Beyond Science & Religion: The Greater Reality

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It is a book that I keep on my reading table for those precious moments late in the day, when we can allow ourselves to think about the big questions and ponder the spiritual nature of our Source. For me, it is then a joy to pick up The Collapse of Materialism and take part of that journey on a subject that intrigues me. Whether it is a new angle on inflationary theory, classical Darwinism or the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, Philip Comella never fails to amaze with his thoughtful insight.

This work, developed over decades of research and personal inquiry, is, indeed, what it sets out to be: This book should be required reading for any soul who longs to know why we are here and how we can make our highest Real Dream come true. Emanuel Kuntzelman - President and Founder, Greenheart Transforms In The Collapse of Materialism , Philip Comella calmly and methodically demonstrates the inconsistencies in the materialistic worldview, covering not only the meaning behind quantum theory but also the gaps in cosmology and Darwinism.

The clarity and thoroughness of his arguments are highly impressive, yet the text remains readable and accessible throughout. Having described the collapse of materialism, Comella then provides possible bridges to the future in which he sees that mind and matter may no longer be seen as separate. The objects of observation are of course very different in the two cases. Physicists, by contrast, begin their inquiry into the essential nature of things by studying the material world.

Exploring ever deeper realms of matter, they become aware of the essential unity of all natural phenomena. More than that, they also realize that they themselves and their consciousness are an integral part of this unity. Thus mystics and physicists arrive at the same conclusion; one discipline starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to atman, the reality within.

A further important similarity between the ways of the physicist and the mystic is the fact that their observations take place in realms that are inaccessible to the ordinary senses. In modern physics, these are the realms of the atomic and subatomic world; in mysticism, they are non-ordinary states of consciousness in which the everyday sensory world is transcended.

Twentieth-century physics was the first discipline in which scientists experienced dramatic changes of their basic concepts and ideas — a paradigm shift from the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and systemic conception of reality.

Subsequently, the same change of paradigms occurred in the life sciences with the gradual emergence of the systems view of life. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the similarities between the worldviews of physicists and Eastern mystics are relevant not only to physics but to science as a whole. After the publication of The Tao of Physics in , numerous books appeared in which physicists and other scientists presented similar explorations of the parallels between physics and mysticism e.

What Pantheism believes

Other authors extended their inquiries beyond physics, finding similarities between Eastern thought and certain ideas about free will; death and birth; and the nature of life, mind, consciousness, and evolution see Mansfield, Moreover, the same kinds of parallels have been drawn also to Western mystical traditions see Capra and Steindl-Rast, The extensive explorations of the relationships between science and spirituality over the past four decades have made it evident that the sense of oneness, which is the key characteristic of spiritual experience, is fully confirmed by the understanding of reality in contemporary science.

Hence, there are numerous similarities between the worldviews of mystics and spiritual teachers — both Eastern and Western — and the systemic conception of nature that is now being developed in several scientific disciplines. The awareness of being connected with all of nature is particularly strong in ecology. Connectedness, relationship, and interdependence are fundamental concepts of ecology; and connectedness, relationship, and belonging are also the essence of spiritual experience.

Hence, ecology — and in particular the school of deep ecology, founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the s see Devall and Sessions, — can be an ideal bridge between science and spirituality. The defining characteristic of deep ecology is a shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric values. It is a worldview that acknowledges the inherent value of non-human life, recognizing that all living beings are members of ecological communities, bound together in networks of interdependencies.

When we look at the world around us, we find that we are not thrown into chaos and randomness but are part of a great order, a grand symphony of life. Every molecule in our body was once a part of previous bodies — living or nonliving — and will be a part of future bodies. In this sense, our body will not die but will live on, again and again, because life lives on.

And since our mind, too, is embodied, our concepts and metaphors are embedded in the web of life together with our bodies and brains. Indeed, we belong to the universe, and this experience of belonging can make our lives profoundly meaningful. For more information please go to www.

Originally posted on Sutra Journal. How will my data be used? The Tao of Physics. The Systems View of Life, Cambridge: Steindl-Rast with Thomas Matus. Belonging to the Universe. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1: Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Ohio State University Press. Science and the Common Understanding. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. I have read, and understood, quantum physics. We can forget the clashes between science and religion if we embrace spirituality.

