Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

13: Science and Religion

After all, who or what besides myself will decide what I accept as truth? I know that if there are ultimate answers I’m surely not the court of last appeal as to what the answers are, but here in my study, on this human level, for myself, it appears I am. Does it matter very much what I decide? Not to science. But religion would have me think that the decisions of this private court when it comes to whether or not I will believe in God are of inestimably great significance.

Kitty Ferguson

Any type of dogmatism is the very antithesis of science.

Victor Stenger

The Western God

“I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.” It is remarkable that these passionate words of Richard Dawkins, already quoted previously, are from a man who considers himself a scientist, and whose name is now often conjoined with the name of Charles Darwin. “I have never heard such hardline, aggressive promotion of atheism under the guise of science as I have heard from the Darwinists,” writes Denyse O’Leary. “It is, at best, amusing to hear Darwinists charge that the creationists have an underlying religious agenda, when the Darwinists own anti-religious agenda is pretty obvious.”¹

The literature produced by zealous atheist scientists, mainly biologists, is increasing steadfastly. Some telling titles are: A Devil’s Chaplain and The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins, 2003 and 2006), Breaking the Spell (Daniel Dennett, 2006), The End of Faith (Sam Harris, 2006), God is not Great (Christopher Hitchens, 2007), God – The Failed Hypothesis (Victor Stenger, 2008). In all these books religion is presented as irrational, by which they are continuing the tradition of the Enlightenment; totalitarian, reigning by dogma and fear as well for the earthly as the eternal destiny; and outright evil, given the uncountable instances of physical and moral cruelty in history and even today. “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg²)

It is noteworthy that the controversy between religion on the one side and atheism and anti-theism on the other was and is taking place almost exclusively in the West, within the culture dominated by Christianity and having its roots in Europe. Modern culture, carrier of Christianity, the Enlightenment values and science, has spread over the globe from Europe, which deemed itself superior to all the peoples and cultures it discovered, conquered and exploited during the era of colonialism. The general outlook was Eurocentric, an attitude which has broadened into ‘Western’ when America entered the global stage, and which is still alive, consciously or subconsciously, as proved by the ongoing attack of science on religion.

The God in the literature mentioned above is invariably the bearded Man in nightdress Upstairs, a kind of irresponsible autocrat. “A naïve Western view of God is an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard, who sits on a very large throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow.” (Carl Sagan³) In his Gifford lectures, the theologian Etienne Gilson argued: “Christian thought did not simply cloak itself in Greek philosophical ideas. What it uniquely added to Western philosophy was the Hebrew Creator.”⁴

Like so many other concepts in the Christian religion, the mental idea of ‘God’ is, in itself, confused and contradictory. Arthur Lovejoy called “the word ‘God’ in the last degree ambiguous.” In the Bible we find at least three different kinds of God: the tribal terrible, jealous and vengeful Yahweh, the metaphysical God of the prophets, and the loving God, the Father, of Jesus Christ. To these quite different Gods the Church Fathers added the Trinity, the three-in-one God.

The tribal God belonged to a period of the establishment of morality among the primitive Hebrews, the new moral precepts being hewn in stone as the Ten Commandments. It was the tribal God who ordered: “If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying: ‘Let us go and serve other gods’, unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity; you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.” This passage from the book Deuteronomy is here quoted from Sam Harris’ The End of Faith. Lots of passages from Deuteronomy and other books constituting the Bible are ready ammunition for use by the anti-religious, not entirely without justification, for the Bible has provided, in the West, the religious and moral inspiration for centuries.

Another easily accessible provision of anti-religious ammunition is the history of Christianity. As soon as Catholicism was recognized as the official church of the Roman Empire, around the year 400, hordes of ‘monks’ went on the rampage, murdering ‘heathens’ and destroying the buildings of the existing religions and cults. There has been the Crusades, the Inquisition (still extant), the witch hunts which killed hundreds of innocent women in the cruelest manner, and the burning of unbelievers from within and without the Church’s ranks. Dogmatic fanaticism brought Galileo to trial, “the most tragic event in the whole of the scientific revolution.” Less well-known is the anti-modernist action of the Catholic Church following the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870. “The Vatican did not merely now make the claim of papal infallibility. In the nineteenth century, in its assaults on every development in scientific knowledge, every glimmering of light shed in the field of biblical scholarship, every advancement of technical skill (it even issued condemnation of the electric light), the Vatican was the great powerhouse of reaction, posing very grave difficulties for those who wished to practice the Catholic faith without committing intellectual suicide.” (A.N. Wilson⁵)

The anti-religious attitude of many scientists has been sharpened by the 20th century trials about the teaching of evolution in the educational institutions of the USA. Christians tried to have the teaching of evolution forbidden by law or demanded equal time for biblical creationism. The most famous trial remains the State of Tennessee vs. John Scopes in 1925, known as “the monkey trial.” In recent years, against the background of the controversy between creationism and “intelligent design,” there have been several more court cases in which evolution was at stake. Such events seem to be spreading to other countries, sometimes instigated by Muslim students or teachers, for Islam does not accept the theory of evolution.

Besides, what doubtlessly intensified the motivation of the anti-religious was the spectacular destruction by Muslim terrorists of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001. This blatant act of fanatical religious aggression made the relation of the Western mentality, tempered by the Enlightenment, and the dogmatism of the Islamic faith, professed by millions in several countries, into a red hot world issue. “9/11” changed drastically the Western attitude towards Islam, whose millions were formerly supposed to exist behind an invisible wall in the stagnant confined universe of their faith. Suddenly the Muslim religion was studied, and Muslim immigrants in non-Muslim countries obtained equal rights with the local populations. The friction between Islam and the Western ‘Satan’ is far from ended, and hardly a day passes without the news bulletins carrying an item about head scarves, burqa dresses, mosques – not to speak about atrocious terrorist acts in most of which Muslims kill their brothers and sisters in the Faith, and of course the wars and lesser military operations, still ongoing.

