Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[underthesun]

PING

[f.Christian]

Good News For The Day

‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.’ (Luke 20:17)

"The most familiar, and the best-loved images of Jesus, are those that picture to us, his gentle, compassionate spirit. "Whoever comes to me, I will in no wise cast out"; "Come to me, all you who are weary"; "Let the little children come to me."

"But there are other images of Jesus in the Gospels, which show another aspect of his personality. They emphasize the steel in him. Sometimes Jesus was awesome; formidable."

"In the parable, Jesus presents himself as the landlord's Son; the rejected stone, that eventually becomes the most important stone in the superstructure of the kingdom of God. Jesus plainly thought that those who opposed him were in collision with God. He was warning nation's leaders: "It is unwise and unsafe to be against me." Tough talk from Jesus! He was signaling what was taken up by Peter at Pentecost, where, full of resurrection joy and authority, he preached saying: "This Jesus, you put him to death. . . . but God raised him from the dead. God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:31-36).

"In the parable of the wicked tenants, Jesus teaches that those who discard him, will not thereby have gotten rid of him. Jesus was not, and is not now, a passing phenomenon. So truly does Jesus represent reality; so deeply entrenched in the ultimate truth of existence, is his life and teaching, that He, and not his opponents, will prevail. If the universe is a moral place (and Christ himself is the most convincing evidence that it is), then his prediction that he would triumph, even over those who killed him, must come true. Therefore let us treasure the august aspects of his personality, as much as his gentle features, for they signal a world order in which 'goodness', as Jesus taught it, will... reign---unopposed. The stone that was rejected, will become the capstone."

Good News For The Day

‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.’ (Luke 20:17)

"There is a certain inevitability about Christ. He is the fulfillment of Herod's worst nightmare. Herod killed John the Baptist, and when Christ followed, the ruler thought John had risen from the dead. In a sense, it was true. Jesus' first appeals to the corrupt king were made through the Baptist."

"Christ is uncompromising; inexorable. He is unpreventable, unstoppable, unavoidable. An outline of the creation's future is discernible in the personality of Jesus. The new world order will bear the stamp of his character."

"The invincibility of Jesus is good news. It confirms our deepest hope-that the highest values known to humankind, will overcome, and reign. It is good strengthening to believe that... Spirit---is higher than matter. No one really wants to inhabit a world where material values rule. The incarnation of such values are exampled by Adolf Hitler, or Idi Amin."

"It is good news to know that we are loved by a 'tough love'; a love that is not willing to give up, or let go, and hence, a love that suffers long. In short we are loved by a love that will triumph. "Love never fails."

Good News For The Day

‘He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but on whom it falls will be crushed.’ (Matthew 21:44)

"In his parable of the tenants, Jesus looks across the years of Israel's covenant privilege, and gives his interpretation of them. He sees that Israel's history can be stated in terms of its refusal to recognize Him-the rejected stone. Through the prophetic ministry, Christ had made many pre-incarnational appeals to his people. "How often would I have gathered you together, even as a hen gathers her chickens."

"Thus did Jesus claim deep involvement in his nation's history. The Jews had stumbled over the Christ of the Old Testament. Many times the people had been humbled and broken through its rejection of his claims. So it may be with us. Our life story can be understood as the tale of a person engaged in a quest to make terms with the Stone-with Christ."

"From the beginning, Christ has been present to us. Our first meeting with him was through the warmth and love of our mother; then our father, and later, teachers and mentors. Christ has been there in providence; in good and ill. We have bumped into him time and again, in our attempts to be free of his claims. We have fought tooth and nail for our freedom from God. We have been burned and bruised repeatedly. These seasons of brokenness have been gracious. They have been... signs to us---that life will not work any other way but Christ's way."

"God enable me to discern the ministry of Jesus, the Stone, in my life."

[forsnax5]

If all of time is as a panoramic plane to the Creator (leaning loosely on the concept of flatland), then going to a point on the plane of time is as easy for Him as anything He does.

This concept makes all of time into a CD, where everything that ever happened or will happen is recorded. The creator of the CD can go to any point on the CD, being outside the limits of it (and it must have limits if the creator can be beyond them).

