JENNA OUTCALT
Staff Writer
When JD Stillwater was a teacher, he said he noticed that things scientists took for granted were the same things students “would take profound meaning from.” He calls these meaningful scientific facts “revelations,” and he will share them with the Chautauqua Science Group at 9:15 a.m. today in Hurlbut Sanctuary.
He used the example of nothing truly touching anything else at the atomic level, which is something that is no longer revelatory to scientists.
“If you go throughout your day with that in mind, it can really change how you feel about yourself and your place in the universe,” Stillwater said.
His lecture, given in partnership with the CSG and the Chautauqua Climate Change Initiative, is called “One Song: The Science of Oneness.” He will explore various scientific fields and the way they are connected.
“About 120 to 150 years ago, science had a worldview of separateness, that you can isolate systems and study them, and we still do that in science,” he said. “But what we’ve learned more in the last 120 years is that nothing is actually separate, that all systems are interconnected on many different levels.”
Stillwater has presented at Chautauqua Institution before, but this year, he will be able to incorporate multimedia elements into his lecture.
“In science, an image is worth a thousand words, so I use sound and video and immersive images to help illustrate what I’m sharing,” he said.
In addition to scientific fields being connected to one another, Stillwater wants to bridge the perceived gap between science and religion.
“I think people are tired of the debate between fundamentalists and the neo-atheists,” he said. “They’re just tired of the argument and the debate, and they’re looking for ways to integrate the awe and wonder that come from science with whatever their faith tradition is.”
He emphasized that science itself unavoidably “involves people from every faith.”
“What’s cool about science is that it’s global. I say this and people give me pushback, but it is truly [an] interfaith endeavor,” Stillwater said. “It’s not about faith, has nothing to do with faith, but people from every different faith background on the planet are involved in the scientific community.”
Stillwater is a Unitarian Universalist and a religious naturalist, and he said his spirituality informs his perspective on the connectedness of humans and science.
“My religion, if you will, is seeking out experiences of awe and wonder and devotion and reverence without necessarily any reference to anything transcendent or supernatural,” he said.
Stillwater explained how he heard the music of Peter Mayer, a Unitarian Universalist who writes music centered around the human journey on Earth. He pitched the idea of hosting a concert in which Mayer would play his music and Stillwater would explain the science that intertwines with his songs. Mayer was not initially able to join Stillwater for the concert, but it inspired a program called Seven Candles — which Stillwater has been running for 14 years — that presents the connection between science and spirituality with immersive multimedia.
“The best part of the story is that about a year and a half ago, Peter and I finally did the thing,” Stillwater said. “We call it ‘Cosmology in Concert,’ and it’s a two-hour program.”
Stillwater hopes the main thing people come away with after the talk is the aspect of oneness between spirit and science.
“Science and natural reality is a global interfaith source of deep meaning, and we can study it in interfaith spaces together,” he said.