A little knowledge of the Christian past may cause profound amazement about the similarities between the Muslim world as it still is today, and the Catholic medieval world surviving in so many aspects of the Western way of life, tempered by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Omnipresent was the Christian morality taught by the Holy Book, inspired by God. “All those books which the Church regards as sacred and canonical were written with all their parts under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Now, far from admitting the coexistence of error, Divine inspiration by itself excludes all error, and that also of necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of teaching error.” (Leo XIII, 1893⁶) Galileo barely escaped burning, Bruno did not. Descartes hesitated to publish, Newton hid his Arianism, Darwin stalled writing what would become the Origin for twenty years, the theologians Küng and Schillebeeckx were forbidden to teach, liberation theology was forbidden, many of the most important writings were put on Rome’s “Index of Forbidden Books.” All this because of the Christian mullahs, madrasas, communal congregations, and fatwas.

The three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are highly esteemed by theologians because they are supposed to be the only monotheisms. This is a gross misconception. “The earliest Greek natural theology was certainly monotheistic … The Greeks did not invent polytheism but instead spoke of a single god whom they call Zeus, whose mind embraces all things in its knowledge, and who guides all things and is king of all’.” (Werner Jaeger⁷) And there was the Platonic Absolute, the God identified with the Idea of the Good as perfection or self-sufficiency. Moreover, one must be ignorant of Hinduism not to know about Brahman, the Absolute, of whom the gods and goddesses are the cosmic powers, and who is represented above the entrance of the temple of every Hindu god and goddess by the glyph for OM.

What the three Abrahamic monotheisms certainly have in common is their totalitarianism and the ruthlessness, often culminating in cruelty, of its enforcement. It may be remembered that the Hebrews were the Chosen People to whom all “the nations” were to bow, and whose reign over the Earth would be the sign for the Last Judgment. Nor should it be forgotten that Judaism had its own Galileo in the person of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), one of the great philosophers. “On 27 July 1656, the elders of the Amsterdam synagogue made the following cherem, or damnation, or fatwa, concerning his work: ‘With the judgment of the angels and of the saints we excommunicate, cut off, curse, and anathemize Baruch de Espinosa, with the consent of the elders and of all this holy congregation, in the presence of the holy books: by the 613 percepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua cursed Jericho, with the curse which Elisha laid upon the children, and with all the curses which are written within the law.

“Cursed be he by day and cursed by night. Cursed be he in sleeping and cursed be he in waking, cursed in going out and cursed in coming in. The Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of the Lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses which are written in the book of the law. The Lord shall destroy his name under the sun, and cut him off for his undoing from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the book of the law.’”⁸ Excommunication was common practice in the Catholic Church also. Some popes excommunicated whole nations, thereby, at least in intention, sending the souls of their people to burn in hell for eternity, and this every so often for the basest political or financial motives.

Where the anti-religious scientists go seriously wrong, however, is when they consider the mania shown by the religions to be an exclusively religious phenomenon instead of a way the human mind functions. Nowhere in the books mentioned at the beginning of this chapter does one read about the philosophical and political manias of Russian communism, Nazism or Maoism, or of the general aggressive egoistic attitude of individual versus individual, community versus community, caste versus caste, nation versus nation, culture versus culture. The egocentric, sectarian functioning of the mind is part of our evolutionary condition, as is its fear and insecurity. Education, inculcation and brainwashing construct a human mind in a way which is near to impossible to change, except by a long and painful conversion process. We have seen that conversion also plays a part in Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the paradigms in science. And the attitude of the atheist and anti-theist scientists becomes quasi farcical when they do not seem to realize that they themselves are defending a dogmatic totalitarianism that has become the Church of Scientism (not to be confused with Scientology). “It is easy to forget that both science and religion are preoccupied with justifying beliefs,” (Steve Fuller⁹) which is putting it mildly.

Religion or Spirituality

“There is nothing accidental about the difference between a Church and its Founder,” wrote Bertrand Russell. “As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any privileged caste they use their powers to their own advantage.”¹⁰ This sequence of events has been repeated throughout history and is actually the history of religion: a Person has a new revelation or realization which attracts a group of followers; they lower his inspired message to their level of understanding and fix it into a set of formulas comprehensible by all; the new message is declared the absolute truth; this truth is to be approached solely through a body of initiated representatives, who invent a set of rules and rituals to be executed obligatorily. To this has to be added that an individual approach to the Truth is forbidden. Such, by and large, has also been the history of Christianity.

“The religious life is a movement of the same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the earth towards the Divine, but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic tenets and rules of some sect or creed which claims to have found the way out of the bounds of the earth-consciousness into some beatific Beyond,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “The religious life may be the first approach to the spiritual, but very often it is only a turning about in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices or set ideas and forms without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of the consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness in which one finds one’s true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine.”¹¹

The spiritual life is an individual, inner exploration. The spiritual aspirant undertakes the adventure of the discovery of Reality by a direct contact, for the Real is present in himself. To start on his quest, he may follow the inspiration of persons who have preceded him on the different levels of the human personality. His first task is the mastery of the way evolution has produced our extremely complex being. This effort itself is already so daunting, especially in the nether vital and material regions, that several spiritual paths have limited their exploration to the more accessible regions of the soul and the mind.

Practitioners of the individual inner exploration are not welcome in the body of the established religious communities, ruled by dogma and authority. In the West, where they are called ‘mystics’, hardly a single one has escaped persecution by the Church, and many have paid with their life for the truthful confession of their spiritual attainments.