This is an easy-to-understand concept, because we're familiar with CDs. But it excludes free will.

The popular dodge for this conundrum is that every time a choice is made, a new CD (universe) is created. Think of all the Jewel Boxes He'd need!

If a person's essense can enter an afterlife, I don't think it can take a mind with it. Perhaps the soul is like a flat stone being skipped across an infinite lake, where each splash is a different existence, and each expanding pattern of ripples is a new mind.

[BikerNYC]

If they did not believe, with all their hearts, that they would live again in glory, why would they bother with a lie?

Fanatics believe a lot of things with all their heart. Where is the evidence that what they believed is true? The testimony of others who believed like them? How about the testimony of those who did and do not believe with all their heart? Many, many Jews died during the Inquisition when they refused to renounce their very heart-felt beliefs. Were these Jews right when they declared that Jesus was not the son of god?

[MHGinTN]

This is an easy-to-understand concept, because we're familiar with CDs. But it excludes free will. The individual has free will, to chose; that choice, when made, is registered on the CD and is then part of the temporal record ... taking your useful analogy. Free will is not excluded merely because God has access to all of the dimension time, the past, present, and future.

His knowledge of us, by giving us the free will to chose individually, is the reason He offered His Son for us. It is the individual who chooses to accept or reject that gift, even as the Creator is able to see our choice. We condemn ourselves in a rejection of that gift, but we shall all be resurrected some where/when, some to everlasting loss of communion with the Creator, some to everlasting communion with the Creator. When we are given that choice is the gnarly issue not to be debated on this particular forum.

[Bob J]

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[Hank Kerchief]

Give me a break. Show me a pound of courage, a quart of love, a mile of sacrifice. Good Grief. You're almost as a pita as my #2 son.

That's my argument. I thought you were arguing for numbers being pure concept. My point was that numbers are nothing more than abstractions from perceived and identified qualities of material existense. I would never make such abstractions applicable to concepts of consciousness such as courage, or love. (I consider sacrifice a very evil concept, by the way.)

What in the world made you believe I would confuse concepts about material existense with concepts of consciousness?

(This does not mean I believe courage, love, fear, and other such concepts are unmeasurable. They are, in a relative sense, such as more or less courage, or love, and so one.)

Hank

[Hank Kerchief]

PS. Tried to read Aristotle. Drove me to abstraction. With all of his counting and sorting, he couldn't have been much fun at a party, or a debate either.

Yes, well I do understand that.

Hank

[MissAmericanPie]

Look, your in a room, the door is locked, and your friend walks right through it. Would you really want to tell anyone? Do you think that they really believed anyone would understand it, or think them sane? Would you or I tell it?

Only if the fear of not telling it out weighed the fear of telling it. The fear of offending God by remaining silent, added to the weight of evidence that life continues, would be the only weight sufficient enough to make everyday people fess up to having seen something like that. Their hero had just died, they felt used and abused, not knowing what to do next, where to go. Then there he was in the midst of them, they were terrified. But when they left that room, they were changed human beings, not the devil himself, or threat of death, could make them take back the truth of the matter, they sure didn't care if people thought them insane and they fully understood that most would.

[BikerNYC]

Would you really want to tell anyone? Do you think that they really believed anyone would understand it, or think them sane? Would you or I tell it?

A very nice story. Those who have been abducted by aliens phrase it the same way. Why would they subject themselves to such ridicule unless what they said were true?

[Nogbad]

To hold that the world is eternal
or to hold that it is not
or to agree
to any other of the propositions you adduce
Vaccha
is the jungle of theorising
the wilderness of theorising
the tangle of theorising
the bondage and the shackles
of theorizing
attended by ill
distress
perturbation
and fever
It conduces not to detachment
passionlessness
tranquility
peace
to knowledge and wisdom
of Nirvana.
This is the danger
I perceive
in these views
which makes me discard them all.

The Buddha

[beckett]

[                                     ]

[MissAmericanPie]

Given the public miracles, I don't see a problem believing his private miracles. But you, like the ones in power at the time, can write them off as the superstitions of the unwashed masses, or mass hysteria.

