Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [127]
He noted that whenever he presents scientific data suggesting we are not biological robots, totally determined by our genes and our neurons—that perhaps we have a spiritual side—the scientists fill the room and clamor to know more. He believes the challenge to the mind-brain problem is gaining followers as more scientists conduct studies on the sly or, more recently, with funding from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health. More important, Beauregard senses a generational shift, the kind that presages the collapse of an old paradigm. The young scientists are restless.
“Many young scientists come to me—not openly, but covertly—and they tell me they greatly admire the kind of work I’m doing,” he said. “They don’t dare go out publicly yet. But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before we see a true revolution in science because of that. And there will be a big clash, because science has been controlled for centuries by materialists, by atheists.”
Clearly, no one knows at this moment whether Mario Beauregard and the other guerrilla scientists are correct. But here’s a provocative idea: We will know. New technology that allows us to peer into the brain and record the path of subatomic particles points toward that end. The paradigm will fall or it won’t, the spiritual will be acknowledged or marginalized once and for all.
I am reminded of scientist Dean Radin’s comment that 96 percent of the universe is “dark matter” or “dark energy”—that is, cosmologists haven’t a clue as to what it is. That means that all our scientific theories are built on 4 percent of the observable universe.
“Science is a new enterprise,” Radin said.“We are monkeys just out of the trees. And for us to be so arrogant as to imagine we’re close to understanding the universe is just insane.”
How much more arrogant to proclaim we know all about “God.” But as the science proceeds, many scientists suspect that the days are numbered for a purely materialist paradigm. They believe that the evidence challenging the matter-only model is building, bolstered by research on meditation, the mechanisms for prayer, and more radical studies on the neurology of near-death experiences. And as the “anomalies” accumulate, these scientists predict the pressure on the dam will grow, and one day the wall of materialism will come crumbling down.
This is the dilemma that Saint Paul voiced in one of his (rare) flashes of intellectual humility.
“Now we see through a glass, darkly,” Paul told the Corinthians, “but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
A Personal Paradigm Shift
If I harbor only suspicions about paradigm shifts in science, I am more certain of my own. In the course of looking under the hood of spiritual experience, guided by some smart and very generous scientists, I experienced a series of personal epiphanies about, first, the existence and nature of “God,” and second, my own religious beliefs. Let me take these in order.
The question that launched me on this journey could not be more basic: Does God exist? Or, put another way: Is there more than this material reality? This question is at once too ambitious and too modest. Too ambitious because science can never prove that a supernatural being exists; if there is a God, He or She or It operates outside of nature and beyond the reach of scientific measuring instruments. The question is also too modest: I am only reaffirming something that I have always felt to be true. It is difficult to be a Christian, after all, if you do not believe in God or a meaningful universe or an eternal purpose to life. Still, at the outset I worried that I would find a material explanation for every spiritual phenomenon and that my research would drain life of its magic and mystery.
What I have concluded is this:While science cannot prove the existence of God, neither can it disprove it. In fact, science is entirely consistent with a Being who organized