For scientific materialism there is no inner reality, and consequently no spirituality. Those who still believe so are retarded, mystics or charlatans. They are derided on practically every other page written by the positivist reductionists, who do not mind to flaunt their ignorance of such foolish if not cretinous matters. Take for instance Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher in the Dawkins camp. He concedes: “I simply do not know enough about religions to write with any confidence about them,” but the attacks them nevertheless with candid confidence. “Perhaps,” he writes, “I should have devoted several years more to study before writing this book,” namely Breaking the Spell – the spell of religion. “I will try to tell the best current version of the story science can tell about how religions have become what they are. I am not at all claiming that this is what science has already established about religion. The main point of this book is to insist that we don’t yet know the answers to these important questions. …The spell that must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”¹²

Besides, why should religion or spirituality remain of interest at all? “We scientists have the drama, the plot, the icons, the spectacles, the ‘miracles’, the magnificence, and even the special effects. We inspire awe. We evoke wonder. And we don’t have one god, we have many. We find gods in the nucleus of every atom, in the structure of spacetime, in the counterintuitive mechanisms of electromagnetism. What richness! What consummate beauty! (Carolyn C. Porco¹³) The leading promoter of the poetry of science and poetry in science was Carl Sagan, who said: “Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder,” and let no occasion pass by without trying to prove his point. He has been arduously imitated by the militant anti-religious camp, e.g. Peter Atkins, who exclaimed in an interview: “The world around us is extraordinary: it’s delightful, it’s wonderful, it’s awesome. Science enables us to pick it apart, to look inside and to see why it is so wonderful.”¹⁴ In the works of thus-minded authors this praise of materialistic science is expressed again and again – till one reaches the pages on theodicy, where the horror of life and human existence are being discussed, and the incompetence of the Good God to change or put an end to them.

Empiricism and Religion

As we have seen, Dennett wants “to investigate religious phenomena scientifically” without knowing what they are. He praises “those pioneers who are now beginning for the first time really to study the natural phenomena of religion through the eyes of contemporary science.” He wants “to put religion on the examination table.”¹⁵ Victor Stenger is of a similar mind: “If a person undergoes a religious experience that truly places him in communication with some reality from beyond the material world, then we may reasonably expect that person to have gained some deep, new knowledge about the world that can be checked against empirical facts.”¹⁶ However, the problem, which Stenger here curiously overlooks, is that “some reality beyond the material world” and the reality of “empirical facts” are in the eyes of scientific materialism two utterly different realms, of which the former is a priori censured by the latter.

Empiricism recognizes what it calls ‘objective’ facts perceived through the senses. Sri Aurobindo notes that “science cannot dictate its conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions on science.”¹⁷ That matter is the only reality, is also the basic principle of the new field of ‘neurotheology’, in which scientists seek the biological basis of spirituality, asking questions like: Is God all in our heads? Countless articles in science magazines carry titles of the same sort: “How God lives in my right brain … Do we have neurons specialized in the divine? … The biology of religious faith … Three religious experiences under the microscope … Is fanaticism a molecule? …” In France, Patrick Jean-Baptiste has even published a book with the title La biologie de Dieu – The Biology of God (2003). John Horgan, a journalist and contributor to Scientific American, wrote three books based on interviews with key figures in science and trying to fathom the heart of the matter. In the last one, Rational Mysticism, he comes to the conclusion: “Scientists studying mysticism are still in the fact-accumulation stage, and may always be. … The fact is, neuroscientists cannot explain how the brain carries out the most elementary acts of cognition.”¹⁸

Stephen Gould, an agnostic materialist, but a cultured one (which is not as common as one might wish), has introduced a much discussed concept in his Rock of Ages: NOMA. “To say for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time: science simply cannot, by its legitimate methods, adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply cannot comment on it as scientists.”¹⁹ NOMA stands for “non-overlapping magisteria,” which means that science and religion both rule in their own domain and cannot or should not be in conflict. As Gould sees it – and many agree with him – the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm of fact and theory; the magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. (The term ‘magisterium’ is best understood as sphere of authority or domain of competence.)

“I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation or analysis,” wrote Gould, “but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict. Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values – subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. … These two magisteria do not overlap … To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”²⁰

Knowing what we do about sociobiology, it is clear that its representatives could not possibly accept such a standpoint. According to them, biology, based on physics, is the science that will provide humanity with a total explanation and interpretation of what it is, where it is, and wherefore it is there. Such was the vision of Edward Wilson, and such is the still more extreme gospel of Richard Dawkins: “Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”²¹

Might there not be a way to bring science and religion to a common understanding? “Convergence? Only when it suits,” answers Dawkins. “To an honest judge [which must be a scientific materialist, of course], the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctered sham.”²² “Science and religion cannot be reconciled,” concurs Peter Atkins, “and humanity should begin to appreciate the power of its progeny [science, that is] and refuse all efforts at a compromise. Religion has failed, and its failure should be brought into the open. Science, with its present successful effort at universal competence through identification of the smallest [reductionism], she who is the highest joy of the intellect, should be recognized as the universal Queen.”²³ Steven Weinberg, caustically, is “all in favour of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.”²⁴

The End of Science?

It is not the intention of this book to attack science, but to examine its claims to exclusivity and absolute truth. The question which is the title of this section may shock at first sight in a culture which prides itself on being scientific, but it is on the order of the day especially among theoretical physicists. The following recent book titles speak for themselves: The End of Science (John Horgan), La fin des certitudes (The End of Certainties, Ilya Prigogine), Science in the Age of Uncertainty (John Brockman, ed.), The Trouble with Science (Robin Dunbar), The Trouble with Physics (Lee Smolin), The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (David Linley) … Jean-Pierre Vigier, a French physicist, said that “physics is in crisis, we are in full struggle, the stakes are enormous.” Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in physics, conceded that “it is a terrible time for particle physics.”

