Crabtree Adam - Beyond physicalism: toward reconciliation of science and spirituality

Beyond Physicalism

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond physicalism : toward reconciliation of science and spirituality / edited by Edward F. Kelly, Adam Crabtree, and Paul Marshall.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-3238-9 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-4422-3240-2 (electronic)

1. Religion and science. I. Kelly, Edward F., editor. II. Crabtree, Adam, editor. III. Marshall, Paul (Paul David), editor.

BL241.B445 2015

201'.65dc23

2014039921

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

The rise of modern science has brought with it increasing acceptance among intellectual elites of a picture of reality that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the worlds great cultural traditions. A particularly stark but influential early statement of the emerging picture came from philosopher Bertrand Russell:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Mans achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the dbris of a universe in ruinsall these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the souls habitation henceforth be safely built. (The Free Mans Worship, 1903)

There can be no doubt that this bleak vision continues to dominate mainstream scientific thinking and has contributed to the disenchantment of the modern world with its multifarious attendant ills. Prominent recent spokesmen include, for example, Nobel prize winners such as theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, for whom the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless, and physicist-turned-neurobiologist Francis Crick, whose astonishing hypothesis declares that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carrolls Alice might have phrased it: Youre nothing but a pack of neurons.

Overt conflict between science and religion has erupted sporadically since the first stirrings of science centuries ago, and recent years have witnessed a series of heavily publicized attacks on nearly all things religious by well-meaning defenders of Enlightenment-style rationalism. Such persons clearly regard themselves, and current mainstream science itself, as reliably marshaling the intellectual virtues of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of irrational authority and superstition. For them the truth of the picture sketched above has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, and to think anything different is necessarily to abandon centuries of scientific progress, release the black flood of occultism, and revert to primitive supernaturalist beliefs characteristic of bygone times.

Contributors to the present volume share a very different view. We believe it takes astonishing hubris to dismiss en masse the collective experience and wisdom of a large proportion of our forebearers, including persons widely recognized as pillars of all human civilization, and we are united in believing that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of