The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [88]
In the case of the afterlife, just because we do not have a 100 percent completely natural explanation for all of the experiences that people have near death does not mean that we will never understand death, or that there is some other mysterious force at work. It certainly does not mean that there is life after death. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a challenging enterprise.
Hoping and Knowing
I am, by temperament, a sanguine person, so I really hate to douse the flame of hope with the cold water of skepticism. But I care about what is actually true even more than what I hope is true, and these are the facts as I understand them.
I am occasionally accused of being skeptical of the wrong things, or of being too skeptical for my own good. Sometimes I’m even charged with denialism—I don’t want X to be true, therefore I unfairly find reasons to reject X. That is undoubtedly sometimes the case. In fact, belief-dependent realism and the confirmation of beliefs after they are formed necessarily must apply to me as well as others.
On this particular issue of agenticity and its manifestation in dualism, mind, the supernatural, and the afterlife, however, I entertain no such denialist tendencies. In fact, I passively wish for their manifestation in reality. The afterlife? I’m for it! But the fact that I wish it were so does not make it so. And herein lies the problem of understanding the mind in order to know humanity: our belief systems are structured such that we will almost always find a way to support what we want to believe. Thus, the overwhelming desire to believe in something otherworldly—be it mind, spirit, or God—means that we should be especially vigilant in our skepticism of claims made in these arenas of belief.
Is scientific monism in conflict with religious dualism? Yes, it is. Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does or ever will. Does science and skepticism extirpate all meaning in life? I think not; quite the opposite, in fact. If this is all there is, then how meaningful become our lives, our families, our friends, our communities—and how we treat others—when every day, every moment, every relationship, and every person counts, not as props in a temporary staging before an eternal tomorrow where ultimate purpose will be revealed to us but as valued essences in the here and now where we create provisional purpose.
Awareness of this reality elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, as we course through life together in this limited time and space—a momentary proscenium in the drama of the cosmos.
8
Belief in God
Among the many binomial designations granted our species—Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo economicus—a strong case could be made for Homo religiosus.
According to Oxford University Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia, 84 percent of the world’s population belongs to some form of organized religion, which at the end of 2009 equals 5.7 billion people. That’s a lot of souls. Christians dominate at around 2 billion adherents (with Catholics accounting for half of these), Muslims come in at a little more than a billion, Hindus at around 850 million, Buddhists at almost 400 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others