After Disenchantment: Modalities of Enchantment among Nonreligious Scientists

Max Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis casts science as a carrier of secularization, dissolving mystery and ultimacy. Yet theorists such as Hans Joas and Charles Taylor suggest modernity reconfigures transcendence rather than simply erasing it, generating “cross-pressures” and longings for “fullness” within the immanent frame. This paper draws on 104 interviews with physicists and biologists in the US, UK, Italy, and India to examine how scientific practice elicits experiences of wonder, mystery, and “otherness”--and how these experiences can function as pathways into spiritual yearning, especially among nonreligious scientists. We conceptualize enchantment as a relational mode of engagement marked by (1) encounter with alterity, (2) orientation toward the world as a meaningful cosmos, and (3) affective engagement. Comparing religious and nonreligious narratives, we show how immanent and liminal forms of enchantment enable yearnings for connection and higher meaning without stable doctrinal commitment, reframing science as a consequential site of contemporary spirituality.