For me, given the preponderance of the historical record, going back a thousand years before his birth, I can't write it off as mass hysteria. I don't know if you have read the bible, but if you have or ever do, I would like to call to your attention, the great detail given to the varying personalities of the individuals God worked through. This attention by God to the individual, and what makes him tick, is the very basis of the Christian inspired value placed on the individual in our Constitution.

And here is the difference, to me, between the Quaran, Buddism, Hinduism, all the "isims" and the historical record of the Bible. One cannot read it, and not come to an understanding of the importance of the individual personality to God, Himself, and the love glowing there, and the longing for, the individual to reconcile himself to the One who created and loves him. You matter to Him, each and every one of us do. The question is asked, does He matter to you? It can only be answered "yes" or "no".

The bible is many things, an historical record of man, from our begining, an insight into the fact that no matter what our circumstances, light switches, and cars, or clubs and caves, mankind has not changed a whit in his hearts desires or rational. The same intrigues and reactions that were typical of people then are typical of people now.

The bible is also a message from God, revealing Himself and His plan for our future to us. "I would not have you ignorant" is a beautiful assurance to be rested in. And given that His foretelling of His plan, and the fact that history and the present gives evidence of it's truth and power, the assurance that He is right on time gives a joy that surpasses the daily tribulations we all endure.

He told us that He would send a "Redeemer", a Saviour, He did. Some missed that fact because He did not arrive with fanfare and trumpets, but in humility and in the clothes of a servant. The everyday man, ordinary to the eye of the beholder. Diety wrapped in flesh and binding us to Him, and Him to us in every way possible, genetically, and spiritually. When He created us in his "image" we were merely an image, when He wrapped himself in flesh we became His kindred. When He laid down His life, He defeated the death that we had become infected with.

I'm trying to inspire your curiosity and hunger here. I'm sure not Billy Graham unfortunately. I can only tell you that the more science learns, the more evident it becomes that there is a plan here. I'll read something new, the "Crunch", multi-dimensions, the "yes", "no" step beyond Quantum Mechanics and think to myself, "Well this is in the bible, been there all this time in black and white".

The bible makes it clear what this plan is, and what will lead up to the completion of it. I hope you read it and come to appreciate it's value and message, the simple truth of it.

[Cvengr]

Heb 4:12 need not be metaphorical. The Word of God does indeed cut between soul and spirit.

[LogicWings]

May commend you on an excellent post. Your are at least speaking in a fashion that makes sense to me, even though we may not always agree.

Your Pinker quote is interesting and you are quite right that what he is saying is mere assertion. It is conjecture but not an isolated case. I find it everywhere. I am reading a Masters of Science book on Darwin, just because it has been so long since last read anything about evolution, and it is the pivotal element in so many of the discussions here. On the first page of the first chapter he said that Darwin “proved the fact of evolution.” Huh? When did this happen? When did the theory become a fact? Then why don’t all evolutionists agree on the mechanism? So I find such things everywhere.

And I agree with you, even if they succeed in replicating abiogenesis in the lab, that doesn’t prove anything other that we can replicate it in the lab. Doesn’t mean that’s how it happened the first time.

After Satre I think Kierkegaard is one of my least favorite writers. The definition you gave is one of my main objections to the concept, if it is ’totally other’ then how does he know anything about it to make the statement? This is as much an unwarranted assertion as Pinker.

It has been a while but Julian Jaynes postulated not only God as right brain communication, but consciousness itself as a byproduct of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. This presupposes there is a breakdown, and I don’t find any evidence of that in sane people. In fact, just the opposite. The most conscious people are those that can reconcile the two, who don’t see any such division. Rare in today’s world.

I noted with interest your pejorative use of the term "insane" to describe theists earlier in the thread.

Oh, I guess I have to plead guilty. But many theists are functionally insane, something we ignore on a daily basis in this country, and around the world. The recent guy in New England that starved his child to death because his sister had a ‘revelation’ that the child was ‘chosen’ and should eat no solid food. The guy who refused medical attention for his daughter because he believed God would heal the child, and she died. That crazy lady in Texas who drowned her five kids to keep them from falling into the clutches of the devil (the religious side of this story is seldom told.) The stories are too numerous to mention. Aren’t these people functionally insane?

