Here’s the latest in John Boswell’s unique and beautiful Symphony of Science series. This short three-minute video is called “The Big Beginning,” and raps — you might say — on some of the basic facts of the Big Bang.

Since the Renaissance, but especially since the Industrial Revolution, we in the West live in a world in which the scientific and spiritual realms are increasingly separate and apparently incompatible with one another.

Over the centuries, some people in each realm have tried at various times to resolve this split by vanquishing the other realm in its entirety.

For instance …

Fundamentalisms of all kinds usually retreat into some text as the “word of God,” and engage in complete denial of well-established scientific facts about such matters as the age of the Earth and the processes of evolution.

On the other hand, some atheists (in the other realm) “preach” a radical absence of meaning in the mindless mechanisms of our cosmos.

John Boswell’s work, though, points to a middle way, in which the facts of science itself are an expression of the spiritual. They are both spiritual and material.

One of the great beauties of this “middle way” (and it’s no accident that you find this expression in Buddhism) is that it heals the split in our culture as well as the split within our own psyches: Boswell’s work engages both our intellectual and our emotional faculties at once. For some of us, science always does this.

How would you change your life if you believed that the entire universe is holy?