He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkins’s foot. Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and possibly the world’s most famous atheist, certainly one of the most militant. Two days earlier, Dawkins had delivered a talk that he believed would prove the impossibility of God, and which would later be published as a book called
The God Delusion
.
2
He had remained in Cambridge to hear the lectures of other researchers, particularly the world-class John Barrow. When Barrow, who turned out to be an Anglican, mentioned his belief in God, Dawkins began roiling with frustration like a teakettle about to blow.
“Why on earth do you believe in God?” Dawkins blurted.
All heads turned to Barrow. “If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world.”
“Yes, but
why do you want to look for divine action?
” Dawkins demanded.
“For the same reason that someone might
not
want to,” Barrow responded with a little smile, as all of us erupted in laughter—except for Dawkins.
So there you have it. The paradigm is not a law, it is a choice: a choice to look for—or exclude—the action of a divine intelligence. The paradigm to exclude a divine intelligence, or “Other,” or “God,” to reduce all things to matter, has reigned triumphant for some four hundred years, since the dawn of the Age of Reason. Today, a small yet growing number of scientists are trying to chip away at the paradigm, suspecting that its feet are made of clay.
Some of them have patiently guided me through my own quest to understand the nature of God and my instinct that something does indeed exist beyond the reach of our physical senses. I have come to think of them fondly as “my” scientists: they are brave and passionate in their conviction that the materialist assumptions of modern science are not as sturdy as they look.
These scientists repeatedly invoked Thomas Kuhn’s name. Kuhn, a historian of science at MIT, changed the world with his book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
3
Aside from popularizing the phrase “paradigm shift,” he presented a new model for scientific progress. He argued that science proceeds not by steady accumulation of knowledge but (as one writer put it) by “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.”
4
Those revolutions are “tradition-shattering complements to the tradition bound activity of normal science.”
5
Kuhn argued that scientists are not the skeptical, freethinking, and objective investigators they fancy themselves. Rather, they tend to assimilate what they have been taught and work on solving problems within an accepted framework. Normal science, Kuhn observed,“often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”
6
If some iconoclastic scientists produce results that challenge the prevailing consensus, the research is often dismissed as simply wrong—not as legitimate findings that point to a different sort of paradigm. Eventually, though, the pressure builds to the breaking point and, overnight, the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by a new one.
For example, Ptolemy’s theory that the sun revolves around the earth was overthrown by Copernicus’s evidence that the planets orbit the sun.When Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation could not explain the motion of light, his paradigm gave way to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Darwin’s theory of natural selection threw out the paradigm of man made in God’s image with one scoop of dust. Generally, for this shift to happen, the old scientists have to die off before a revolutionary who has no stake in the system—say, a twenty-six-year-old patent examiner named Albert Einstein—comes along and throws all the cards up in the air. He sweeps away the old paradigm, ushering in a new one. A revolution occurs.
Of course, most mainstream scientists believe we are nowhere close to a Kuhnian-style revolution when it comes to spirituality. They point out that a true revolution requires more than merely trotting out unexplained phenomena and arguing that current explanations should be scrapped. A paradigm shift requires that the new idea make predictions and explain the world in a better way. You can point out that your mother prayed for you and subsequently your fever abated. But before we discard the aspirin, we need a hypothesis about how prayer works and a prediction of what it will cure. For example: reciting the Twenty-third Psalm cures fevers, while the Sermon on the Mount suppresses coughing. Skeptics say that today’s “revolutionaries” do not have a theory of “God,” much less hard evidence to back it up.
Researchers like neurologist Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal believe that they are developing such a theory, and that mainstream scientists remain stuck in the “normal science” mode of ignoring the evidence or dismissing it.
“Thomas Kuhn talked of paradigm revolution, and I think we’re in the middle of one right now,” Beauregard offered.“There are too many data coming from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, now spiritual neuroscience, quantum physics, and various lines of evidence, all pointing to major failures in the old materialist paradigm. So for me, it’s only a matter of time before there will be a major paradigm shift.”
He noted that whenever he presents scientific data suggesting we are not biological robots, totally determined by our genes and our neurons—that perhaps we have a spiritual side—the scientists fill the room and clamor to know more. He believes the challenge to the mind-brain problem is gaining followers as more scientists conduct studies on the sly or, more recently, with funding from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health. More important, Beauregard senses a generational shift, the kind that presages the collapse of an old paradigm. The young scientists are restless.
“Many young scientists come to me—not openly, but covertly—and they tell me they greatly admire the kind of work I’m doing,” he said. “They don’t dare go out publicly yet. But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before we see a true revolution in science because of that. And there will be a big clash, because science has been controlled for centuries by materialists, by atheists.”
Clearly, no one knows at this moment whether Mario Beauregard and the other guerrilla scientists are correct. But here’s a provocative idea: We will know. New technology that allows us to peer into the brain and record the path of subatomic particles points toward that end. The paradigm will fall or it won’t, the spiritual will be acknowledged or marginalized once and for all.
I am reminded of scientist Dean Radin’s comment that 96 percent of the universe is “dark matter” or “dark energy”—that is, cosmologists haven’t a clue as to what it is. That means that all our scientific theories are built on 4 percent of the observable universe.
“Science is a new enterprise,” Radin said.“We are monkeys just out of the trees. And for us to be so arrogant as to imagine we’re
close
to understanding the universe is just insane.”
