Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [128]
Materialists can say that this astonishing thing called life (including conscious human beings who are curious about their origins) emerged from a series of random acts, starting from the Big Bang and onward. They can posit that there are 10,500 other universes with no life in them, and we just happened to hit the jackpot by landing in the one universe friendly to life. But isn’t it just as plausible—indeed, simpler and more elegant—to postulate that a cosmic Mathematician created the universe to evolve and sustain life?
Or consider spiritual “experience.” Materialists can say that our brains evolved so that we would experience profound numinous sensations. For no particular reason, during meditation or an emotional breakdown, on a walk in the mountains or on the cusp of death, some people feel a union with all things, an overpowering love, a light that eviscerates the fear of death. One explanation is that this is a quirk of evolution. But is it not just as plausible to posit that there is a Mind who wired us with the ability to access that Mind and tap into invisible realities?
William James considered the dichotomy between “materialism” and “spiritualism” a hundred years ago. He argued that both are internally logical. He asserted that a material worldview that excludes a Creator and a spiritual worldview that includes one can both explain natural phenomena, such as the motion of the planets, or the evolution of the universe and life.You can believe either explanations for life and leave it at that. It is when you look toward the future that you see how differently the two views play out. As Professor Darren Staloff described it in his lecture on James’s pragmatism,7 materialism holds that eventually our sun will die, Earth will be destroyed, the universe will collapse on itself, and everything we hoped or dreamed or achieved or learned will be for naught. A spiritual worldview, however, leaves room for hope—that all we accomplish, all we are, will be preserved for eternity “if only in the mind of God.”
The real distinction between a material and spiritual worldview, James wrote, does not rest “in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.”8
Given the choice, I throw my lot in with hope.
A century after William James wrote those words, I believe there is even more reason to bank on the existence of God. It seems to me that the instruments of brain science are picking up something beyond this material world. It seems plausible to me that we perceive the ineffable with spiritual senses, and when the spiritual experience ebbs, it leaves a residue in one’s brain or body.
Science is showing that a spiritual experience leaves fingerprints, evidence that a spiritual transaction has occurred. This is hardly a surprising statement: science shows that any significant experience, especially an extraordinary one that lasts longer than thirty minutes, leaves an indelible mark on the brain. A near-death experience after a car crash, a spontaneous mystical experience, hours of prayer and meditation over the years, a seizure in which one hears the “voice of God”—of course these mental events sculpt the physical brain that mediates them.
After the encounter, the brain is physiologically different. For adepts in Buddhist meditation, the brain waves sprint along in perfect synchrony. For experts in Christian prayer, the encounter may allow them to quiet certain spatial lobes of their brain so that they feel at one with the universe. A brush with death appears to slow one’s brain-wave activity and jump-start a profound spiritual life. Psychedelic drugs and the electrical storm