How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [27]
Book sales also reflect these trends. The American Booksellers Association (ABA), for example, reported that books on religion and spirituality rose 112 percent between 1991 and 1996. And from 1996 to 1997 books on religion were the only type of adult nonfiction whose sales were steadily rising. In 1997, for example, among national bestseller lists such as in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, religion and spirituality titles averaged five spots among the top fifteen. Examples included Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, Neale Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God, and Billy Graham’s autobiography. James Van Praagh’s Talking to Heaven had a remarkable run of over three consecutive months as the number-one bestselling book in America, with sales approaching a million copies. According to the ABA, publishers are calling for books that bridge the gap between scholarly depth and everyday spirituality. The mantra is “make it popular and serious.” Today’s readers, while skeptical of easy answers and shallow summaries of complex problems, still desire a sense of the sacred, or what is called “lived religion.” ABA’s Willard Dickerson says the trend highlights a “growing hunger in the public reading market for answers that go past the secular or materialistic cultures.”
One deeper motive contributing to the search for God comes from the fact that the Hebrew Bible has God’s influence slowly but ineluctably fading as the story unfolds, so that by the end God’s face is almost completely hidden and humans are left to fend for themselves. Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman documents this phenomenon in his 1995 work, The Disappearance of God:
The Bible begins, as nearly everybody knows, with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament, Holy Scriptures, or tanak), the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portions of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known apparent ways of the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” (Deut. 31:17, 18; 32:20). By the end of the story God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.
Extraordinary indeed! Where did God go and, more importantly, why did He choose to disappear? Friedman explores these questions and provides some intriguing answers. He closes his exploration with a discussion of the relationship of science and religion, and a comparison of Kabbalah and cosmology, concluding: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” This depends, of course, on how one defines God, but I am more interested in the search than the disappearance. Is the New Age resurgence in spirituality an attempt to uncover the hidden face? Perhaps the face is to be found in a mirror. In her splendid little book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, biologist Ursula Goodenough explores this possibility in what she calls “religious naturalism”: “If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality—and I believe that they can—then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate.” In any case, this longing and search tells us something very deep about the need in the human psyche for the spiritual and sacred aspects of life not often found in the sciences or humanities. Yet they are there if you know where to look.
SACRED SCIENCE
Scientists and skeptics must address the fact that God is alive and well at the end of the second millennium—and likely will be at the end of the third. It would appear that