Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

INTRODUCTION

As an academic – a researcher and senior lecturer at a university in the UK – people are often surprised by my unorthodox views on the nature of life, and of the world. For example, when I mention to colleagues that I’m openminded about the possibility of some form of life after death, or that I believe in the possibility of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy or precognition, they look at me as if I’ve told them I’m going to give up academia and become a professional footballer. It’s taken for granted that if you’re an academic or an intellectual, you don’t entertain such unusual views.

The majority of my colleagues and peers – and most academics and intellectuals in general – seem to have an orthodox materialist view of the world. They believe that human consciousness is produced by the brain, and that when the brain ceases to function consciousness will end. They believe that phenomena such as telepathy and precognition belong to a pre-rational superstitious worldview, which has long been superseded by modern science. They believe that the evolution of life – and most human behaviour – can be completely explained in terms of principles such as natural selection and competition for resources. To doubt these beliefs is to be seen as weak-minded or intellectually gullible.

People are even more confused when I tell them that I’m not religious. How can you believe in life after death without being religious? they wonder. How can you be doubtful about Darwinism without being religious?

This book is my attempt to justify my views to anyone who believes that to be rational means that by definition you also ascribe to a materialist view of the world. It’s my attempt to show that one can be an intellectual and a rationalist without automatically denying the existence of seemingly irrational phenomena. In fact, I will show that it is actually much more rational to be open to the existence of such phenomena.

Beyond religion and materialism

Another aim of this book is to show that, although we might not be aware of it, our culture is in thrall to a particular paradigm or belief system that in its own way is just as dogmatic and irrational as a religious paradigm. This is the belief system of materialism, which holds that matter is the primary reality of the universe, and that anything that appears to be non-physical – such as the mind, our thoughts, consciousness or even life itself – is actually physical in origin, or can be explained in physical terms.

I hope to show that we don’t just have to choose between an orthodox materialist view of the world and an orthodox religious view. Often it is assumed that these are the only two options. Either you believe in heaven and hell, or you believe that there is no life after death. Either you believe in a God who overlooks and controls the events of the world, or you believe that nothing exists apart from chemical particles and the phenomena – including living beings – that have accidentally formed out of them. Either God created all life forms, or they evolved accidentally through random mutations and natural selection.

But this is a false dichotomy. There is an alternative to the religious and materialist views of reality, which is arguably a more rational option than both. Broadly, this alternative can be termed post-materialism.¹ Post-materialism holds that matter is not the primary reality of the universe, and that phenomena such as consciousness or life cannot be wholly explained in biological or neurological terms. Post-materialism holds that there is something more fundamental than matter, which might be variously termed mind, consciousness or spirit.

There are a number of varieties of post-materialism. One of the most popular is called panpsychism, which is the idea that all material things (down to the level of atoms) have a degree of sentience, or consciousness, even if it is infinitesimally small, or just a kind of proto-consciousness. However, for reasons that I will describe in detail in Chapter 2, I favour what I call a panspiritist approach. Or you could simply call it a spiritual approach.

The basic idea of my spiritual approach is very simple: the essence of reality (which is also the essence of our being) is a quality that might be called spirit, or consciousness. This quality is fundamental and universal; it is everywhere and in all things. It is not unlike gravity or mass, in that it was embedded into the universe right from the beginning of time, and is still present in everything. It may even have existed before the universe, and the universe can be seen as an emanation or manifestation of it.

Although this is a simple idea, it has a lot of important corollaries and consequences. Since all things share this common spiritual essence, there are no separate or distinct entities. As living beings, we are not separate from each other, or from the world we live in, since we share the same nature as each other and the world. It also means that the universe is not an inanimate, empty place, but a living organism. The whole cosmos is imbued with spirit-force, from the tiniest particles of matter to the vast, seemingly empty tracts of darkness between planets and solar systems.

Spirituality isn’t often thought of in an explanatory context. Most people believe that it is the role of science to explain how the world works. But in this book we’ll see that this simple notion – that there is a fundamental spirit or consciousness that is ever-present and in everything – has great explanatory power. We will see that there are many issues that don’t make sense from a materialist perspective, but which can be easily explained from a spiritual point of view.

This is perhaps the biggest problem with materialism: that there are so many phenomena that it can’t account for. As a result, it is woefully inadequate as a model of reality. At this point, it is reasonable to say that, as an attempt to explain human life and the world, it has failed. As I will point out throughout this book, only a worldview based on the idea that there is something more fundamental than matter can help us to make sense of the world.

