5848 - The clash between science and religion

This is a book review from Science Magazine. I need everyone to buy this book and give me comprehensive book reviews so I don't have to read the whole thing. Book reviews are due in two weeks. Now get to it!

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The clash between science and religion has generated more heat than light, and yet our search for meaning in life is relentless, and a sense of the sacred remains a universal part of the human experience. Matter and spirit must thus engage in dialogue rather than in feud, as the American physicist and writer Alan Lightman argues in his new book, The Transcendent Brain.

Lightman seeks to reconcile transcendent experiences with scientific materialism and begins the book with a personal story of a close encounter with a pair of juvenile ospreys that left him with “a feeling of being part of something much larger than myself.” He then switches modes and declares: “I’m a scientist and have always had a scientific view of the world—by which I mean that the universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff.”

Lightman calls himself a “spiritual materialist” and honors experiences of enchantment, but he ultimately conflates science with a materialist worldview. His metaphysical presuppositions seem to overrule concrete experience, leaving readers with a peculiar kind of empiricism—one in which love, awe, and pain are real, but molecules [and atoms (and protons)] are somehow realer.

“How can the material neurons in the human nervous system give rise to feelings of spirituality?” asks Lightman. His answer (and question) draws from mainstream neuroscience and evolutionary biology: The brain makes conscious experiences, and evolution made some of these experiences transcendent. Here, he invokes the notion of “emergent phenomena,” comparing fireflies flashing in synchrony with neurons producing our inner lights.

The book’s introduction clearly outlines Lightman’s position, while the first two chapters provide a necessarily incomplete but superficial exploration of the origin of nonmaterialist conceptions of the world. Chapters 3 and 4 form the core of the book. Here, a series of non-sequiturs portrays a narrow account of current consciousness studies, which is followed by Lightman’s argument that spirituality is a natural by-product of high-level conscious minds subject to natural selection.

Lightman acknowledges the epistemic insufficiency of reductionism, whereby different levels of analysis and explanation are needed; however, his ideology remains that “mind and brain are the same thing” and there is nothing but the material world. But what exactly is matter? And is lived experience secondary?

This, in turn, leads to a sophisticated naïveté: Religion becomes psychologized and human values biologized. Lightman does “not mean to diminish such a majestic and profound feeling,” but, nevertheless, he sees spiritual experiences as being “as natural as hunger or love or desire, given a brain of sufficient complexity.” Beauty becomes a by-product of traits with survival benefits, creativity hardly more than a consequence of the urge for exploration and discovery, and the capacity for awe just a kind of openness to the world.

Sparks of intellectual courage shine through at the end of the book. Here, Lightman addresses the counterproductivity of so-called “new atheists”: “[Richard] Dawkins dismisses people of faith as ‘nonthinkers’ and labels religion as ‘nonsense.’ Such an attitude from a leading spokesperson for the scientific establishment only increases the divide between different groups of people.”

Indeed, it is one thing to be intolerant of gluten, and another to deny that bread exists or to insult those who eat it. The belief that science has all the answers now, or will in the future, and that what cannot be counted does not count is plain “scientism,” and it does science no good.

Lightman’s “spiritual materialism” will not “out-transcend” evangelical atheists like Dawkins. Even they have transcendent experiences. But as the American philosopher David Ray Griffin has argued: “The perceived conflict between science and religion (now rebranded as spirituality) is based upon a double mistake—the assumption that religion requires supernaturalism and that scientific naturalism requires atheism and materialism”.

Let us, therefore, put an end to the ongoing confusion whereby science, materialism, atheism, and reason are used interchangeably. We can affirm both science and spirituality without subordinating one to the other and progressively come out of the spiritual closet in our professional and personal lives.