The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [28]
Informal science writing—what I call the narrative of practice—presents the actual course of science as it is sewn through with periodic insights and subjective intuitions, random guesses and fortuitous findings. Science, like life, is messy and haphazard, full of quirky contingencies, unexpected bifurcations, serendipitous discoveries, unanticipated encounters, and unpredictable outcomes. Where a narrative of explanation might read something like “the data lead me to conclude…” a narrative of practice reads more like “Huh, that’s weird.”
The rest of this particular integrative work of science appears in the style of the narrative of practice and is, in a manner of speaking, an unauthorized autobiography of the science of belief.
What If I’m Wrong? What I Would Say to God
I am old enough now to have learned the hard way that there is always the possibility I could be wrong. I have been wrong about many things, so it is possible that I am wrong about God.
Maybe what Chick D’Arpino experienced that early morning in 1966 was the real deal: an intentional agent outside of our world—call it God, an Intelligent Designer, ET, or the source—spoke to Chick and delivered a message that by most people’s judgment would be a welcome one: there is an entity out there who cares for us. That is most certainly what Chick believes to this day, despite the fact that he knows all about the neuroscience of such experiences. Perhaps Francis Collins is right in his reasoning that there had to be a first cause and prime mover of the cosmos, an actual (not imaginary) intentional agent who arranged the laws of nature to give rise to stars, planets, life, intelligence, and us.
Maybe all those other mystics and sages and regular folks in history and today who have touched the spirit world or encountered the paranormal are simply more attuned to another dimension, their skepticism reduced enough to allow their minds to connect to such a source. This is, in fact, what the great Institute for Advanced Study physicist Freeman Dyson believes. In a 2004 essay on the paranormal, Dyson concludes with a “tenable” hypothesis that “paranormal phenomena may really exist” because, he says, “I am not a reductionist” and “that paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by a great mass of evidence.” That evidence is entirely anecdotal, he admits, but because his grandmother was a faith healer and his cousin edits a journal on psychic research, and because anecdotes gathered by the Society for Psychical Research and other organizations suggest that under certain conditions (for example, stress), some people sometimes exhibit some paranormal powers, “I find it plausible that a world of mental phenomena should exist, too fluid and evanescent to be grasped with the cumbersome tools of science.”14
Maybe there is mind outside of the brain, maybe God is mind or some manifestation thereof, and if so maybe the mind transcends the body and continues after death and this is how we may ultimately connect to the divine. What if it is mind itself that brought the universe into existence in the first place? In this scenario, maybe God is the universal mind and the afterlife is where minds go without their brains.
Maybe. But I doubt it. I believe I have outlined a reasonable explanation for Chick D’Arpino’s experience as a stress-induced auditory hallucination, not unlike the sensed-presence effect experienced by climbers, explorers, and ultraendurance athletes, which I describe at length in chapter 5. As for Dyson’s endorsement of the paranormal, he is one of the greatest minds of our time and thus whatever he says is worthy of serious