By Mark Davidson

Allow me to introduce a proposal that might possibly reconcile the opponents in the ongoing controversy about permitting organized prayer in public schools.

Let us encourage our public schools to set aside some time for organized awe. Let us begin teaching our schoolchildren that all existence is miraculous and that all life is sacred.

For very young children, everything commonplace is a miracle. You can confirm that by carefully watching them at play, or by listening to those rare grownups who refuse to grow old. Thoreau found all reality "fabulous". To Whitman, "every cubic inch of space is a miracle". To naturalist Loren Eiseley, "Nature is one vast miracle, and each one of us repeats that miracle". And to the astronomer Harlow Shapley, "it is a religious attitude to recognize the wonder of all things that exist".

As biologist Rachel Carson sadly observed, the sense of wonder is outgrown by most adults. The apparent reason was described back in 1834 by essayist-historian Thomas Carlyle: "Innumerable are the tricks of Custom: but of all these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. True, it is by this means that we live; for man must work as well as wonder…. (But) am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two hundred times, or two million times?"

Carlyle might have added that Custom’s trick of concealing miracles is abetted by many parents and teachers, who show off to children by acting as if Nature’s mysteries can be explained away by giving them labels, For example, one of the most fantastic of all mysteries usually is identified to children as "just gravity". And the child is told the tired old story about the apple falling in the 17^th century English garden of Sir Isaac Newton.

The child almost never is told that mathematician Newton was so much in awe of gravity and other forces of Nature that he once wrote: "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being". A public school teacher who might thus inform the class about Newton’s feelings would not be violating our constitutional separation of church and state, the teacher simply would be recounting an important fact about an important human being. Teaching need not mean preaching.

The same principle of teaching should apply to the forces that control the movements of planets. Teachers commonly do a thoroughly tedious job of informing students of the mathematical laws of planetary motion as discovered in the early 17^th century by Johannes Kepler. But most teachers neglect to tell what Kepler’s discovery meant to Kepler; "The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived by the intellect, not by the ear. It is no longer surprising (therefore) that man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time. . . by an artful symphony for several voices. . . by making music in the imitation of God".

Students certainly should have the right to reject Kepler’s religious interpretation, but teachers should not have the right to ignore it. Moreover, teachers who present astronomy or any other science without transmitting some sense of passion are committing an offense tantamount to teaching music appreciation by merely asking students to memorize symphonic mathematics.

Likewise, should students be given an opportunity to evaluate the kind of evolutionary philosophy espoused by Nobel Prize geneticist George W. Beadle, who wrote: Is it any less awe-inspiring to conceive of a universe created of hydrogen with the capacity to evolve into man than it is to accept the creation of man as man?"

Students should also be informed of the following observation in Holism and Evolution, published in 1926 by Jan Christiaan Smuts: "If matter holds the promise and potency of life and of mind, it is no longer the old matter of the physical materialists". In other words – as biologist Edmund W. Sinnott wrote 40 years later – science has destroyed neither God nor religion; science has destroyed orthodox materialism. This truth literally shook the Earth in the middle of our century, as atomic explosions confirmed Einstein’s formula for the equivalence of mass and energy – and thus forever demolished the imaginary line between matter and what religious people choose to call spirit.

I propose that science teachers hold many of their lab sessions outdoors. In the outside world, the teachers could help revive the spirituality of childhood – by adoring the sun for fathering all life – by adoring plants for magically transforming sunlight into food – and by adoring the human body for magically transforming such trivial food as a peanut into the energy for two hours of human thought. If humanity is to regain its sense of wonder, our teachers must stop dismissing the above three miracles as "just the carbon cycle".

Some academic sophisticates delight in reminding us that, despite the remarkable qualities of our bodies, we are pathetically insignificant as compared with the vast space and time of the cosmos. However, there is a higher level of sophistication, a level in which we become aware that we exist in a space-time dimension that is excitingly unique: Our size is midway between the microcosm of the atom and the Macrocosm of the galaxy. And, midway between the rotation-period of an atom’s electron and the age of a galaxy is the time it takes us to wink an eye.

Despite our relatively small size, we are uniquely equipped to be the universe’s explorers – and adorers. We are atoms that have time-lapsed into cells. We are sea creatures that have crawled ashore to walk on land and fly into space. We are star dust that has become self-conscious.

As we become conscious that "matter and spirit" are one, that "the sensual and the sacred" are one, that all religious inspirations are one, perhaps we will become aware that all humanity is one. And then perhaps we shall begin treating each other accordingly.

Let us all join in that prayer, a prayer for everyone from fundamentalist to freethinkers, a prayer that our species soon will awaken to its common membership in the brotherhood and sisterhood of cosmic explorers – who all love the Creation even though we differ on the question of a Creator.

And for those who cannot honestly address this prayer to God, there is the beautifully playful prayer of the agnostic:

"To Whom it may concern"