Are human beings set up to believe in a higher power? Some scientists say yes, based on either a "faith gene" or certain areas of the brain that light up on MRIs when people pray or think about God. But this is a highly destructive yes, because it reduces spirituality to a mechanical function like heart rate or the secretion of growth hormone. The same evidence fuels the arguments of atheists, who claim that if God is just a chemical reaction, it's time we quit believing in a deity. At the very least, we should stop glorifying God, now that he (or she) has been demoted far below the exalted status one finds in the Bible and the rest of world scriptures.
I think atheists are getting a lot of mileage out of a facile argument. In 1896, long before brain imaging and the discovery of DNA, the famous Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James published a famous lecture called "The Will to Believe." It contains one idea that is a revelation. James found a way for science to lead to God instead of defeating God. Let me give the revelation a context. James thought that people had a right, perhaps even a drive, to say that God existed, and even though they couldn't offer evidence for their religious beliefs, it sustained them with comfort, hope, and so on.
Atheists scoff at this rationale, claiming that it's childish to fall back on fairy tales about God just because they make you feel better. Far better to grow up and see what's before your eyes: the material world operating through random chance without the slightest sign of a higher intelligence, moral authority, afterlife, and all the other trappings of religion. But James was ahead of this argument.
He asked, what if believing in God actually makes new evidence appear? That was the revelation, because while believing in ghosts or Cinderella won't make either one appear (so far as we know), God is an aspect of our own consciousness. The deity is continuous with the human mind. When Jesus said, "Seek the kingdom of Heaven within," he was pointing to this very continuity. I am paraphrasing James and to some extent going beyond his lecture. But what fascinates me is that he hit upon a familiar notion among seekers today: "You will only see it if you believe it."
To a non-believer, this sounds like self-hypnosis. Being materialists, they cling to the old formulation, "I'll believe it when I see it." But no one ever claimed that God or higher intelligence or the creative principle in the universe was tangible, like a rock or a tree. Gravity isn't tangible, either, but once the human mind decided to look for it, gravity became evident. God is subtler than gravity but just as evident, and just as dependent on knowing what to look for.
To be clear, James' belief is not the fervent belief of the religious fundamentalist who uses desperate literal interpretations of scripture to mask his insecurities and limited experience of the divine. This is the pragmatic belief of a working hypothesis applied toward improving one's life.
Therefore, I don't think it's time to give up on believing. Quite the opposite. Belief is a step ahead of hope. Hope can be desperate, empty, or false. But when you step beyond hope into belief, you do something both real and positive. You say, "I believe in something, so let it appear." In other words, you open yourself to knowledge, which is what everyone wants. Belief is a halfway house. It opens your awareness to a new possibility, and then you find out whether God can actually be known. We have countless saints and sages to tell us that God can be known, and with all their combined doubt, atheists, materialists, and skeptics cannot prove that God is unknowable.
The whole issue depends not on religion versus science but on James's insight that the mind allows Nature to reveal itself in greater depth the deeper we are willing to look. I find great encouragement in that insight and thought it was worth sharing. We can all benefit from James's sort of pragmatism, which says that God should be adopted as a working hypothesis, even when doubt exists, because as evidence emerges to support our belief, we will succeed in living better in this world.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
Follow Deepak Chopra on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DeepakChopra
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Essentially the logic of the materialist and literalist boils down to this--someone says read between the lines and they both actually look for writing between the lines. When they don't find any writing between the lines they rejoice thinking how brilliant they are and how ignorant the person must be who told them to look between the lines.
Belief implies transforming and conforming to the reality one believes in. The reason one has to start with belief when it comes to the Divine is because only the like can know the like and belief isn't some abstract acknowledgement of a idea, it is the very beginning of spiritual transformation, the first step in the journey, not the end of the journey itself.
Well, look, you got some really elegantly-phrased insults in there, I'll give you that, but I'm not sure you're actually saying anything more than "I disagree with those foolish, foolish people who are too pig-headed to see the world the way I do." Yeah, well, y'know....me too.
Just saying "belief implies transforming and conforming to the reality one believes in" doesn't make that statement true. I don't think belief implies any such thing--that's certainly not how the vast majority of humans use the word. To the rest of us, "belief" simply means "accepting that something is almost certainly true." As in, "I believe I'll have tacos for dinner tonight." Or "I believe in God." (Neither of which I actually believe, by the way.)
