Falls at Letchworth State Park in New York. iStockphoto hide caption

Falls at Letchworth State Park in New York.

"Where were you?" my beloved asked as I walked through the door caked in mud and sweat. "I was communing with my gods," I responded and proceeded to tell her about the exquisite hike I'd had that morning in New York's Letchworth State Park (the Grand Canyon of the East).

Earlier in the day, looking down the rim of a canyon cut over thousands of years by the Genesee River, I felt a profound sense of awe that cut me to the quick. But in that sense of awe, was I communing with anything extending beyond just a particular state of my neurons? My joke about the gods aside, was there anything religious about the feeling I, an atheist, felt looking across that vast expanse of river, stone and still blue air?

During the last week we've been having a fascinating conversation here at 13.7 on exactly this topic of atheists and awe and science and religion.

Barbara King started us out using two books she'd recently finished to dispel the notion that atheists can't feel awe. She further argued that it's an experience that need have nothing to do with the "sacred" but can be a pure response to science's own unpacking of the world's richness. Then, Tania Lombrozo picked up the ball by looking at psychological research showing how the feeling of awe has two characteristics: an experience of vastness and the need for an accommodation with that experience. Both the religious and non-religious have this experience of vastness, she argued. The real difference between them arises with how the subsequent accommodation is accomplished.

Marcelo Gleiser then drew from the ancient Greeks to explore how reason could be a gateway to a profound sense of spirituality but only if that sense eschews mysticism. In this way, Marcelo argued we might "rid spirituality of its supernatural prison." Alva No finished the week taking a different path. In his meditation on the limits of rationality, he argued it's imperative to see meaning and value as real in and of itself, something perhaps rationality can't do.

I loved the insights in all of these posts and am thankful to my colleagues for pushing me in my own thinking. If there's one word I'd emphasize in my response to their discussions it would be this:

Experience. Experience. Experience.

OK, that was three words. But like my moment standing at the edge of Letchworth's deep cliffs, I believe that it's experience that should come first and foremost in our discussions of awe. In fact, it is exactly that emphasis on what happens in experience that makes awe a proper pivot point for deeper discussions of science and spirituality.

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Is Atheist Awe A Religious Experience?