The difference between science and scientism

One thing I would like to make clear at the beginning of this book is that I am not criticizing science itself. This is one of the common reactions I’ve had to the articles I’ve published on similar themes to this book. How can you criticize science when it has done so much for us? is a typical comment. How can you tell me it isn’t true when it’s based on millions of laboratory experiments, and its basic principles are used in every aspect of modern life? is another. A further typical query is: Why do you equate science to a religion? Scientists don’t care about beliefs – they just keep their minds open until the evidence appears. And if they have to revise their opinions, they do.

I have no wish to criticize the many scientists – such as marine biologists, climatologists, astronomers or chemical engineers – who work diligently and valuably without being particularly concerned with philosophical or metaphysical issues. Science is a method and process of observing and investigating natural phenomena, and reaching conclusions about them. It’s a process of uncovering basic principles of the natural world, and of the universe, or of the biology of living beings. It’s an open-ended process whose theories are – ideally – continually tested and updated. And I completely agree that science has given us many wonderful things. It’s given us amazingly intricate knowledge of the world and of the human body. It’s given us vaccinations against diseases that killed our ancestors, and the ability to heal a massive array of conditions and injuries that would also have been fatal in the past. It’s given us air travel, space travel and a whole host of other incredible feats of engineering and technology.

All of this is wonderful. And it’s partly because of such accomplishments that I love science. The other main reason I love science is that it opens us up to the wonders of nature and the universe. In particular, I love biology, physics and astronomy. The complexity of the human body – and particularly of the human brain, with its 100 billion neurons – amazes me. And I find it mind-boggling that we know the structure of the tiniest particles of matter, and at the same time have knowledge of the structure of the universe as a whole. The fact that scientific discoveries range from such a microcosmic level to such a macrocosmic level is incredible. I feel immense gratitude to the scientists throughout history who have made our present understanding of the universe and the world possible.

So why am I so critical of science? you might ask.

The answer is that I’m not critical of science or scientists. I am critical of the materialistic worldview – or paradigm – that has become so intertwined with science that many people can’t tell them apart. (Another possible term for this is scientism, which emphasizes that it is a worldview that has been extrapolated out of some scientific findings.) Materialism (or scientism) contains many assumptions and beliefs which have no basis in fact, but which have authority simply because they are associated with science.

One of these assumptions is that consciousness is produced by the human brain. However, there is no evidence for this at all – despite decades of intensive investigation and theorizing, no scientist has even come close to suggesting how the brain might give rise to consciousness. It’s simply assumed that the brain must give rise to consciousness because there appear to be some correlations between brain activity and consciousness (for example, when my brain is injured, my consciousness may be impaired or altered) and because there doesn’t appear to be any other way in which consciousness could possibly arise. (In fact, as we will see in Chapter 3, there is a growing awareness of how problematic this assumption is, with more and more theorists turning towards alternative perspectives, such as panpsychism.)

Another assumption is that psychic phenomena such as telepathy or precognition cannot exist. Similarly, anomalous phenomena such as near-death experiences or spiritual experiences are seen as brain-generated hallucinations. Materialists sometimes say that if psi phenomena really did exist, they would break the laws of physics, or turn all the principles of science upside down. But this is untrue. As we will see later, phenomena such as telepathy and precognition are compatible with some of the laws of physics. In addition, there is a great deal of empirical and experimental evidence to suggest that they are real.

However, some materialists have a blanket refusal to consider the evidence for these phenomena, which is similar to the way many religious fundamentalists refuse to consider evidence that goes against their beliefs. This refusal isn’t based on reason, but on the fact that these phenomena contravene their belief system. (This contradicts the naive assumption that science is always purely evidence-based, and theories and concepts are always re-evaluated in the light of new findings. This is how science should ideally be, but unfortunately any findings or theories that contravene the tenets of scientism are often dismissed out of hand without being given a fair hearing.)

Thankfully, there are some scientists who actively oppose materialism – scientists who have the courage to risk the hostility and ridicule of their orthodox peers and investigate potentially heretical possibilities, such as that there may be more to evolution that just random mutations and natural selections, that so-called paranormal phenomena may in fact be normal, or that consciousness isn’t wholly dependent on the brain. Heretical scientists aren’t burned at the stake, of course, as religious heretics sometimes were, but they are often excommunicated – that is, ostracized and excluded from academia, and subjected to ridicule.

So in this book, I certainly don’t intend to throw science overboard, and return to ignorance and superstition – far from it. I would simply like to free science from the straitjacket of the belief system of materialism, and as a result introduce a wider and more holistic form of science, one that is not limited and distorted by beliefs and assumptions – a spiritual science.