We will probably have to wait for the die-hard religious people to pass on. Yet, here is a viable explanation of Life! Do the research yourself and you will soon see. Technology is milked you and I know this. Thank you for speaking directly to my heart. I find it hard to express these things to others. Maybe I am not meant to. Science and the spirit are indivisible to me. Technology is milked, smoke and mirrors. Very good, thank you for posting this article!

This is basically the same, what Hans-Peter Duerr said, long-term collaborator and successor of Werner Heisenberg. He also emphasized, that the philosophical implications of quantum physics still have not arrived in mainstream science. Not that changing things on this level is always wrong, but to treat living beings as machines is the same as to treat them as slaves. There is no relationship between science and spirituality; there could be no discussion about it. For science to even consider this, there needs to be something that suggests there are such things as souls.

So in a way, the relationship between science and spirituality is no different than the relationship between science and smurfs. Ok so that is where you are at in your evolution.

The conflict between science and religion lies in our brains, researchers say

It is good that you have a curiosity. It is the beginning of the next stage in your evolution of consciousness. Packard; but I absolutely have no idea in which language you are speaking.

I have curiosity in reality; but not in fairy tales. Science does not care about explaining religion and philosophies, nor they have any kind of relationship with each other. This article did not once mention the word soul. You either did not read it or clearly misunderstood the point. Awakening from the Dream of Thought. The State that is Key to Deep Self-discovery. The Power of Living Your Purpose.

Deva Premal and Miten: Singing the World into Being. The History of the Happiness Movement. Claiming Your Sexual Sovereignty. All the best content delivered fresh to your inbox every week. The Relationship between Science and Spirituality. They do not generally spread from mind to mind by imitation. It is biologically prepared, culturally enhanced, richly structured minds that generate and transform recurrent convergent ideas from often fragmentary and highly variable input.

Core religious ideas serve as conceptual signposts that help to socially coordinate other beliefs and behaviors in given contexts. Although they have no more fixed or stable propositional content than do poetic metaphors, they are not processed figuratively in the sense of an optional and endless search for meaning. Rather they are thought to be right, whatever they may mean, and to require those who share such beliefs to commune and converge on an appropriate interpretation for the context at hand.

To claim that one knows what Judaism or Christianity is truly about because one has read the Bible, or that what Islam is about because one has read the Qur'an and Hadith, is to believe that there is an essence to religion and religious beliefs. But science and the history of exegesis demonstrates that this claim is false. Dan Dennett seems to argue that because most people are rational most of time, as in properly navigating when crossing the street, then people should be perfectly capable of following and accepting rational arguments against religion if only the repressive social and political support for religion could be jettisoned.

Now, unlike in the field of economic judgment and decision making, where basic assumptions of rationality have been scientifically sundered most prominently by recent Nobel laureates Danny Kahneman and Thomas Schelling , there has been little serious of study of the scope and limits of standard notions of rationality in moral judgment and decision making.

There is, however, some evidence that rationality is not standard for religion and morality. Religious behavior often seems to be motivated by sacred values, that is, values which a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance that underlies cultural identity and precludes comparisons or tradeoffs with material or instrumental values of realpolitik or the marketplace. As Immanuel Kant framed it, virtuous religious behavior is its own reward and attempts to base it on utility nullifies its moral worth.

Instrumental decision-making or "rational choice" involves strict cost-benefit calculations regarding goals, and entails abandoning or adjusting goals if costs for realizing them are too high. A sacred value is a value that incorporates moral and ethical beliefs independently of, or all out of proportion to, its prospect of success. Current approaches to resolving resource conflicts or countering political violence assume that adversaries make instrumentally rational choices. However adversaries in violent political conflicts often conceptualize the issues under dispute as sacred values, such as when groups of people transform land from a simple resource into a "holy site" to which they may have non-instrumental moral commitments.