Not only particle physics is in crisis. We find alarming words of desperation from prominent scientists in other fields which are commonly regarded as definitively acquired and established knowledge. “Perhaps the resolution [of some problems] is that our theory of gravity – the general theory of relativity – is just plain wrong.” (David Susskind). “The results [of some experiments] could send us back to the drawing board about the early universe.” The Big Bang, multiple universes, black matter and energy in macrophysics; the unification of relativity and the quantum theories; string theory, the search for the Higgs boson and the problem of reality in microphysics – these are only some of the problems now in need of an urgent solution.

“Science is a human institution, subject to human foibles – and fragile, because it depends as much on group ethics as on individual ethics. It can break down, and I believe that it is doing so now. … There can be no doubt that we are in a revolutionary period. We are horribly stuck, and we need real seers, and badly,” writes Lee Smolin, one of the founders of string theory who has become its severe critic. And he reminds us that “there is no scientist, not even Newton or Einstein, who was not wrong on a substantial number of issues they had strong views about. … There is a great tendency to think that the fundamental principles of physics, once discovered, are eternal, yet history tells us a different story. Almost every principle once proclaimed has been superseded.”²⁵ Nowadays the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the paradigms, the changing views of the basics of science, is felt everywhere.

As this issue is so important, and for the most part still unrealized by the educated public, we quote the statements of two other scientists. The first one is Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner. “At the macroscopic and microscopic levels, the natural sciences have rid themselves of a conception of objective reality that implied that novelty and diversity had to be denied in the name of immutable universal laws. They have rid themselves of a fascination with a rationality taken as closed and a knowledge seen as nearly achieved. They are now open to the unexpected, which they no longer define as the result of imperfect knowledge or insufficient control.”²⁶ In another essay he writes: “The fundamental laws are now the expression of possibilities and no longer certitudes … I think that we are only at the beginning of the adventure. We are witnessing the emergence of a science which is no longer limited to simplified, idealized situations, but which puts us face to face with the complexity of the real world …”²⁷

Another voice is that of Sven Ortoli, a journalist trained as a physicist, who says: “Determinism is badly shaken. What is more, there are some scientists, Nobel Prize winners among them, who go far enough to consider the universe as an essentially spiritual phantasmagoria. The majority of the physicians reject such an extreme hypothesis, but this does not prevent it from being there and from being accepted by what may still be considered demented beliefs, to the outrage of the defenders of intellectual traditions dating back to the 19th century. … The physics of the last century has been completely destroyed … The facts that those pieces of matter [the elementary particles] have proved to be in reality nothing but mathematical abstractions, non-local, which means that they can spread out over the whole of space, and that they obey determinism no longer, has given a fatal blow to ‘classic’ materialism. True, materialism is still possible, but then ‘quantum’ materialism, which should be called ‘fantastic materialism’ or ‘science fiction materialism’.” And he goes still further: “The idealism that believes in the autonomous existence of the spirit, comes to the fore again. A kind of new religion, which we have called ‘quantum syncretism’, is being born; it refers everything – matter and spirit – to an Absolute that is unknowable, but whose existence could be deduced from the extraordinary aspects of the new physics.”²⁸

Towards the end of his life, Albert Einstein once said: “You probably think that I look back on the work of my life with quiet satisfaction. Seen from nearby, it is totally different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will remain unchanged, and I feel uncertain to be even on the right path. … If there is something that I have learned from the intricacies of a long life, it is that we are much farther from a more profound insight in the elementary complexities than most of our contemporaries think we are.”²⁹

But the main focus of our interest is on evolution. The question becomes more pressing: if the foundation of biology is physics, and physics seems badly shaken by the uncertainty about its underpinnings, how does biology react to this? The answer, as we have seen in Dawkins and his supporters, is quite simple: it takes no notice and looks the other way. His words may be recalled: “I am a biologist. I take the facts of physics for granted. If physicists still don’t agree over whether those simple facts are yet understood, that is not my problem.” If the accepted fundamental basis of biology is shaking, is that not his problem too, especially he being a reductionist?

Other biologists are more reasonable, or more sincere. “We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from ‘a warm little pond’. The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the Good is found.” (David Berlinski³⁰)

Scientists Pro and Contra

Ken Wilber was one of the thinkers who reacted strongly against the thesis of popular books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. He “disagreed entirely” with such books “which had claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism. This is a colossal error. Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavour, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality. It does not, for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary, or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all that, with the Whole.”³¹

One of Wilber’s least known books is Quantum Questions, in which he examines the sources of the thought that created 20th century physics: Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli … some of whom he quotes extensively. “Everyone of the physicists in this volume was a mystic,” he writes. “They simply believed, to a man, that if modern physics no longer objects to a religious worldview, it offers no positive support either; properly speaking, it is different to all that.” It is different because it was in the past and is still at present a work of the mind, and the mind is only part of the Whole, incapable of grasping the Whole. “They all shared a profoundly spiritual or mystical worldview, which is perhaps the last thing one would expect from pioneering scientists.”³²

Wilber quotes Arthur Eddington: “Briefly the position is this. We have learned that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness, the one centre where more might become known.”³³ A mathematical formula can never tell us what a thing is, only how it is moved. It can only specify an object through its external properties: movement, measure, mass.

