Stephen Strauss's Articles on Lions Roar

Is life ruled by cosmic design or cause and effect? Stephen Strauss suggests that some of the answers may be found in our DNA. In December of last year, Nature magazine, depending on how you view it either the first or second most important science publication in the world, published an article headlined "Buddhism on the Brain." While most of the piece detailed a conference on the human mind held at the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Dharamsala, buried within it was a paragraph which undoubtedly caused some of the relentlessly scientific readers of Nature to clean their glasses and begin reading the startling words out loud. Fred Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who had presented his research showing that the mammalian brain can change and adapt during adulthood, reported a conversation with the Dalai Lama. "At one point I asked: ‘What if neuroscience comes up with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?’," said Gage. "The answer was: ‘Then we would have to change the philosophy to match the science.’" The shock value for scientists was not what this said about the plasticity of Buddhism, but rather hearing the words in the context of the near H-bomb-level conflict between science and religion playing out in the United States. I can give you some sense of the incendiary nature of this dispute from that classic literary measure of the public mind - newspaper headlines. "Keep Your Church Away From My State," reads one in Syracuse’s Post Standard/Herald Journal. "Darwin Faces God In Kansas Trial," exclaims the Ottawa Citizen. "Evolutionary War," announces the Boston Globe. Another measure of the intensity of the dispute are the category-5-hurricane rhetorical winds - read all shrubs, trees, and signs blown down, complete destruction of mobile homes - generated by various individual disputants. When meeting a scientist who also believes in divinity, the defiantly atheist New York Times science writer Natalie Angier starts popping mental veins. "How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might of an afternoon deftly puree a colleague’s PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read a two-thousand-year-old chronicle riddled with internal contradictions of a meta-Nobel discovery like ‘Resurrection from the Dead,’ and say, gee, that sounds convincing?" she writes in an essay on her "god problem." To this David F. Coppedge, founder and "chief bwana" of a website devoted to both disproving evolution and promoting "creation safaris," responds with equal vitriol: "The laziness of evolutionists is parasitic on society. Did this tall tale by Darwin Party mythmakers bless your heart? Did it do anybody any good? Did it advance civilization or help those in need? Challenge your professor when he wastes your time with improvable assertions and glittering generalities that assume evolution before the evidence even has had a chance to speak." The conflict between religion and science is hardly new - the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo and battles over Darwinism in the last century leap to mind - but what is startling is the vehemence of the conflict in what, if you judge from the numbers of recipients of Nobel Prizes and the nationality of authors of scientific papers, is the leading scientific country on earth. I will leave it to others to reflect on the Red State versus Blue State, Bushites versus Kerryites sociology aspect of the conflict, and discuss in this essay two things. First, what seems to me to be the essence of the disagreement, and second, some hope if not exactly for a resolution, then for a reconfiguration of complaint. I wish to approach the first not from a he-said, she-said accounting of what the disputants say is the problem, but from the dim, dark cellar of my youth, where I once had a religion/science moment so profound that it deformed the rest of my life. I had obtained some LSD, and those being the days when the drug was supposed to open up Huxley’s euphonious Doors of Perception, I conceived taking it as a way to encounter God, who to that moment seemed to have gone out of his or her or its way to ignore me. So I took my tab and laid down on a mattress in a dumpy apartment on the Lower East Side and awaited a divine incarnation. What transpired was instead exceedingly clinical: the splotched walls melted, my body seemed to disconnect from my brain, fantasy flowers bloomed in the melted paint - and then nothing. Reality had become an hallucination, but no god, no higher consciousness, no sense of the divine manifested itself. So I got up and later that night started to tell my friends that I had conducted a scientific experiment and it proved there was no God. It was, in retrospect, a gigantically arrogant interpretation of the even more fantastically constructed god-conceit of LSD’s promoters, but one that was deeply bolstered by my sense that I had been, as best I could be, scientific in my search. I had seized upon what philosopher Karl Popper argued was the essence of what science was. Mine was a testable thesis. If LSD opened up a pathway in which God suddenly became available, God should appear to me. If the technique worked for me, the experiment could supposedly be repeated with others. To avoid the possibility of other influences, I’d also made sure I had taken only LSD and nothing else. While there might be problems with the Stephen Strauss God experiment - a sample size of one, for example - I had made myself open to the possibility that a sense of the divine would appear by clearing my mind of doubt about the existence of a god. I describe this experience because it seems to me that it captures, in its youthful arrogance, what is the most fundamental but oft unexpressed element in the present conflict between science and religion. The warring in some large way is between conflicting and conflicted methodologies. Scientists believe in their results, but only because they believe in a deeper sense in science’s methodology, and that methodology is profoundly materialistic and non-transcendental. Anyone who has ever spent ten seconds in a scientific laboratory has to be struck by how much discovery has become a routine. You conduct an experiment, and then conduct it again, and then conduct it a third time, because you worry that your materials were contaminated, or that the graduate student from Japan who had worked a sixteen-hour shift had fallen asleep at a crucial moment, or that your result was an artifact of a machine’s hiccup. If things keep repeating themselves, then you write up your results in a scientific paper and distribute it to other scientists, who try as hard as they can to figure out how you have tricked yourself into believing that you understand nature. When you have convinced them that you haven’t made some fundamental methodological mistakes, then what you found can be published, and others can try to repeat your experiment. If they succeed, it is thought that what you have found is - more or less - true. If not, suddenly the evil wind of potential scientific fraud starts blowing through your life. This faith in how you arrive at answers has an almost religious feel to it. It led that most scientific - and most theist - of American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, to opine that "the patient pursuit of facts, and cautious combination and comparison of them, is the drudgery which man is subjected to by his Maker, if he wishes to attain sure knowledge." Against this is placed organized religion’s entirely different set of methodological presuppositions. What holy seekers are looking for are transcendent truths, and their methodology is invariably one of individual search and discovery. There is routinization to be sure - meditation, prayer, ritual behavior - but nobody is going to confuse the compulsive calculations in a laboratory with the drama of worship or self-knowledge advancement in a temple, church, synagogue, or mosque. Believers aren’t conducting an experiment to see if their beliefs make sense. They don’t send particular moments of enlightenment out to peers to see if colleagues in spirituality can figure out a hundred ways in which they were kidding themselves. They don’t risk being rebuked if others don’t achieve the same sense of the sacred as they on any given day. If there is contradiction between their religion’s truths and others, it is not a question of fraud. Rather it is that, as the New Testament has it, "in my father’s house there are many dwelling places." Essentially, the quality of transcendent belief in a god or godhead defies experimentation. Looking at the methodological chasm between the two different ways of discerning the truth, the greatest surprise would be if religion and science did not war, and war fanatically. Even if you looked at exactly the same topic, you would be hard put to believe that with such profoundly dissimilar methodologies - the Dalai Lama’s science/religion ecumenicism aside - you would arrive at the same answers. This difference in approach has inspired efforts on the part of some to describe a universe in which both approaches worked, but in different domains. The most notable of these in recent times has been the attempt by Harvard paleontologist and literary science writer extraordinaire Stephen Jay Gould to formulate the notion of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. Essentially, Gould argues that science and religion have their own fields of authority. Science covers the material realm. Religion is the arena of ultimate meaning and moral value. A truce, if maybe not true peace, can be reached on the science/religion war front if you just let the two domains operate in their own areas of expertise. "To cite the old clichés, science gets the ages of rocks and religion gets the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven," wrote Gould in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages. It...

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