Nowhere is this issue more pressing than in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which the majority of people in almost every country surveyed e. We found that emotional outrage and support for violent opposition to compromise over sacred values is a is not mitigated by offering material incentives to compromise but b is decreased when the adversary makes materially irrelevant compromises over their own sacred values.

For these participants, all deals thus involved a "taboo" trade-off. However, we observed the following order of support for violence: In this experiment, hypothetical peace deals see supporting online materials all violated the Palestinian "right of return", a key issue in the conflict. The same order was found for two measures ostensibly unrelated to the experiment: These experiments reveal that in political disputes where sources of conflict are cultural, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or emerging clashes between the Muslim and Judeo-Christian world, attempts to lessen violent opposition to compromise solutions can backfire by insisting on instrumentally-driven tradeoffs and rational choices, while non-instrumental symbolic compromises may reduce support for violence.

Further studies with Hamas members and non Hamas controls this past June, show similar results, as do on-going pilot studies among Christian fundamentalists who consider abortion and gay marriage to violate sacred values. Given these facts, I and others have been assisting in political negotiations that target recognition of sacred values over instrumentally rational tradeoffs. The goal is to break longstanding deadlocks that have proven immune to traditional business-like frameworks for political negotiation that focus on rational choices and tradeoffs.

By targeting "sacred values" and "moral obligations" I don't seek to "ignore the role of religion" in people's actions and decisions, though Harris complains this is the reason I introduce sacred values into the discussion. My aim is quite the opposite: Humankind does not naturally divide into competing camps of reason and tolerance, on one side, and religion and intolerance, on the other. It is true that "scientists spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about being wrong and take great pains to prove other so.

The Relationship between Science and Spirituality

But it is historical nonsense to say that "pretending to know things you do not know… is the sine qua non of faith-based religion," that doubt and attempts to "minimize the public effects of personal bias and self-deception" are alien to religion, or that religion but not scientific reason allows "thuggish lunacy.

Is Augustine's doubt really on a different plane than Descartes'? Are Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's religious appeals to faith and hope in the face of overwhelming material adversity truly beside the point? Did not the narrow focus of science on the evidence and argument of the task at hand allow the production of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and are not teams of very able and dedicated scientists today directly involved in constructing plausible scenarios for apocalyptic lunacy?

Were not Nazi apologists Martin Heidegger and Werner Heisenberg among Germany's preeminent men of reason and science who used their reason and critical thought to apologize for Nazism? Did not Bertrand Russell, almost everyone's Hero of Reason including mine , argue on the basis of clear and concise thought, and with full understanding and acknowledgement of opposing views and criticism, that the United states should nuke Soviet Russia before it got the bomb in order to save humankind from a worse evil? And Newton may have been the greatest genius that ever walked the face of the earth, as Neil de Grasse Tyson tells us, but if you read Newton's letters at St.

John's College library in Cambridge, you'll see he was one mean and petty son of a bitch. The point is not, as Harris conjures it, that some scientists do bad things and some religious believers do good things. The issue is whether or not there are reliable data to support the claim that religion engages more people who do bad than good, whereas science engages more people who do good than bad. One study might compare, say, standards of reason or tolerance or compassion among British scientists versus British clergy.

My own intuition has it a wash, but even I wouldn't trust my own intuitions, and neither should you. Have I Misrepresented Harris? Harris says that I attribute words to him that he never said at Salk "but which bear some faint resemblance to words I have written. In his last book he stated that "70 percent" of the prisoners in French jails are Muslim. In fact, according to Farhad Khosrokhavar, France's foremost scholar on Muslim radicalization in European prisons, "the French government estimates the Muslim prison population at about 50 percent, although in certain banlieux [urban suburbs] it can reach 70 percent.

Harris introduces his penultimate book with these words: The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple… smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars.

All has gone according to plan. The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man…. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man's religion? Where does Harris get these "facts"? He tells us only that he "reads.

The most prolific groups of suicide bombers in recent history is largely secular though nominally Hindu, and multiple interviews with families of Palestinian and Muslim suicide bombers do not reveal pride among parents for what their children have done to any reliable degree. These facts negate the generalizations implicit in Harris's caricature of suicide bombing.