Wilber also quotes Erwin Schrödinger: “The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. … In brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. … From where do I come and to where do I go? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for everyone of us. Science has no answer to it.”³⁴

This is of course a tone which differs altogether from much that we have heard before. These physicists, among the very greatest, dared to reflect and to speak out on the essential problems of our lives and on the relation of science to them. The difference between them and the parochial reductionists we have become acquainted with, is considerable. Moreover, “their writings are positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.”³⁵

Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches: the open-minded “mystics” including all those named above, and the mathematical theorists like Dirac, Weinberg, Feynman and Witte, plus most of the physicists active in the near past and at present. As to the latter, one quote from Steven Weinberg says it all: “Among today’s scientists I am probably somewhat atypical in caring about such things [the concept of God]: On the rare occasions when conversations over lunch or tea touch on matters of religion, the strongest reactions expressed by most of my fellow physicists is a mild surprise and amusement that anyone still takes all that seriously. … As far as I can tell from my own observations, most physicists today are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practicing atheists.”³⁶

Whence this huge existential and perspectival difference? The “mystic” physicists lived on the fault line between two eras, between two Kuhnian paradigms in science. They personified the transition between the Newtonian era, as it were solidified by the 19th century positivism we have met in the lives of Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace, and their own 20th century thinking which put everything into question. An important factor here is that religion was no longer part of the equation. Spirituality, or “mysticism”, or “the oceanic feeling,” yes; dogmatic religion, no. For Einstein, Eddington, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli – to name only the best-known – re-thinking the universe in the terms of physics was their life task. In their quest, time and again, they found resonances and references in the testimonies left behind by others who had undertaken a similarly daunting task, though necessarily in other terms: the “mystics” in West and East, who had put their life on the line for similar reasons. Those who say that physics (and science in general) has nothing to do with “mysticism” are ignorant of its copiously documented history of a century, and less than a century, ago.

It may, moreover, be remembered that science was born within religion and in reaction to it. Galileo was as good a Catholic as any, for instance as the late-medieval monks who, together with the great Greeks, were his predecessors; but he shared the Renaissance mind to ask questions and to dare to answer them, even if they did not agree with the teachings of Rome. Johann Kepler, the great astronomer and mathematician so often ignored, was a mystic pure and simple, and spoke out as such, for instance in his De Harmonia Mundi. Descartes had been educated by the Jesuits, spent much of his life in hiding for fear of suffering the same treatment by the Inquisition as Galileo, and did his best to find room for God in his worldview. Newton, as is now well known, dedicated more years of his life to alchemy and biblical theories than he did to science, and all that after the publication of the Principia Mathematica. The erosion of God in the Western mind was the work of the Enlightenment, followed up in this by 19th century positivism, not by the actual founders of science, who would have been amazed at the consequences of their genius.

Fundamentally, science is the search for Truth through the instrument of the mind. Religion and spirituality are the search and the effort to know and to live Truth through the instrument of the whole being, including the mind. Therefore there should be no contradiction between science, religion and spirituality. The attitude of the one or the other becomes twisted when one or the other claims an absolute prerogative, as do many religions in their Churches and as do the sciences in the Church of Scientism. This selfish, egocentric attitude is common to everything naturally human, because it is common to life’s evolution of which we are the children.

The human being is human in the measure that it can overcome its selfishness – curiously enough the argument of Richard Dawkins when he divides the human personality in the part that is subject to the selfishness of the genes and the part of the memes that belongs to the other, cultural half. As Thomas Kuhn has made clear in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: no scientific truth is absolute; all theories and paradigms are a partial approach. As Sri Aurobindo has made clear on the very first page of his Essays on the Gita: no written truth or holy book contains the absolute spiritual truth. Truth, to be known, has to be realized, and as such is always an approach, conditioned by the earthly circumstances of the beings who dedicate their life to this kind of realization.

There are even now many scientists who are religious. One is the astronomer Owen Gingerich, who writes: “As a scientist I accept methodological naturalism as a research strategy. … There is no contradiction between holding a staunch belief in supernatural design and working as a creative scientist … No one illustrates this point better than the seventeenth century astronomer Johann Kepler … Kepler’s work and life provide central evidence that an individual can be a creative scientist and a believer in divine design in the universe, and that indeed the very motivation for the scientific research can stem from a desire to trace God’s handiwork. … I think my belief makes me no less a scientist. … It is a matter of belief or ideology how we choose to think about the universe, and it will make no difference how we do our science. … Science remains a neutral way of explaining things, not anti-God or atheistic. … I do believe, however, that religious belief can explain more than unbelief can do.”³⁷

Another prominent scientist who wrote about his religious belief is Francis Collins, the leader of the International Human Genome Project. In his book The Language of God he writes: “For me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship. Many will be puzzled by these sentiments, assuming that a rigorous scientist could not also be a serious believer in a transcendent God. This book aims to dispel that notion, by arguing that belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science.”³⁸

As to be expected, there are the believers and the non-believers, and every shade in between. For example Alister McGrath, a theologian with a scientific training, is an absolute believer: “I write as a Christian, who holds that the face, will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth.” Among the Roman Catholics, Claude Tresmontant writes: “The Church has been communicating throughout the centuries the creative information which she has received initially from her Lord, to the whole of humanity which it is her task to transform.” Jean Delhaye has reservations: “As to me, I belong to the Catholic Roman Church. I am thankful for all the riches I own to her, and the tie which attaches me to her is a tie of love. But I regret her to heavy institutional character, certain archaisms in the formulation of the faith which it is her mission to transmit, a dogmatism of which one does not find in the Gospels, some misuses of a power which she holds without any contestation, and her hesitations in front of any innovation.”³⁹ The mathematician Paul Germain sees his faith as purely personal: “I believe. This has nothing to see with scientific reasoning. It is an affirmation which is my own, which I take as my own responsibility. I see myself as part of the Church and I commit myself to her. I bet my life on her, freely and daily, without any rational proof and without experimental evidence.”⁴⁰

The Unknown God

If scientists admit that they know so little about religion and God, why are they talking so much about him, and this in statements which read like final verdicts? “I simply do not know enough about religions to write with any confidence about them,” we remember Daniel Dennett confessing, but he composes all the same an ample polemical volume on the topic. “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology,” finds Terry Eagleton.⁴¹ As we have seen, the ‘God’ in the mind of practically all scientific materialists is the Judeo-Christian God, the irresponsible autocrat seated on the clouds. As to their knowledge of religion, it is in most cases limited to anecdotes they have heard in their youth: the horrors and bizarreries in the Old Testament, the unbelievable miracles in the New Testament, the tragi-comedy of Christianity’s history, and some quotations from Voltaire (who was, though not religious, an ardent believer in God), David Hume and Bertrand Russell.