Aren’t those Islamic theists who strap bombs to themselves blow themselves up in crowded places insane? Oh, I know, I know, you are going to say, well they aren’t Xtians and they don’t represent all theists, and this is why I said I plead guilty. I know it sounds sometimes like I’m tarring everybody with the same brush, but there are theists and there are theists. I think there are so many contradictions in most theist’s positions that they are somewhat insane. My exposure to the thought processes and the stubborn refusal to consider anything other than ‘what they believe’ hasn’t moderated my view any.

Is it so bizarre to be a little insane when presented with the great surprise of life?

This statement scares me. It opens the door to anything. I could use this statement to justify Hitler. When does one cross the line from a ‘little’ insane to a ‘lot’ insane?

Is a leap of faith really that irrational?

Well, if you mean the word ‘faith’ in the sense of believing in the existence of the ‘supernatural’ that you also admit you have no reasons for believing in, other than that you believe, then yes. It is that irrational.

Hardcore materialists confidently aver that no leakage occurs between the material and the non-material.

Well, materialists don’t have any evidence for that either, they can’t. The relationship between energy and matter has utterly demolished this argument but most people don’t realize it yet. Energy is ‘non-material’ by definition, so there is more to the universe than the material. We are just beginning to understand what this is and the implications are huge.

To jump out of sequence:

Does BettyBoop's formidable metaxy no longer apply? Or does knowledge simply move us a little further down a path still jam packed with an unending supply of mysteries?

I’m not sure I’m familiar with BB’s writings enough to understand what you mean here. Has the ghost in the machine truly been vanquished? According to whom? I’ll bet I can find holes in any argument that asserts it has. When do we know we’ve pierced the final ‘mystery?’ When do you decide you know enough to say, “Enough! I’ve figured it out!” When you do, don’t you turn to stone like those that gazed upon the face of the Medusa?

And finally, to return myself to the question:

I believe they are wrong. I think that somewhere way, way down deep in Mandelbrot's fractals --- way, way down, almost infinitely way down --- there is a leak.

And this also where we part company, I think you‘re looking the wrong way. I don’t look, ’way, way down.’ The function of philosophy is, ultimately, is to integrate everything into a whole. I look UP, I look at the big picture. What is the ’whole thing?’ If there is an answer it is in the sum total, the Universe, and not in the reductionist, devil is in the details, details.

Some insanely huge piece of the puzzle is missing, and not even the best theories of evolutionary psychology show much promise of finding it.

I have been studying Japanese for years, it is a very difficult language. There is a single line in my current language book that makes the point - ’Mind pervades the whole universe.’

And Jesus was a sailor when He walked upon the water.
And he spent a long time watching from a lonely wooden tower,
and when He knew for certain only drowning men could see Him.
He said “All men shall be sailors, then, until the sea shall free them."
But He Himself was broken long before the sky would open.
Forsaken almost human, He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

[LogicWings]

You might find it enormously fulfilling to give equal time and read the Old and New Testaments completely,....or even partially while in fellowship with God.

I have read, cover to cover, all the Scriptures a number of times over the years. I read them long before I discovered the Nag Hamadi scripts, the coptic writings and the Hidden Gospels, [or those Gospels that weren't canonized (which are far more interesting than those that were, and supports my view that the Church was more a political entity than a religious one.)]

[LogicWings]

Gnosticism fails to properly address the issue

It does not, this is merely your opinion.

and the seeming causal effect on reality can be used by those persons in the spirit domain who are deceiving (demons and deceiving spirits) to further deceive the unrepentant.

At this point I reliquish the floor. It isn't enough to have to believe in God, we have to believe in all this too!

Healing may be caused by fallen angels as well as by holy power. Not the best example to use when discerning the Holy Spirit.

Then how can 'you' ever know when a healing is from God or is from a "fallen angel?" Why can't you be fooled as well as anybody else? Because only what you believe is true? Why, because you say so???

You just utterly undercut your own argument. Maybe all are deceived.