Where Science Meets the Sacred: Reflections From a Journey to Houston

The Houston heat wrapped around me like an invisible shield as I navigated the city with the strange feeling that I was not walking to a lab or a museum, but to something that provided silence. The Rothko Chapel is hostile to sound: black walls, enormous canvases, light that doesn’t so much illuminate them as permeate through like some ancient sigh. There, in that weightless inner space, I found myself having a thought that does not frequently occur to me at Caltech, amidst equations and lab equipment: human beings have forever sought a face in the invisible.

Perhaps religion started in such moments—not so unlike the one I was having in that chapel. It is the effort to nail down what eludes our grasp, to render habitable the vast unknown. Rothko’s deep paintings, hung between color and void, were a mirror of the same primal urgency that once led primitive cultures to visualize gods in thunder, in storm, in birth. The search for God was not science, not superstition; it was a movement of orientation, a first attempt to create an inner compass.

**Rothko Chapel interior and new skylight. (Photo: Texas Highways)

And yet, as I walked once more towards the airport, another thought occurred: almost contrary to what their history would suggest, science and religion are less enemies than they are offspring of questions that are beyond practical answer. Just as theoretical physics ponders particles no eye can see, religion evolved as a language for what cannot be directly known. Science collapses mystery into measurement, while sacred space opens it out to where it is inhabitable.

Inside the Rothko Chapel there is no pulpit, no scripture—only color and silence. And yet those void-filled panels vibrate with the same energy that makes an astronomer turn a radio telescope to the sky. Before the abyss of depth, science and religion appear twin manifestations of one human impulse: leaning out over our limits, reaching out to an ever-receding horizon.

Philosophy and the Origin of Religious Thinking

The moment human beings began philosophizing about religion, ritual turned into discourse, myth into inquiry. Belief was no longer lived, but questioned.

Saint Augustine gave voice to this transformation. In the Confessions, God is not a distant monarch but the innermost space of the self: “You were within me, but I was outside.” Sitting in the Rothko Chapel, Augustine’s words echoed—the dark panels seemed less paintings than mirrors deflecting sight inward.

Thomas Aquinas, centuries later, pursued another path: to place faith in dialogue with reason. His “Five Ways” of proving God’s existence—by causality, motion, order—are a testament to the conviction that faith does not need to retreat from rational inquiry. His project speaks to science: like a scientist who does not linger on observation but seeks causes, Aquinas did not linger on mystery but sought argument.

Spinoza framed the issue anew. God was not a transcendent person for Spinoza, but nature itself, infinite substance through all. It was a concept forbidden as heresy, but before Rothko’s dissolving color fields I found myself remembering Spinoza’s vision: no God-person backstage from the canvas, but immanence pulsating in every shade.

With Kant, the question had changed once again. He demanded that reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Yet, the divine is still necessary—not as a object of knowledge, but as a prerequisite for moral existence. I can perceive something of science here: scientists will accept unproveable assumptions—like the ultimate intelligibility of the universe—so research may begin.

Hegel incorporated religion into his grand system. Religion was not error for Hegel but stage: symbolic form through which Spirit arrives step by step to know itself. History, in this fashion, is God’s path to self-knowledge. I pondered: perhaps the Rothko Chapel itself signifies this very movement—neither church nor museum, but one in which art assumes religion’s ancient task of holding humanity’s quaking before mystery.

Modern Radicalizations: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas

Whereas Augustine found God in the heart and Aquinas in reason, modern philosophy addressed the question more radically in challenge. It no longer addressed only the divine; it overthrew or rephrased it at times.

Nietzsche & Heidegger, Joe Smith, 2019.

Nietzsche shattered Western conventions with the proclamation that “God is dead.” Not nihilism’s victory, but recognition: the new era could no longer depend on transcendent order. Meaning had to be upheld by shoulders of human alone. Standing before Rothko’s black fields—with no reassuring figures, no symbols of tradition—I felt that Nietzschean test: to stand before the void, not to crumble before it, but to find strength there.

Heidegger, in other words, restated the issue. He did not ask about God, but Being. Modernity, in his view, had reoriented man from his dwelling in Being, leading him off course through technology and clamor. The Rothko Chapel seems to set the scene for his call: a room drawn back from size, where Being breathes not as thinking but as existence.

Levinas placed ethics in the front. God for him was not a theorem of abstractions but the trace that shines on the face of the Other—the unlimited responsibility we owe the one sitting beside you. In a vacant chapel devoid of icons or divine imagery, this finds its haunting echo: transcendence not born of sight drawn on a wall, but of the neighbor sitting next to you who is occupying the space.

Modern and contemporary thinkers today don’t turn their backs on the sacred—they reinterpret it. For centuries the challenge was to prove God or to defend mystery; today it is to ask what place is left for transcendence in a science-mapped world free to human freedom.

From Augustine to Nietzsche, from Aquinas to Heidegger, there is a strand to be followed: human beings never cease to philosophize religion because the questions—Who are we? Where do we come from? To what do we strive?—will not disappear. They transform shape—from theology to skepticism, from mysticism to criticism, from metaphysics to ethics—but they remain.

As I stepped out of the Rothko Chapel into the stifling Houston heat, I felt that continuity: the silence I had just enjoyed was religious, to be sure, but also philosophical, scientific, fundamentally human. A strand a millennium old that bound man’s relentless fight against his own limits.