The structure of this book

This book begins by looking at the main principles of both materialism and panspiritism. Then I will take you on a detailed tour of a number of areas of scientific enquiry, during which I will highlight many problematic issues – or puzzles – which materialism struggles to solve. We will see that there are two ways in which the conventional materialist model of reality is deficient. One is that it cannot adequately explain major scientific and philosophical issues, such as consciousness, the relationship between the mind and brain (and the mind and the body), altruism and evolution. The second is that it cannot account for a wide range of anomalous phenomena, from psychic phenomena to near-death experiences and spiritual experiences. These are rogue phenomena that have to be denied or explained away, simply because they don’t fit into the paradigm of materialism, in the same way that the existence of fossils doesn’t fit into the paradigm of fundamentalist religion. Then we will look at what spirituality has to say about each of these issues, and how it can actually resolve them (that is, solve the puzzles). We will also look into the mysterious world of quantum physics, which has always highlighted the limitations of materialism – but does so even more at the present time, now that it has become clear that quantum effects take place abundantly on a macrocosmic scale and are involved in a host of biological and natural phenomena (such as photosynthesis). Finally, I will suggest that the validity of materialism is fading, and that as a culture we are moving (slowly) towards a new post-materialist phase.

As a result of the investigations that make up the main part of this book, two things will become clear. First, we will see just how inadequate materialism is as a way of explaining the world, and our experience of it. Second, we will see how easily – from a spiritual perspective – the riddles of the materialist model dissolve away. We will see that almost every phenomenon that appears anomalous from the perspective of materialism can be easily and elegantly explained from the perspective of panspiritism.

It’s also important to point out that these issues aren’t just academic. It’s not just a question of me picking arguments with materialists and sceptics because I think they’re wrong. As we will see in Chapter 1, the conventional materialist model has very serious consequences in terms of how we live our lives, and how we treat other species and the natural world. It leads to a devaluation of life – of our own lives, of other species’ and of the Earth itself. It is essential that our culture moves beyond materialism – and towards post-materialism – as quickly as possible.

At the same time as solving many of the riddles of science, a spiritual worldview can change our relationship to the world. It can engender a reverential attitude to nature, and to life itself. It can heal us, just as it can heal the whole world.

CHAPTER 1

THE ORIGINS OF MATERIALISM: WHEN SCIENCE TURNS INTO A BELIEF SYSTEM

The materialist belief system is so pervasive and taken for granted that we may not even be aware that it exists – in the same way that for the peasants of medieval Europe, say, the belief system of Christianity was so deeply embedded into their lives that they accepted it as reality, unaware of any alternative perspectives.

When I was about 18, a friend asked me if I wanted to go to a talk about meditation at a local library. I didn’t know anything about meditation, but I was curious, so I decided to go. At one point the speaker said something like, Meditation is a way of refining your inner being. It’s a way of experiencing the well-being of consciousness. Consciousness has a natural quality of well-being. At the time I had no idea what the man was talking about. I remember thinking, ‘Inner being’? ‘Consciousness’? What do those terms mean? Where can they be? I’m just a brain and a body. What else is there inside me?

Once I started to meditate, I realized that I did have an inner being. I realized that there was something non-material within me – a consciousness that did have a natural quality of well-being. But this shows how deeply I had absorbed the belief system of materialism, through my education, the media and my parents and peers. I took it for granted that I was nothing more than the physical stuff of my body and brain, and that my thoughts were just projections of my brain. I took it for granted that I was nothing more than atoms and molecules.

There was no religion in my upbringing at all. That wasn’t unusual – I didn’t know anyone who was religious (apart from a boy in my year at school who was a Jehovah’s Witness). Even my grandparents were completely non-religious. And this wasn’t because they were atheists – no one I knew would have described themselves in those terms either. It was just that religion wasn’t part of our lives. It wasn’t a subject that anyone ever thought about or talked about. We sometimes said prayers or sang hymns in school assembly, but no one took them seriously.

Although Britain in general is a very secular country, I later learned that was particularly true of my social class. My ancestors were factory and mill workers in the northwest of England, and religion was never important to them. Factory and mill workers laboured incredibly long hours in terrible conditions, lived in poverty and often died young. They may have gone to church on Sunday mornings – often under duress, since vicars and mill owners would often round people up or punish them if they didn’t go – but they probably took the services about as seriously as I took my school assemblies.