You can define "belief" in your own, personal, dismissive way, but that doesn't really mean much unless you can get a whole lot of other people to use the word in the same way. Words only mean what we, as a group, decide they mean. Making unilateral decisions about what "belief implies" is self-indulgent claptrap. Or so I believe.
And once again, telling me that I can't believe in God unless I'm willing to believe in God is not a convincing argument. And, yes, I mean that literally.
Also: gravity is a given only to modern man. Until we started describing the world in terms of energy, and Newton quantified it in mathematical terms, nobody was aware of it as a seperate force. Things just fell down. Only when it was described as one of many types of energy acting in the world at large did it become an indisputable item of our conciousness. I think this is what DC is trying to say.
"I believe John will come to tonight's party."
Now if we are sure John is coming.
'I know John is coming to the party tonight's party because he told me so."
Similarly
"I believe God exists." because we have not seen God or his heaven.
But if you know God exists then you will say, "I know God exists because I have been to heaven, seen him and now I am back to take you there."
So after hundreds of years or thousands of years to some believer of Gods no one had said that including Chopra.
We can only hope and pray out of desperation or when we are in the dark about what lies ahead.
While 'in the dark about what lies ahead', hope and prayer are great, and I would also add 'trust' and 'surrender'. Learning and awareness can be found in all experiences.
Me: Realists say, "I need something, so let me work to obtain it, or make it, or invent it."
Which do you think find the solutions to problems? Believers or realists?
Depends on the type of problems and even then, different perspectives from different ways of thinking can all be valid and useful. I've also learned that there can be exceptions, so being open to all ways of thinking even if one leans toward Believer or Realist etc is most wise.
I think dreamers do...and those who are open to the ephiphany...inspiration or aha moment...
What is that old adage about inspiration and perspiration? "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration..."
What about that aha moment adage? "an instant at which the solution to a problem becomes clear"
Don't forget that calculus was invented because Newton believed first in the theory of gravity and invented calculus to prove it's existence...
Don't forget it would be years after Einstein's death that proof could be found to his general and special theories of relativity and a relationship we all take for granted...E=mC^2
Mia Rose
http://www.healinglovenotes.com
The ontological argument? I didn't know that anybody used that one nowadays - it's so ... medieval.
If we can conceive of Gawd, then Gawd exists. But this argument is reserved for the concept called "Gawd" alone - not for ghosts or Cinderella. So this special Gawd condition depends on him/her being Gawd. The conclusion presupposes the premise.
Not a logician I see.
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Seems to me Mr. Chopra's thesis that "belief is a halfway house" is just a new-age version of the age-old theist argument that "you can't know God until you're willing to accept that God exists." Which is, of course, circular reasoning.
Like most atheists I know, I don't scoff at people who find comfort in believing in God (unless they scoff at me first), but the fact that they find comfort in that belief is not evidence that their belief is true. Sandra Bullock took great comfort in her belief that her husband was devoted and faithful--that didn't make it true.
Like most atheists I know, I don't say "I'll believe it when I see it." I say "I'll believe it when I encounter someone who presents some credible, testable, objectively verifiable evidence that it is true." Something other than yet another variation on "I believe in God's existence, and you can too if you'll only open yourself up to God's existence."
I am open. To credible, testable, objectively verifiable evidence.
To be sure, persons that can convince others denying part of their very existence is somehow their 'god's will' - are NOT usually the type person I'd trust for 'honest' advice.
To me, experiencing deep love with someone is a way of experiencing 'God'. It all depends on our definition of God, which to me is unlimited and completely individual and experiential.
I would also ask yourself if your open inwardly. Do you believe in Love? Can you test that? Is it objective or verifiable?
In the end, I believe "love" is a category of thought, and that all thought is the result of various electro-chemical interactions in my brain. And I am quite confident that those processes can, in fact, be measured. It probably won't be long before such measurements are commonplace, and not too very long before such electro-chemical interactions can be manipulated at will. (Psychopharmaceuticals already do so in a crude way.) None of which prevents me from feeling (and appreciating) love every bit as strongly as anyone.
Same goes for my dog, by the way. The guy in the office down the hall I'm not so sure about.
This is really odd you use this analogy of God and gravity because I thought of the exact same analogy just a few days ago. Brilliant minds think alike I guess.
Another excellent article Mr. Chopra.
Really? That's what you guess? LOL.