Why do we feel awe under the night sky, and is it a spiritual experience?

What is awe, and why does the night sky set it off?

Psychologists mostly ignored awe until the early 2000s. In 2003, Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia proposed a simple model. They argued that two features show up in every clear case of awe. The first is perceived vastness: something seems much larger than the self, whether in size, in status or in complexity. The second is a “need for accommodation,” which they define as an inability to fit an experience into the mental structures we already have. Five more features give awe its flavor: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue and the supernatural. A storm can bring awe mixed with fear; a sunset, awe mixed with beauty.

The night sky scores high on both. On a dark night, the pale band called the Milky Way is our own galaxy, seen from inside. According to NASA, it holds roughly 100 billion stars in a disk about 100,000 light-years across. The Andromeda Galaxy, a fuzzy patch to the naked eye under a very dark sky, is about 2.5 million light-years away. The light reaching your eye from it left 2.5 million years ago. Numbers like these do not fit our everyday sense of size or time. That is the stretch. Our explainer on how big the universe is goes further.

Why would humans evolve such a feeling? Nobody knows for sure. A 2018 review by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley describes the main ideas. Haidt and Keltner suggest awe stirred devotion to powerful leaders and helped hold groups together. The psychologists Alice Chirico and David Yaden suggest it helped our ancestors find safe places with wide views, where they could see danger coming. Both are hypotheses, not findings.

Beauty, one of awe’s flavors, is its own puzzle. Why do some things strike us as beautiful? Nobody fully knows. In one small brain-scan study from 2011, 21 volunteers looked at paintings and listened to music. The researchers found that one brain area, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was active for both musical and visual beauty, and more active the more beautiful people rated what they saw or heard. That hints at a shared “beauty” response in the brain. But it is one small study, not a final answer.

Is awe a spiritual experience?

For many people, yes, and not only for religious people. The Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study asked how often people have various spiritual feelings. 61% said they feel awe at the beauty of nature at least weekly. 41% said they feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe that often, including 42% of religious adults and 39% of the religiously unaffiliated. The groups part ways on another question. Most atheists (84%) and agnostics (66%) said they seldom or never feel “the presence of something from beyond this world.” So the wonder is shared. What people think it means is not.

Lab studies point the same way. In five studies with 1,064 people, the psychologists Jesse Lee Preston and Faith Shin asked people to recall a spiritual experience. Recalling it raised feelings of awe in both religious and nonreligious people, partly by making them feel small. The memories differed. Religious people more often recalled religious events or brushes with life and death. Nonreligious people more often recalled nature, science, peak moments, or yoga and meditation. The authors suggest this shared “small self” may help explain “spirituality without religion.”

The small self shows up elsewhere too. In one study reported in the Berkeley review, tourists at Yosemite National Park drew pictures of themselves that were nearly 33% smaller than those drawn by tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf, a tourist area in San Francisco. In another, people who gazed up at a grove of towering eucalyptus trees later picked up more pens that an experimenter “accidentally” dropped than people who looked up at a tall building. Across five studies, Paul Piff and colleagues linked awe with more generous and ethical choices.

Astronauts give the most dramatic examples. Seeing Earth from space is known as the “overview effect.” According to the Berkeley review, a 2016 paper by David Yaden and colleagues gathers accounts from many astronauts who link this view to deep awe and even a sense of reaching beyond the self. NASA astronaut Sam Durrance said nothing can prepare you for what Earth looks like from orbit, and that he felt “this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before.” The authors suggest that the whole Earth is vast in meaning, not only in size: it calls up thoughts of home and of humanity as a whole.

What is the strongest objection?

A skeptic can say: if awe is a brain response shaped by evolution, calling it spiritual adds nothing. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays out this argument. If a natural explanation is enough to account for an experience, then we have no grounds for positing anything beyond that natural cause. Some point out that brain events during religious experiences look very similar to events during some kinds of seizures, and that drugs can bring on similar states.

The same encyclopedia records a strong reply. Every experience, including ordinary seeing and hearing, comes with a matching brain state. Finding the brain state does not by itself show the experience is false, or we would have to doubt our eyes too. Richard Swinburne, in his 1979 book The Existence of God, goes further. He argues that if something seems to be present, we are justified in believing it is, unless we have a specific reason to doubt it. Critics answer that religious experiences differ from ordinary seeing in ways that weaken his argument. Science can describe the feeling, but it cannot decide what, if anything, the feeling is about.

What do people often get wrong?

“Awe belongs to religion.” Pew found wonder about the universe almost as common among the unaffiliated as among people who identify with a religion.

“If science explains awe, awe is not real.” As an analogy, knowing how a rainbow forms does not stop people from stopping to look. The analogy has a limit: a rainbow’s cause is fully known, while the meaning of awe is still argued.

“Awe switches off good judgment.” The evidence is mixed. One study, reported in the Berkeley review, found that people who had just felt awe were less persuaded by weak arguments. Another set of five studies found that awe made people less comfortable with uncertainty, and more likely to believe in unseen, nonhuman agents and to see human intention in random events. Neither finding shows whether any particular belief is true or false.

“Awe research proves awe makes you a better person.” Some studies link awe with kindness and generosity. But the Berkeley review warns that the field is young and that many findings have yet to be replicated, meaning repeated by other teams.

“The Milky Way is there for anyone who looks up.” For most people in North America and Europe, it is not. The 2016 world atlas of night sky brightness, led by Fabio Falchi, found that about 83% of the world’s people, and more than 99% of people in the U.S. and Europe, live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. In Singapore, the whole population lives under skies so bright that eyes cannot fully adjust to the dark. It is getting worse. A team led by Christopher Kyba used more than 50,000 star sightings sent in by volunteers from 2011 to 2022, mostly in Europe and North America. Their paper estimates that the sky grew brighter by 7 to 10% a year; NOIRLab’s release gives 9.6%. At that rate, Kyba said in a NOIRLab release, a child born where 250 stars were visible would see only about 100 by age 18.

Where can people of faith and skeptics agree?

• The feeling is real and common. Surveys and lab studies find it among religious and nonreligious people alike.
• It turns us outward. In studies, awe shifts attention away from our own concerns and toward the group we belong to.
• Dark skies are worth protecting. Whether you see the Milky Way as creation or as nature, light pollution takes it away from everyone.
• Different paths, same feeling. In one set of studies, religious people often recalled religious moments and nonreligious people often recalled nature or science. Both felt awe.

How can you check this yourself?

• Test your own sky. The citizen-science project Globe at Night asks you, during its campaign dates, to go out more than an hour after sunset with no Moon up, let your eyes adjust for 10 minutes, and match what you see to star charts. Your report joins observations from around the world.
• Find a dark place. Compare a night in town with a night in the countryside. Notice when the Milky Way appears.
• Read the survey question. Pew asked how often people feel “a deep sense of wonder about the universe.” Different wording can give different numbers, and Pew says its older surveys used different methods, so their results are not directly comparable. A shorter 2023 Pew survey about spirituality also found fewer such feelings, and Pew suggests the setting of a question can matter.
• Look for repeat studies. Trust a finding more when other teams get the same result.

The answer stands. Awe comes from meeting something vast that stretches our minds, and people of every belief feel it. What it points to, science cannot settle.