This background meant that I absorbed a materialist worldview, rather than a religious one. Without being consciously aware of it, I adopted a mechanical vision of the world and the universe. I adopted the view that the world consists of tiny particles that arrange themselves into ever-more-complex forms, eventually giving rise – through an accidental process of evolution – to living beings, and eventually to human beings. I adopted the view that the universe functions according to rigid physical laws, like a giant machine. I learned that all of the characteristics of an individual human being were passed on from their parents, in the form of tiny units called genes, which determined not only our appearance but also our behaviour. When we did our weekly religious education lessons at school, and we heard about concepts like heaven and hell and salvation and eternity, those beliefs seemed bizarre and naive, as if they belonged to a different era of human history.

I was at school in the 1970s and 1980s, and over the following decades the belief system of materialism became more pervasive. Fields such as neuroscience, psychobiology (which attempts to explain human behaviour in neurological terms) and evolutionary psychology (which suggests that present-day human traits are evolutionary adaptations from prehistory) added new perspectives to the materialist paradigm. Even more so than when I was a child, materialist assumptions permeate our educational systems, the mass media and the intelligentsia of our culture. While there might be some popular magazines or TV programmes which discuss psychic phenomena, near-death experiences or spiritual experiences, the serious media rarely pays attention to such concepts, except to dismiss them. To discuss them with any degree of credence would mean exposing yourself as unsophisticated and unintelligent and risking ridicule. Certainly, very few of my academic colleagues would be willing to take such irrational phenomena seriously. To do so would mean a loss of credibility – perhaps even a loss of career.

Recently, I met a well-known and well-respected psychologist who told me that he had always been interested in psychic phenomena and Eastern spiritual traditions, but he had never discussed them in detail in his work. He told me that in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was becoming established as an academic, it would have damaged his reputation, and prevented him from gaining a post at a university. And once he began teaching at a prestigious university, such interests would have stopped him being able to advance in his career. In other words, if he had shown his true allegiances it would have meant being excommunicated. Fortunately, the psychologist told me that – now that he had gained some status, and was nearing the end of his career – he was beginning to address these forbidden topics.

The tenets of materialism

Before we go any further, let’s define exactly what materialism is. In philosophical terms, materialism is a form of monism. Here mon literally means one, so we could call it oneism – the belief that the world consists of one fundamental or primary thing. And according to materialism, this primary thing is matter. There are no higher levels of reality, no different dimensions, no heaven or hell, or gods or spirits. Human beings do not have souls or spirits, and even our minds are material in the sense that they’re just a product of our brains. Even the various forms of energy (such as mechanical, thermal and kinetic energy) are material in the sense that they are properties of material objects, in the same way that colour is a property of objects. Only the physical is real – the physical stuff of the world around us, and the physical stuff of our bodies.

An obvious alternative to monism is dualism – the belief that the world is made up of two fundamental things. One of these is matter and the other is a non-material quality, such as mind or perhaps soul or consciousness. According to dualists, mind or soul can’t be accounted for in terms of matter – they are of a fundamentally different nature. But to materialists, there is nothing mysterious about the mind, or about life itself or even death – all can be explained in terms of the interactions of material elements, such as brain cells, molecules and atoms.

So materialism suggests that matter is the primary or fundamental substance in the world and that all phenomena (including mental phenomena) can be explained in terms of the interactions of matter. The basic reality of the world is microcosmic particles, which collect together and interact in extremely complex ways to produce everything we know. We living beings are simply agglomerations of particles. We are machine-like entities made up of tiny material building blocks consisting of different types of atoms and molecules working together to form different parts of our bodies and organize the interactions between them. Seen in this way, you could refer to materialism as a bottom-up approach – that is, it tries to explain all human behaviour and experience in terms of biology, chemistry and physics.

These ideas might be said to be the primary assumptions of materialism, but other assumptions follow from them. Every religion has a number of basic tenets – principles that everyone who takes up the religion has to adopt. And here are what might be called The Ten Tenets of Materialism:

•  Life came into being by accident, through the interactions of certain chemicals. Once it had come into existence, it evolved from simple to more complex forms through randomly occurring genetic mutations acted on by natural selection. The driving force of evolution is competition, or the survival of the fittest.

•  Human beings are purely physical creatures, or machines. There is nothing more to us than physical stuff– that is, the atoms, molecules and cells of our bodies and brains. As a result, there is no such thing as a soul, spirit or life-force. These are superstitions that have been dispelled by science.

•  Living beings consist of selfish genes whose goal is to replicate themselves. Human beings are merely vehicles for the propagation of our genetic material. The desire for genetic replication is the primary motivation of human behaviour.

•  All mental phenomena can be explained in terms of neurological activity. Consciousness itself is generated by the brain. The billions of neurons in our brains work together – in some as yet undiscovered way – to produce our subjective feeling of being someone who can think and feel.

•  Because consciousness is produced by the brain, and we are nothing more than physical stuff, there can’t