A skeptic waxing poetic

I have been exchanging some rather interesting emails with a new friend of late and, in the course of them, wrote the following. It is really my answer to the common charge that atheists and rational skeptics lack any sort of awe or wonder in their relationship to the world; far, far from it.

I would love to be proven wrong and to experience the sort of transcendent, spiritual connection between things that is posited in most indigenous / pagan / new-age systems of belief; it fits incredibly well with how I see the world, with the vast complexities and interconnectedness / interdependence of life, and with my environmentalist / sustainable mindset.

But that, in a lot of ways, is exactly the problem- if I just accept that because it fits well, because it harmonizes with my feelings and how I view the world, I am in no more tenable a position than someone who does the same thing with their deity of choice. Being rational about it, I can only accept such things as I have seen sufficient evidence to support, and I have seen no evidence to support the idea that there is that spiritual, transcendent level to reality that would tie things up so neatly. I haven't ruled out the fact that someday, I might have that sort of revelatory experience and all of the sudden realize that, holy shit, I am connected to everything in the world not only in terms of energy and matter moving through states in this partial closed-loop system but something utterly transcendent, but until I see evidence of that for myself, I can't make that assumption.

In the meantime, though, my biggest point is that while that additional connection to the world would be nice, it isn't necessary to provoke the sort of awe that most religious types think rational reductionists lack. Even without the assumption of another layer of reality, I am connected to All That Is. We are both in the stream and of it, and what we do to the whole we do eventually to ourselves. It sounds incredibly new-age and hippy dippy, but strictly in terms of
physics, chemistry, and biology, it is all absolutely true.

Look at water as a simple example... We drink it in. We breathe, sweat, piss, and otherwise excrete it out for every moment we are alive on this planet. It doesn't disappear. It is taken back up into the stream, absorbed and used by myriad forms life, from trees to bacteria, swept up into clouds and rained back down to begin anew. Molecules of water that were once a part of me have passed through and been a part of billions of other organisms- maybe even you. The same is true of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all manner of other things; energy to fuel all of this comes from the sun and powers this organization until it is lost to entropy, but perpetually replaced.

With that sort of connection just in what we can see, touch, measure, and truly understand, what need is there truly for another ineffable layer to reality?