Does Harris respond to the evidence with arguments "designed to minimize the public effects of personal bias and self-deception"? Or, does he persist in "pretending to know things you do not know [which] is a great liability in science"? Finally, Harris says that because he and Dawkins and Weinberg never talked about scapegoating, then my bringing in statistically reliable evidence about scapegoating from studies involving thousands of people from several religions around the world is irrelevant.

But I cited the evidence that atheists are as likely as religious people to scapegoat others, to hold dogmatic beliefs, and to condone violence because Harris and company repeatedly emphasize in one form or another that, all things being equal, atheism bests religion for tolerance, openness, and opposition to violence. Again, I see no evidence this is so though I certainly wouldn't mind if were so. One would be justified in asking: So data were collected and it was unanimous? Not even Epicurus and Lucretius?

Where were these results published? Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Scott Atran presents an important problem, but his treatment of it is puzzling to me: I find it fascinating that among the brilliant scientists and philosophers at the conference, there was no convincing evidence presented that they know how to deal with the basic irrationality of human life and society other than to insist against all reason and evidence that things ought to be rational and evidence based. It makes me embarrassed to be a scientist and atheist. What can Atran be saying here?

Not that things ought not to be rational and evidence based. He appeals frequently to the scientific method and warns us all not to mistake anecdotes for data; he bows to no one in his allegiance to reason and evidence. Perhaps he is saying that it is folly to expect people other than scientists to act on the basis of reason and evidence. What is his evidence for that?

The Relationship between Science and Spirituality

I have seen no evidence that shows they are unable to guide their myriad daily decisions when to plant, what to buy, where to live,. Probably it is only on certain sensitive topics that people abandon reason and evidence. But then what is he recommending we do about this? Concede game, set and match to their irrationality on these topics? That's the easy part.

The hard part is figuring out how to deal, diplomatically and effectively, with the variety of religious convictions that runs from truly dangerous lunacy at one end of the spectrum to the bland view that "core religious beliefs, like poetic metaphors, are literally senseless in that they altogether lack truth conditions. Atran describes himself as a scientist and an atheist. So when does he think it is appropriate to declare his own atheistic convictions candidly, if not at the Salk meeting? He is surely right that "simply telling hostage takers their beliefs are bullshit will get you the opposite of what you want" but then is he recommending that we should always just lie?

Or doesn't he agree that their views are, in the cold light of day, evil bullshit? The problem is that the dangerous fanatics get an entirely undeserved mantle of respectability from the sane behavior of the moderates. If we button our lips to avoid offending the moderates, declining to draw attention to the utter irresponsibility of the fanatics, we become complicit in perpetuating the myth that there's really nothing to criticize in religious convictions. Atran vividly draws our attention to the problem. Weinberg, Dawkins and Harris are saying that whatever the second, third, and fourth step should be, the first step must be to acknowledge the very fact of this basic irrationality of human life and society: You don't have to be an expert plumber to know that the first step, when burst pipes are flooding your house, is to turn off the water!

I think they are right. The public needs to be told this. I doubt that it will work. Scott Atran rebukes Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg and me for the various ways we each criticized religion at a recent conference at the Salk Institute. While Atran responded to us in person at this meeting, and has elaborated his views at considerable length here, he has yet to say anything of relevance to the case we built against religious faith. There are also several inaccuracies in Atran's account of the Salk meeting, and these provide some of the many straw-men with which he grapples in his essay.

For instance, he attributes words to me which I never uttered at Salk, but which bear some faint resemblance to words I have written. Whatever their source, the quotations are both inaccurate and out of context, and he uses them to attribute beliefs to me which I do not hold. As to matters of real substance, Atran makes insupportable claims about religion as though they were self-evident: What is "literally senseless" about the claim that human beings were created in their present forms by God and that evolution is, therefore, a fiction? What is "literally senseless" about the proposition that an eternity in a fiery hell awaits nonbelievers after death?

Or the expectation that Jesus will one day return to earth and magically lift good Christians into the sky while hurling sinners into a lake of fire? More than half of the U. And despite Atran's protestations on the subject, religious literalism is an utter commonplace in the Muslim world.