The physicist Paul Davies started his career as a best-selling science author with God and the New Physics (1983) and The Mind of God (1992). For the second book he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion to the amount of roughly $1 million, slightly above the value of the Nobel Prize. It is the most lucrative prize in the world today, prestigious enough to be presented in Westminster Abbey by royalty. In this book Davies writes: “I would rather not believe in supernatural events personally. Although I obviously can’t prove that they never happen, I see no reason to suppose that they do. My inclination is to assume that the laws of nature are obeyed at all times. But even if one rules out supernatural events, it is still not clear that science could in principle explain everything in the physical universe. … The ‘ultimate’ questions will always lie beyond the scope of empirical science as it is usually defined.”⁴² Reading both books, one finds them void of any knowledge about religion, except for the usual clichés. The prize may have been awarded because a scientist deigned to touch the subject of religion at all. In God and the New Physics Davies had already written: “In my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”⁴³

The professional knowledge of the scientists who attack religion is poorly balanced by their ignorance in religious matters. Carl Sagan has given an example of the formation required of them. “Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics is about. There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school – roughly fifteen years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.”⁴⁴

How is it then that the same scientists, thoroughly schooled in their profession and indoctrinated in their reductionist worldview, think they are qualified in everything else, including the fundamental matters of human existence? “Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?” asks Sagan.⁴⁵ The predictive accuracy of physics, and of no other science, is limited to physical processes within exactly repeated experimental circumstances. If scientific formulas and mechanisms can be approximately repeated in the complexity of the world as given, it is thanks to the technological skill of the engineers who have, by trial and error, made them applicable. And it is telling to read about “reliability” decades after Kuhn’s essay on the relativity of all scientific paradigms.

Indeed, the miracles one reads about in the religious literature are most often folklore or superstition. On what grounds, however, does science suppose that its own miracles are more acceptable? For it demands that you should believe that the whole gigantic universe originated from something much smaller than a mustard seed; that most of your body and the bricks of your house are empty space; that the smallest bit of matter is at the same time a particle and a wave; that matter is nothing but energy although you may badly butt your head against the door; and, yes, that the Sun moves around the Earth, despite you seeing otherwise with your own eyes every day. What is more, each one of the theories by which these wonders are explained is being questioned at the moment. Of the “accuracy and reliability” of the biological sciences, we have had some glimpses earlier.

“No information supposedly gained during a mystical or religious experience, which could not have been otherwise known to the individual claiming the experience, has ever been confirmed,” asserts Victor Stenger. Probably not in the literature he has read, which will not have included, let us say, the writings of the medieval mystics of the Rhine Valley or the Zen masters. “All spiritual disciplines, in the East and in the West, have a common core of experience,” wrote Sri Aurobindo,⁴⁶ who had read the literature of both hemispheres, and who had had such experiences himself. “If a person undergoes a religious experience that truly places her in communication with some reality from beyond the material world,” continues Stenger, “then we may reasonably expect that person to have gained some deep, new knowledge about the world that can be checked against the empirical facts.” Yet, empirical facts are from the material world, not from beyond it. And if Stenger wants to disprove the existence of God (in God – The Failed Hypothesis), he should at least have read something or other about the difference between subjective and objective reality.

“Subjective reality cannot be referred to the evidence of the external senses; it has its own standards of seeing and its inner method of verification: so also supraphysical realities by their very nature cannot be referred to the judgment of the physical or sense mind except when they project themselves into the physical, and even then that judgment is often incompetent or subject to caution; they can only be verified by other senses and by a method of scrutiny and affirmation which is applicable to their own reality, their own nature. There are different orders of reality; the objective and physical is only one order. It is convincing to the physical or externalizing mind because it is directly obvious to the senses, while of the subjective and the supraphysical that mind has no means of knowledge except from fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable to error. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings …” (Sri Aurobindo⁴⁷)

“Scientists studying mysticism are still in the fact-accumulation stage, and may always be,” is the conclusion of John Horgan’s inquiry in Rational Mysticism. Here the following quotation from Brian Pippard (1920-2008), the late Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge University, may be apt: “The scientist is right to despise dogmas that imply a God whose grandeur does not match up to the grandeur of the universe he knows. But when we have chased out the mountebanks there remain the saints and others of transparent integrity whose confident belief is not to be dismissed simply because it is inconvenient and uncharted. We may lack the gift of belief ourselves, just as we may be tone-deaf, but it is becoming in us to envy those whose lives are radiant with a truth which is no less true for being incommunicable. As scientists we have a craftsman’s part to play in the City of God; we cannot receive the freedom of that city until we have learnt to respect the freedom of every citizen.”⁴⁸

To believe is proper to the human personality; without belief, or a mosaic of beliefs, he cannot live. Here we find again that the essential question and target of the positivists is not religion as such, but the constitution of the human species (to which they too belong), more specifically the human mind. As Jacques Arsac puts it: “One cannot escape believing. Either one believes that there is nothing exterior to science, or one believes that there is something. It is not science which answers this question, it is not science which accepts or refutes that ‘exterior’, for a [mathematical] formal system cannot say anything about what is exterior to it. This is a question which is of the order of belief, and nobody can escape it. Every answer is a way of reading, of interpreting the book of science, and belongs to philosophy”⁴⁹ – which ultimately, in its origin and its ground, belongs to the realm of the spirit.

