How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [159]
How then, without such ephemera, can we find meaning in this meaningless cosmos? By broadening the scope of science. Flanagan convincingly demonstrates that the scientific quest to understand our place in the cosmos and our relation to other beings, including and especially our own species, itself generates both awe and reverence—feelings that were previously the exclusive domain of religion: “There is benevolence and compassion expressed by a feeling of connection to all creatures, indeed even to the awesome inanimate cosmos.” This connection comes through knowing something about creatures and the cosmos, and Flanagan spends most of the book discussing the nature of what it means to be human, how brains can create minds (that are not separate from neurons), why free will is not necessarily incompatible with the deterministic assumption behind making free moral choices, how natural selves exist and retain most of the benefits of supernatural selves (souls) with the exception of immortality, and how ethical principles can be derived (and consequent moral behaviors generated) through a purely naturalistic worldview. Here the reading slows a little as Flanagan reviews all the major competing views before delivering his verdict on them along with his alternatives (for example, it takes fifty pages to dispense with the soul and another fifty pages to rebuild it through a natural system). But the effort pays off, as when he delivers this brilliant denouement showing how it is not the answers of science that provide transcendence, it is the quest: “It is becoming, worthy, and noble. It is the most we can aim for given the kind of creature we are, and happily it is enough. If you think this is not so, if you want more, if you wish that your life had prospects for transcendent meaning, for more than the personal satisfaction and contentment you can achieve while you are alive, and more than what you will have contributed to the well-being of this world after you die, then you are still in the grip of illusions. Trust me, you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough.”
It is enough for Flanagan. And it is enough for me and the (roughly) 60 percent of practicing scientists who, according to a 1996 survey by Ed Larson, have no belief in God or an afterlife. But will it ever be enough for the masses? Can we convince hundreds of millions of people—even billions of souls—that the scientific worldview is good enough? The realist in me remains pessimistic. But the idealist in me wants more—a worldview where science is presented as a humanistic and humane enterprise. Science is constructive, not destructive. A few structures (like the soul) may be demolished to make room for the new edifice, but many of the contents of the old building will be preserved in the new. That is the cumulative and uplifting nature of science.
IN SEARCH OF SPIRITUAL MEANING
There is a humorous scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when his unfulfilled and neurotically Jewish character fails to find meaning in alternate religious expressions after visiting a Catholic church and returning home with a loaf of white bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and a crucifix. The reason, of course, is that the trappings and facade of a religion will not get you to that deeper place where so many desire to go. This is the deeper side of the psychology of religion, the exploration of which I found illuminating in Martha Sherrill’s narrative account entitled The Buddha from Brooklyn. There are no grand theories here, no sweeping pronouncements about “what it all means,” but it is a compelling case study in the search for spiritual meaning in an age of materialism. This is the story of Catharine Burroughs, born and raised in Brooklyn as Alyce Louise Zeoli, who was severely abused as a child but found redemption first as a psychic and spiritual counselor in suburban Maryland, then as a Tibetan tulku, or