In fact, openly doubting the perfect veracity and sublimity of the Koran can still get a Muslim killed almost anywhere on earth. Atran's comments, both at the Salk conference and in his subsequent essay, miss the point. The point is not that all religious people are bad; it is not that all bad things are done in the name of religion; and it is not that scientists are never bad, or wrong, or self-deceived. The point is this: The degree to which science is committed to the former, and religion to the latter remains one of the most salient and appalling disparities to be found in human discourse.

Scientists spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about being wrong and take great pains to prove others so. In fact, science is the one area of discourse in which a person can win considerable prestige by proving himself wrong. Of course, individual scientists may or may not be privately honest or personally deluded. But the scientific method, with its institutionalized process of peer review, double blind trials and repetition of experiments, is beautifully designed to minimize the public effects of personal bias and self-deception.

Consequently, science has become the preeminent sphere for the demonstration of intellectual honesty. Pretending to know things you do not know is a great liability in science; and yet, it is the sine qua non of faith-based religion.

Atran would have us believe that specific religious doctrines—like the idea that martyrs go straight to Paradise—are either not believed by anyone, or if believed, are not relevant to people's behavior. To this end, he brandishes empirical results that fail even to strike a tangent to the issues under discussion "scapegoating"?

When did Dawkins, Weinberg, or I ever talk about scapegoating? Given his approach to these issues, it's not clear what could possibly constitute evidence for Atran that people are motivated to act on the basis of their religious beliefs: Sam Harris and others at the conference tells us that suicide bombers do what they do in part because they are fooled by religion into seeking paradise, which includes the promise of 72 virgins.

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But neither I nor any intelligence officer I have personally worked with knows of a single such case though I don't deny that their may be errant cases out there. Such speculations may reveal more the sexual fantasies of those who speculate rather than the actual motives of suicide bombers. All leaders of jihadi groups that I have interviewed tell me that if anyone ever came to them seeking martyrdom to gain virgins in paradise, then the door would be slammed in their face. The first thing to point out is that such cases do exist, "errant" or not. Second, by narrowly defining the promise of Paradise in terms of its sexual perquisites Atran makes the influence of theology on the behavior of jihadists seem like an exception to the rule.

Whether or not they are solely fixated on the promise of virgins, the reality of Paradise and their "duty to God" is so often mentioned by jihadists that one cannot reasonably deny the role that religious belief plays in underwriting their actions. Atran ignores the role of religion, even when it bursts into view in his own research.

Nonviolence in the an Age of Terrorism" in which he summarized his interviews with jihadists: What may appear, to the untutored eye, as patent declarations of religious conviction are, on Atran's account, nothing more than "sacred values" and "moral obligations" shared among kin and confederates. What Atran ignores in his interpretation is the widespread Muslim belief that martyrs go straight to Paradise and secure a place for their nearest and dearest there.

In light of such religious ideas, solidarity within a community takes on another dimension.

And phrases like "God will love you just the same" have a meaning that is worth unpacking. What is God's love good for? It is good for escaping the fires of hell and reaping an eternity of happiness after death. To say that the behavior of Muslim jihadis has little to do with their religious beliefs is like saying that honor killings have little to do with what their perpetrators believe about women, sexuality, and male honor.

Consider the recent cartoon controversy: A Danish newspaper published some caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad; word of the transgression was assiduously spread in the Muslim world; and then we were all given a glimpse of just how reasonable and compatible with civil society conservative Islam can be. How can we interpret these events if we are to take instruction from Atran? Does he believe that religion was orthogonal to this phenomenon? Muslims didn't take to the streets and start killing people because of their religious beliefs.

This behavior was an expression of economic desperation, or politics, or "blowback," or humiliation — anything and everything but religion conspired to bring us this spectacle of thuggish lunacy. The reality, however, is that if the doctrine of Islam were different, the beliefs of devout Muslims would be different, and this difference would have consequences at the level of their behavior. If the Koran contained a verse which read, "By all means, depict the Prophet in caricature to the best of your abilities, for this pleaseth Allah", there wouldn't have been a cartoon controversy.

Can I prove this counterfactual? Do I really need to?

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