A Diminished God

“The God whose existence Dawkins is prepared to challenge seems a curiously diminished figure,” writes David Berlinski.⁵⁰ One expression of Dawkins’ idea of God is as follows: “Any designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable … Either your God is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation.”⁵¹

What Dawkins and Co. do not seem to realize is that the concept of ‘God’ they are juggling with is of the same order as their own very human dimensions. They are attacking the shadow of Yahweh, yet the archetype determining their reasoning is identical. It is a ‘God’ in the image of man, tribal because Eurocentric, and quite childish. Their arguments hardly differ from those already in use in the popular, exoteric religions of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. If an atom and a cell are so fantastically complex as science has discovered; if there are trillions of cells active in a human body, and trillions of planets, stars, galaxies, quasars and black holes in the universe, all in unceasing motion; if trillions of particles are traversing the Earth and every body on it, every moment of their existence – what being in the image of man, even magnified, could keep this show going in all its tiniest and most gigantic parts?

There is no excuse for the professed ignorance of scientists and philosophers of the subject on which they are not only writing extensively, but intend to effect an adjustment in the opinions (the discourse) of humankind. Such a way of argumentation, at times heightened into raving, is at the very least unscientific, often logically inaccurate if not internally contradictory, and uncultured for its lack of factual and historic knowledge. Moreover, the arguments of most authors in this field are a beguiling potluck of theories and hypotheses which true science keeps apart with care and of necessity. Astronomy is different from quantum field theory, plasma research from paleontology, anthropology from herpetology – without even considering the ‘human sciences’. Evolution is a long-term historical event, having taken and taking place one time without any element ever repeating itself. If such, it can only be documented and never proven, for scientific proof demands repetition within similar conditions.

The reason of these reflections is not to be pedantic, but to adduce the necessary thought for the consideration of an evaluation one finds time and again in the writings of the anti-religious: ‘God’ as a tinkerer or a fumbler. To quote a few such remarks: “An intelligent designer might have managed without these chaotic episodes of boom and bust [like the Cambrian explosion and the Permian extinction]: (Hitchens) … The design of the eye is not just bad design, it is the design of a complete idiot. (Dawkins⁵²) … There is certainly a lot of order in the universe, but there is also a lot of chaos. The centers of galaxies routinely explode, and if there are inhabited worlds and civilizations, they are destroyed by the millions, with each explosion of the galactic nucleus or a quasar. That does not sound very much like a god who knows what he, or she, is doing. (Sagan) … If God created the universe as a special place for humanity, he seems to have wasted an awfully large amount of space where humanity will never make an appearance. … He wasted a lot of time too. … Let us also ponder the enormous waste of matter. (Stenger)”

The amazing pretension behind such statements is that the authors seem to know what God is, intends and does – while, being human, they doubtlessly have some problems left with understanding themselves. If they have anything to do with the search for truth which is science, or with the search for truth which is philosophy, why do they not limit themselves to the findings they can validate? Agreed, the discussion of our limited knowledge within a larger framework is an innate exercise of the human mind, as illustrated abundantly throughout history, and discussion is part of the scientific process. But there is a difference, of sincerity or intelligence, between discussion, speculation and condemnation, or just talking one’s head off without rime or reason, repeating common platitudes.

“With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world,” writes Christopher Hitchens. “The sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity.”⁵³ This is an amazing gaffe. Certainly, the Abrahamic religions live in the expectation of the end of the world by water or fire, prelude to the Last Judgment. But the heath death of the Earth preceding the death throes of the Sun is one of the favourite themes of popular science, much rehashed by the media in holiday seasons when there is not much else to report. “If you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system.” (Bertrand Russell⁵⁴)

The Earth is going to die. When? In five billion years. (Mankind is supposed to have originated around two million years ago.) “The surface of the Sun at a temperature of several thousand degrees will come extremely close. The Earth will be charred; it will be a cinder.” The Sun is going to die. “The sun that has nurtured us for so long will turn into a violent and unpredictable monster prone to sudden nuclear shutdowns and re-ignitions, expansions and contractions, alternating over several millennia. It will end its days as a red giant so gigantic that is wayward mantle of gases will swallow up half the planets of the solar system, including the Earth.” The universe is going to die. (The universe is nowadays thought by most cosmologists to have begun 14 billion years ago. Its future life is estimated at about 100 trillion years.) “The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and are snuffed out one by one. Out in the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies, cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in the growing darkness. Occasional flickers of light pierce the fall of cosmic night, and spurts of activity delay the sentence of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard” …

It has already been noted in a former chapter that positive science seems to relish demeaning the human condition – when it is not promoting itself by praising “the grandeur of its view of life.” The Copernican Principle, or Principle of Mediocrity states that humans are nothing special in the universe – though more and more voices are heard which assert the contrary, and which find support in the anthropic principle. The second law of entropy, the law of inevitable degradation, is the staple reference of scientific materialism – but no organism is an independent or closed system, and now the universe itself is thought by many physicists to be part of a greater whole. It is with gusto that the representatives of ‘black science’ state and repeat on all possible occasions that humans are animals – although, when it suits their view, they will declare them ‘special animals’, whose constitution and functioning remains for the greatest part unknown. “By taking the Darwinian ‘cold bath’, and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages: that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose,” writes Carl Zimmer.⁵⁵ Stephen Gould denies any sense of progress in evolution, and evaluates bacteria as more successful than humans.

