Image of praying hands with a dark background

Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash

Image of an assortment of frosted doughnuts

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Image of a young boy with a dirty face sitting beside a barbed wire fence

Photo by Ben Richardson on Unsplash

Image of man with a cane walking on a beach

Photo by 30daysreplay

Image of the Golden Dome topped by a statue of the Virgin Mary at the University of Notre Dame

Photo by Steven Van Elk on Unsplash

Image of man standing on beach looking out at the ocean

Photo by raymond revaldi on Unsplash

Astronomical photograph of hundreds of galaxies in space

A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)

Image of a man in a white coat holding a stethoscope

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

If it walks like a quack, and quacks like a quack…

Sci­en­tists tend to resist any attempt to infuse their work with spir­i­tu­al val­ues. They are fear­ful, right­ly so, of dilut­ing a suc­cess­ful knowl­edge-gen­er­at­ing method­ol­o­gy with “mys­ti­cism.” With cre­ation­ists, pseu­do­sci­en­tists and New Agers storm­ing the gates, intent on bring­ing down the walls, who can blame sci­en­tists for jeal­ous­ly main­tain­ing their aloof­ness from “spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.”

Image of a rocky mountain valley with a chain of small lakes

Coumaknock, Mount Brandon • Photo by SteuveFE (CC BY 2.0)

Image of a gorilla knuckle-walking through a forest

Photo by Mike Arney on Unsplash

What immortal hand or eye…

Chimps and goril­las get about by knuck­le-walk­ing. They curl back their fin­gers and bear the weight of their upper bod­ies on their knuck­les, which per­mits them a four-legged scoot on the ground while retain­ing long, grasp­ing fin­gers for swing­ing Tarzan-like among the branch­es. A nice com­pro­mise between life in the trees and life on the ground.