How much more arrogant to proclaim we know all about “God.” But as the science proceeds, many scientists suspect that the days are numbered for a purely materialist paradigm. They believe that the evidence challenging the matter-only model is building, bolstered by research on meditation, the mechanisms for prayer, and more radical studies on the neurology of near-death experiences. And as the “anomalies” accumulate, these scientists predict the pressure on the dam will grow, and one day the wall of materialism will come crumbling down.
This is the dilemma that Saint Paul voiced in one of his (rare) flashes of intellectual humility.
“Now we see through a glass, darkly,” Paul told the Corinthians, “but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
A Personal Paradigm Shift
If I harbor only suspicions about paradigm shifts in science, I am more certain of my own. In the course of looking under the hood of spiritual experience, guided by some smart and very generous scientists, I experienced a series of personal epiphanies about, first, the existence and nature of “God,” and second, my own religious beliefs. Let me take these in order.
The question that launched me on this journey could not be more basic: Does God exist? Or, put another way: Is there more than this material reality? This question is at once too ambitious and too modest. Too ambitious because science can never prove that a supernatural being exists; if there is a God, He or She or It operates outside of nature and beyond the reach of scientific measuring instruments. The question is also too modest: I am only reaffirming something that I have always felt to be true. It is difficult to be a Christian, after all, if you do not believe in God or a meaningful universe or an eternal purpose to life. Still, at the outset I worried that I would find a material explanation for every spiritual phenomenon and that my research would drain life of its magic and mystery.
What I have concluded is this:While science cannot
prove
the existence of God, neither can it
disprove
it. In fact, science is entirely consistent with a Being who organized the universe and created life. That may seem an unremarkable conclusion, until you consider that materialists have controlled the levers of science—and with it, a claim on verifiable truth—for centuries.
Materialists can say that this astonishing thing called life (including conscious human beings who are curious about their origins) emerged from a series of random acts, starting from the Big Bang and onward. They can posit that there are 10,500 other universes with no life in them, and we just happened to hit the jackpot by landing in the one universe friendly to life. But isn’t it just as plausible—indeed, simpler and more elegant—to postulate that a cosmic Mathematician created the universe to evolve and sustain life?
Or consider spiritual “experience.” Materialists can say that our brains evolved so that we would experience profound numinous sensations. For no particular reason, during meditation or an emotional breakdown, on a walk in the mountains or on the cusp of death, some people feel a union with all things, an overpowering love, a light that eviscerates the fear of death. One explanation is that this is a quirk of evolution. But is it not just as plausible to posit that there is a Mind who wired us with the ability to access that Mind and tap into invisible realities?
William James considered the dichotomy between “materialism” and “spiritualism” a hundred years ago. He argued that
both
are internally logical. He asserted that a material worldview that excludes a Creator
and
a spiritual worldview that includes one can both explain natural phenomena, such as the motion of the planets, or the evolution of the universe and life.You can believe either explanations for life and leave it at that. It is when you look toward the
future
that you see how differently the two views play out. As Professor Darren Staloff described it in his lecture on James’s pragmatism,
7
materialism holds that eventually our sun will die, Earth will be destroyed, the universe will collapse on itself, and everything we hoped or dreamed or achieved or learned will be for naught. A spiritual worldview, however, leaves room for hope—that all we accomplish, all we are, will be preserved for eternity “if only in the mind of God.”
The real distinction between a material and spiritual worldview, James wrote, does not rest “in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and
the letting loose of hope
.”
8
Given the choice, I throw my lot in with hope.
A century after William James wrote those words, I believe there is even more reason to bank on the existence of God. It seems to me that the instruments of brain science are picking up
something
beyond this material world. It seems plausible to me that we perceive the ineffable with spiritual senses, and when the spiritual experience ebbs, it leaves a residue in one’s brain or body.
Science is showing that a spiritual experience leaves fingerprints, evidence that a spiritual transaction has occurred. This is hardly a surprising statement: science shows that any significant experience, especially an extraordinary one that lasts longer than thirty minutes, leaves an indelible mark on the brain. A near-death experience after a car crash, a spontaneous mystical experience, hours of prayer and meditation over the years, a seizure in which one hears the “voice of God”—
of course
these mental events sculpt the physical brain that mediates them.
After the encounter, the brain is physiologically different. For adepts in Buddhist meditation, the brain waves sprint along in perfect synchrony. For experts in Christian prayer, the encounter may allow them to quiet certain spatial lobes of their brain so that they feel at one with the universe. A brush with death appears to slow one’s brain-wave activity and jump-start a profound spiritual life. Psychedelic drugs and the electrical storm of temporal lobe epilepsy may open the “reducing valve” that filters out information, and allow people to perceive another, nonmaterial, dimension.
At first I was befuddled by these wildly divergent brain patterns and experiences, but then I began to perceive a theme. Simply put, when you bump against the spiritual, something changes. First, your brain begins to operate differently, even at resting state. Second, your interior life is transformed.Your priorities and loves, how you choose to spend your time and with whom you choose to spend it—all that changes in the blink of an eye. And for me at least, the catalyst for this upheaval is God.
Nature and nurture, my DNA and my upbringing, all no doubt inclined me toward embracing this sort of spiritual science. What I did not expect in the course of my research, however, was a radical re-definition of God.