Well, I am the daughter of two (atheist) scientists, so I originally identified strongly as a
Naturalistic Pagan, which is a path that is inspired by Pagan traditions but also primarily emphasizes natural, not supernatural, causes, and generally goes with the best of what the scientific method can offer. So I generally see no conflict between, say, the Big Bang or evolution and my beliefs. As the website states,
While we find little evidence to support most of the metaphysical claims made for deities and magic, we find plenty of evidence for the capacity of Pagan myth, meditation, and ritual to affect psychology. That is why we find Pagan ways powerful. By shaping human minds, they motivate change through human hands.
Although I am recently starting to explore more about deities and the more metaphysical, which makes things a little more confusing. For now, I mostly operate with uncertainty. For instance, with deities, I can say with 100% certainty that they are important metaphorical, poetic, or psychological phenomena. I think there is some possibility that they have a life/intelligence/consciousness of their own, and a much smaller possibility that they are real, literal beings that exist in the way that the Christian God exists ("hard polytheist"). I have little experience with them in the hard polytheist sense (I'll tell you when I see otherwise), but I know I can work with them in a metaphorical, poetic, or psychological sense, and some personal experience leads me to believe I can have a personal relationship with them. For me, it's all about being able to hold and appreciate multiple competing truths in my head at the same time.
I will say, though, that I prefer not to look too hard for scientific explanations of metaphysical truth and magic. Generally, I think by definition magic is not 100% knowable; I have experience that magic works and I trust my experience. Unfortunately I have seen way too many bad scientific explanations for magic (throwing around fancy words like "quantum physics" is one such sign
) by people who aren't themselves scientists and use the TedX, TL;DR version of science to explain magic. In addition to just being plain wrong, it also
cheapens spiritual experiences by insisting that the only "valid" spiritual experiences have scientific explanations, when "mythical and mystical truth is just as real and just as important as literal truth" all along. So when I talk about "energy", I generally am talking about something totally different from what science considers "energy", and I don't expect them to follow the same rules or laws. I don't conflate the two.
This isn't to say that some scientific theories aren't powerful metaphors and help us understand magic and life better (I am quite fond of chaos theory myself), but it's a leap to say that the metaphor and the object of comparison are one and the same. One
great blog post on the subject says:
So we can continue to have plant spirits and totems, and gods of the harvest and field. There’s nothing wrong with that. But let’s not use half-arsed studies about “talking plants” to try to prove that the spirits of nature paganism are more real than any other. Better to have no proof and only have our spirituality be true in our hearts, than to root our proof on a crumbling cliffside, only to have the tree fall over in the end.