By Edward F. Kelly
Conflicts
between science and religion have erupted intermittently since the first
stirrings of modern science over four centuries ago, and the past year has
witnessed searing new attacks on religion by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins,
and other defenders of Enlightenment rationalism. Critics like these clearly
regard themselves, like science itself, as marshalling the intellectual virtues
of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of irrational authority and
superstition. In their view science has conclusively demonstrated that we human
beings are nothing but complicated biological machines. Everything we are and
do is in principle explainable in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics.
Mind and consciousness are generated by—or in some mysterious way identical
with—neurophysiological processes occurring in brains. Mental causation,
volition, and the “self” are illusions, by-products of the grinding of our
neural machinery. And because we are entirely the product of this machinery, we
are necessarily extinguished, totally and finally, by the death and dissolution
of our bodies. To think anything different is to abandon centuries of
cumulative scientific progress and revert to the primitive supernaturalist
beliefs of bygone times. Period, end of story.
In reality
things are less clear-cut and much more interesting. My intent here is not to
side with the institutionalized religions against science. All seem imperfect
human creations, and I do not adhere personally to any. But I do believe that
real understanding of human nature will be achieved only by expanding current
scientific orthodoxy in directions broadly compatible with the central impulse
of religion as characterized by the great American psychologist and philosopher
William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, and I further
believe that the primary obstacles to doing so reside within science itself.
The word
“fundamentalism” probably evokes for most of us only images of bomb-wielding
Islamic terrorists and other examples of religious extremism, but
fundamentalism exists within science as well. When scientific opinion hardens
into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a secular faith and no
longer science. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, but in modern times
the main opposition to new scientific ideas has derived not from religious
orthodoxies but from other scientists for whom contemporary opinion established
the limits of the possible.
Consider in
this light the question of post-mortem survival. The notion that aspects of
mind and personality survive bodily death is central to the world’s great
religions yet scorned as impossible by present-day establishment science. But
few participants in this contentious debate have any inkling that there exists
a large scientific literature collectively suggesting that at least some of us,
under largely unknown conditions and for some unknown period of time, do in
fact survive. The primary threat to this interpretation, ironically, has
nothing to do with the quality of the evidence—problems of fraud, credulity,
errors of observation or memory, and the like—but with the difficulty of
excluding non-survivalist interpretations based solely upon supernormal
(“psi”-based or parapsychological) processes involving living persons. The
voluminous evidence for such processes includes both spontaneous cases and
experimental studies, and in my opinion has long since passed the threshold where
competent persons who take the trouble to study it in depth and with an open
mind will routinely conclude that these things exist as facts of nature.
Indeed, future generations of historians, philosophers, and sociologists will
undoubtedly make a good living trying to understand why it took so long for
scientists in general to accept this conclusion.
Either horn of
this interpretive dilemma — survival or psi — is lethal to current materialist
orthodoxy, which undoubtedly helps explain the hostility of its advocates to
both. But many other psychological phenomena pose similarly difficult
challenges to conventional ways of thinking. Conditions such as cardiac arrest
and general anesthesia, for example, abolish brain conditions regarded by most
neurophysiologists as necessary for full consciousness, yet thousands of
patients have reported extraordinarily vivid, life-transforming experiences
that occurred under these circumstances. Even the most fundamental aspects of
everyday mental life including memory, volition, and the qualitative “feels” of
consciousness remain unexplained. Everything points, I believe, to the need for an enlarged scientific
psychology that can accommodate “transpersonal” or spiritual aspects of human
nature without loss of rigor.
There are more
things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in today’s mainstream
materialist philosophy, and huge questions that so far have been addressed
primarily by the world’s great religions are to some degree accessible to the
methods of science. There is middle ground between science and the religions as
presently constituted, and noisy partisans on both sides ought to know this! As
William James himself declared in A Pluralistic Universe, his last book, “Let
empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some
strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe
that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin.”
Edward F. Kelly is a Research Professor in the Department
of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the lead author
of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.
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Posted by: Acatuetty | June 05, 2008 at 05:34 PM