Comment 3 by aths :

Can an atheist have a spiritual experience?

I remember when I first saw Saturn in good quality (before that I only had a little, blurry image.) I saw the planet and the ring with the Cassini division, I also saw one of the larger moons of Saturn. Seeing Saturn, and other planets, and other objects for real instead on photographs, was a strange experience. I would say, even a kind of spiritual one. Of course my telescope cannot show all the details of a professionally taken image, but I saw the actual object with my own eyes.

to me the way science has exposed the reality of the world that surround us is by itself a spiritual experience. Just watching the sky during night and thinking that the stars basically prodouced in the most spectacular way all the substance i'm made of, or caressing a cat and thinking that we both share the same structure and the same origin and the same ancestral feelings, it all makes me feel in deep connection with the nature and the whole life and existence surrounding me, in a much deeper way than the idea of an allmighty creator that made the universe in a blink of an eye and put me inside it just to see if im good enough for paradise.