All the same, it would be wrong to include all scientists in the ranks of ‘black science’. There are some who are as questioning and open-minded as those of the great generation in the first half of the 20th century, and their number may increase because of the present crisis in physics and genetics. In the history of the Gifford Lectures as studied by Larry Witham, “ the scientists, philosophers, and theologians brought many views of God to bear, but when it came to find God in nature, there were two primary options: a process God or a traditional omniscient monarch: a God who grew up with the universe or a king who imposed his will on nature. A third kind of deity, which was more Platonic, was a borderline case, but was generally viewed as transcendent, as far outside of nature, whether as an idea, mathematical form, the ground of being, or ‘the wholly other’.”⁵⁶

Witham quotes Freeman Dyson as having said: “God learns and grows as the universe unfolds,” which is close to Sri Aurobindo’s “progressively manifesting god.” This idea Sri Aurobindo quotes also in the original Greek of Heraclitus, “ho theos ouk estin alla gignetai”: God is not but he is becoming, which here means developing, increasing or growing in the evolution on Earth, as born out by the increasing level of consciousness. Dyson said he found this viewpoint “congenial and consistent with scientific common sense. I do not make a clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

Few words are more often quoted that those of Stephen Hawking at the end of his Brief History of Time, where he expresses the hope that a complete theory of physics, a Grand Unified Theory, will soon be discovered. If that is found, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would truly know the mind of God.” Opinions of the tragic case of mathematical genius that is Stephen Hawking differ, especially about the value of his theories. His quoted words, however well formulated and strategically placed to conclude his book, contribute to the fallacy that the mind of God would be of the order of the human mind, albeit of the most intelligent among homines sapientes. Mathematicians have marveled at the complexity, refinement and beauty of mathematics, and seen God as a Mathematician. Others have called him the Great Geometer or the Great Architect. But no reasonable person could suppose that a galaxy and a grain of sand, or a living cell, are held together, in their unimaginable complexity, by a mind comparable to the human. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, the divine Mind must be of a different order, it must be a ‘supermind’, which is a word, a label covering by definition something of which we can have no idea.

“We have to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of the worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously, this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the magnified and supernatural Man of the ordinary occidental conception, for that conception erects a too human eidolon of a certain relation between the creative Supermind and the ego … Supramental nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of oneness; its will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of oneness, its actions proceed upon that basis. Mental nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills, feels, senses with division as a starting point and has only a constructed understanding of unity; even when it experiences oneness, it has to act from the oneness on a basis of limitation and difference.” (Sri Aurobindo⁵⁷)

Omnipresent Reality

“Generally speaking, when we have no evidence or other reason for believing in some entity, then we can be pretty sure that entity does not exist. We have no evidence for Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster, so we do not believe we exist. If we have no evidence or other reason for believing in God, then we can be pretty sure that God does not exist,” writes Victor Stenger.⁵⁸ The evidence he has in mind is obviously of the scientific, reductionist kind, valid only where material objects are the case. David Berlinski reasons to the contrary: “Either the Deity is a material object or he is not. If he is, then he is just one of those things, and if he is not, then materialism could not be true.”⁵⁹ What kind of God would it be who is a material object perceptible by the human senses, and as such the potential object of scientific experimentation?

No evidence? Only if one is blind or refuses in principle to look at the facts, like there were some who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. There is, for instance, Arthur Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy; or the literature of great Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, Margarete Porete, Hadewych, St. John of the Cross; or the heritage of the Zen Masters, whose poetry is truth and truth poetry; or the Indian mystics; or the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the most voluminous epics in the world, filled to the brim with spiritual lore. John Horgan has the following anecdote about Bernard McGinn, theologian and author of a multi-volume history of Christian mysticism: “When I asked McGinn if he had personal acquaintance with hellish or heavenly mystical states, he chuckled uneasily and replied: ‘I tend to try to stay away from that.’”⁶⁰ But mysticism is a matter of experience, and so is the evidence of God.

The authentic spiritual experience is the same in East and West, and it is the same at the core of every religion, for the human being is the same everywhere. “The perennial philosophy holds that the world’s great spiritual traditions, in spite of their obvious differences, express the same fundamental truth about the nature of reality, a truth that can be directly apprehended during a mystical experience.” (John Horgan⁶¹) “The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being, for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also there are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of experience and expression: the centralization and harmonization of these possible, but also the intensive sole following out of any line of experience are both of them necessary movements of the emerging spiritual Conscious-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation of kind and life to the spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with the mentality of the seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such accommodation or such limiting expression.”⁶²

Still, even in the camp of the anti-religious writers the new spirit of the inner exploration as opposed to the outer, mental and dogmatic one, seems to have penetrated. Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith, writes: “Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not.” He writes about a wealth of mystical evidence. “Spirituality can be – indeed, must be – deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. … When the great philosopher mystics of the East are weighed against the patriarchs of the Western philosophical and theological traditions, the difference is unmistakable: Buddha, Shankara, Padmasambhava, Nagarjuna, Longchenpa, and countless others down to the present have no equivalent in the West. In spiritual terms, we appear to have been standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. It is little wonder, therefore, that many Western scholars have found the view within rather unremarkable.”⁶³ Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo observed almost a century ago: “To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.”

The necessity of Something which brings forth the world, life and ourselves, with all the marvels, riddles and atrocities, cannot but keep humanity spellbound, now as it has in times past. Many are the myths which have tried to explain how it all came about and what it all means, for a human’s understanding is limited, as are his or her powers, and the fear for tomorrow is ever present. In the myths the human capacities were magnified to the superhuman and mysterious, and that was ‘God’. The rationally thinking people in the West can no longer accept this kind of projection, but they have enclosed themselves in their own mind, proud of their rationality and of the new world it has produced, and hanging on to matter as to a raft on a stormy sea.

God, the Divine, ‘That’ has to be something more, essential, worthwhile, great. The patient people of the East discovered ‘That’ long ago, but the discovery is difficult and may demand the wager of an entire life. Above the mind one has to reach the spiritual levels of the being, behind the heart one has to enter the soul. There one finds what one really is – and what all is. “Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman,” said those who had attained the goal.

“An omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent, and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to recognize one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.” (Sri Aurobindo⁶⁴)