigarette, laughs uncomfortably, and the mother screams, “WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE YOUR BUSINESS?!”

In this scene, the adults bully the child into believing that his existential concerns are misguided, and even dangerous. But Allen’s subversive subtext is clear: in fact, it’s the adults’ unwillingness to engage these questions that’s pathological and irresponsible. From my perspective, Allen’s critique extends far beyond the Jewish enclaves of 1950’s Brooklyn — the image of an atheist doctor smoking himself to death, and a hysterical mother berating her son to simply toe the line, make clear that there is something profoundly flawed about our current worldview. As one way to frame this dysfunction, we could say that our scientific worldview has turned truth and intimacy into irreconcilable goals.

As young people, we are generally taught that truth and intimacy are coterminous — that discovering science’s empirical truth will naturally lead us to a deeper  intimacy with the cosmos, and conversely, that deepening intimacy with existence naturally leads to the uncovering of more truth. Upon closer examination, however, our modern worldview appears to place these two values in a deadly conflict. For its part, science seems to pursue truth in a way that actually undermines intimacy with the universe. Because it treats the cosmos as fundamentally inert, science assumes that any sense of awe or intimacy we might feel towards it is just an illusion — an inappropriate projection of our subjective desires for connection onto an utterly indifferent universe.

Conversely, many spiritual Westerners pursue intimacy with the cosmos in a way that seems to discount empirical truth. As just one example, over 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form. In the bubble of secular society, these literal Creationists are often derided as ignorant, but it’s important to point out that the choice faced by evangelical Christians is not simply between empirical evidence and religious illusion — it’s between truth and intimacy. In a rebuttal that only proves the point, hard-core scientists say: “But the universe is inert and so intimacy is not even possible.”

Although the secular and religious factions of our civilization disagree about which goal should trump the other, both seem to be convinced that empirical truth and cosmological intimacy are utterly incompatible. In the more extreme factions of both camps, the other’s goal is very often seen as useless, if not outright dangerous! Among spiritually inclined Westerners, this mistrust appears as the widespread conviction that the rational mind cannot help us find intimacy with the cosmos. From this perspective, in fact, empirical truth and intellectual understanding only destroy intimacy. And to be clear, this critique is not without merit. As we’ve seen, the scientific worldview does indeed rip the human mind out of the cosmic matrix and turn the world into a lifeless machine.

Fascinatingly, the same mistrust is visible on the other side of the divide. When physicists hear cosmologist Brian Swimme suggest that gravity is a form of love, many of them get VERY squeamish. The subtext of their anxiety, I suspect, is that invoking the language of intimacy when discussing the cosmos will necessarily cloud our vision of the truth. And of course, this suspicion is in some ways well-founded, given the dogmatism that blinded humanity for many millennia. (As just one example, I find it astounding that it took almost two thousand years for someone to actually test Aristotle’s claim that heavier objects must fall faster than lighter ones.) From the perspective of many scientists, the intimacy which our ancestors experienced with the universe came at the price of truth.

At YourCosmos, truth and intimacy are not treated as mutually exclusive. In our view, the best evidence from science now suggests that we are part of a profoundly coherent cosmos, and that our symbolic awareness plays a meaningful role in its evolution. We belong to the cosmos, and we also participate meaningfully in its ceaseless creativity. The goal of all YourCosmos courses is to help young people discover their own version of this sense of belonging. Our ultimate hope is to provide young people with a deeply felt sense of being at home in the universe.