The End of Faith (5 page)

Or consider how you would feel if you learned that a nuclear war had erupted between
Israel and its neighbors over the ownership of the Temple Mount. If you were a
millennium-minded Christian, you would undoubtedly view this as a sign of Christ's
imminent return to earth. This would be nothing if not good news, no matter what the death
toll. There's no denying that a person's conception of the afterlife has direct
consequences for his view of the world.

Of course, religious moderation consists in not being too sure about what happens after
death. This is a reasonable attitude, given

the paucity of evidence on the subject. But religious moderation still represents a
failure to criticize the unreasonable (and dangerous) cer- tainty of others. As a
consequence of our silence on these matters, we live in a country in which a person cannot
get elected president if he openly doubts the existence of heaven and hell. This is truly
remark- able, given that there is no other body of “knowledge” that we require our
political leaders to master. Even a hairstylist must pass a licensing exam before plying
his trade in the United States, and yet those given the power to make war and national
policythose whose decisions will inevitably affect human life for generationsare not
expected to know anything in particular before setting to work. They do not have to be
political scientists, economists, or even lawyers; they need not have studied
international relations, military history, resource management, civil engineering, or any
other field of knowl- edge that might be brought to bear in the governance of a modern
superpower; they need only be expert fund-raisers, comport them- selves well on
television, and be indulgent of certain myths. In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly
defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are
allowing unreason and otherworldli- ness to govern our affairs ?

Without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable. Clearly, the
fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our
hope for a better life beyond the grave.

The World beyond Reason

As we will see in the last chapter of this book, there is little doubt that a certain
range of human experience can be appropriately described as “spiritual” or
“mystical”experiences of meaningful- ness, selflessness, and heightened emotion that
surpass our narrow identities as “selves” and escape our current understanding of the

mind and brain. But nothing about these experiences justifies arro- gant and exclusionary
claims about the unique sanctity of any text. There is no reason that our ability to
sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology politics, and
the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all.

The basis of our spirituality surely consists in this: the range of possible human
experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity. Clearly, some experiences
can utterly transform a per- son's vision of the world. Every spiritual tradition rests on
the insight that how we use our attention, from moment to moment, largely determines the
quality of our lives. Many of the results of spiritual practice are genuinely desirable,
and we owe it to ourselves to seek them out. It is important to note that these changes
are not merely emotional but cognitive and conceptual as well. Just as it is possible for
us to have insights in fields like mathematics or biology, it is possible for us to have
insights about the very nature of our own subjectivity. A variety of techniques, ranging
from the practice of meditation to the use of psychedelic drugs, attest to the scope and
plasticity of human experience. For millennia, contemplatives have known that ordinary
people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call “I” and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe.
This phenomenon, which has been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is
supported by a wealth of evidenceneuroscientific, philosophical, and intro- spective. Such
experiences are “spiritual” or “mystical,” for want of better words, in that they are
relatively rare (unnecessarily so), sig- nificant (in that they uncover genuine facts
about the world), and personally transformative. They also reveal a far deeper connection
between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines
of our subjectivity. There is no doubt that experiences of this sort are worth seeking,
just as there is no doubt that the popular religious ideas that have grown up around them,
especially in the West, are as dangerous as they are incredible. A truly rational approach
to this dimension of our lives would allow us

to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the
provincialism and dogmatism of our religious tradi- tions in favor of free and rigorous
inquiry.

There also seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much
of which has been ignored by main- stream science.18 The dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” remains a reasonable
guide in these areas, but this does not mean that the universe isn't far stranger than
many of us suppose. It is important to realize that a healthy, scien- tific skepticism is
compatible with a fundamental openness of mind.

The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has ever experienced
an objective world, or even a world at all. You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and
hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of
which remains a mystery. Your nervous system sections the undifferentiated buzz of the
universe into separate channels of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, as well as other
senses of lesser renownproprioception, kinesthesia, enteroreception, and even echolocation.19 The sights and sounds and pulsings that you experience at this moment are like different
spec- tra of light thrown forth by the prism of the brain. We really are such stuff as
dreams are made of. Our waking and dreaming brains are engaged in substantially the same
activity; it is just that while dreaming, our brains are far less constrained by sensory
information or by the fact-checkers who appear to live somewhere in our frontal lobes.
This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indica- tion of reality at large;
it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not
first been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system. While this gives rise
to a few philosophical problems concerning the foundations of our knowledge, it also
offers us a remarkable opportunity to deliberately transform the character of our
experience.

For every neuron that receives its input from the outside world, there are ten to a
hundred others that do not. The brain is therefore

talking mostly to itself, and no information from the world (with the exception of
olfaction) runs directly from a sensory receptor to the cortex, where the contents of
consciousness appear to be sequestered. There are always one or two breaks in the circuit synapsesgiving the neurons in question the opportunity to inte- grate feedback information, or
information from other regions of the brain. This sort of integration/contamination of
signal explains how certain drugs, emotional states, or even conceptual insights can
radically alter the character of our experience. Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision
of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions
lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.

It is also true, however, that people occasionally have experiences that are rightly
characterized as psychotic. As it turns out, there are many ways to deconstruct a self, to
extract (apparent) meaningful- ness from the deliverances of one's senses, and to believe
that one knows how the world is. Not all visionary experiences are created equal, to say
nothing of the worldviews derived from them. As in all things, some differences here make
all the difference; these differ- ences, moreover, can be rationally discussed.

As we will see, there is an intimate connection between spiritual- ity, ethics, and
positive emotions. Although a scientific approach to these subjects is still struggling to
be born, it is probably no more mysterious that most of us prefer love to fear, or regard
cruelty as wrong, than that we agree in our judgments about the relative size of objects
or about the gender of faces. At the level of the brain, the laws that underwrite human
happiness are unlikely to vary widely from person to person. In the later chapters of this
book, we will see that much can be made of this fact, long before the scientific details
ever become available to us.

O N C E we have examined the problems inherent to faith, and the threat that even “moderate”
religious faith, however inadvertently,

now poses to our survival, we can begin to situate our ethical intu- itions and our
capacity for spiritual experience within the context of a rational worldview. This will
require that we marshal insights from our growing understanding of the human brain, our
genetic conti- nuity with the rest of life, and the history of our religious ideas. In the
chapters that follow, I will try to reconcile the bewildering jux- taposition of two
facts: (1) our religious traditions attest to a range of spiritual experiences that are
real and significant and entirely worthy of our investigation, both personally and
scientifically; (2) many of the beliefs that have grown up around these experiences now
threaten to destroy us.

We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of rea- son, applied as
antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to
intrude upon our lives.20 Your child has died, or your wife has acquired a horrible illness that no doctor can cure,
or your own body has suddenly begun striding toward the graveand reason, no matter how
broad its compass, will begin to smell distinctly of formaldehyde. This has led many of us
to con- clude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in cer- tain
fantastical ideas can fulfill. It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be
irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the
sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can beindeed, must bedeeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin
to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another.

Science will not remain mute on spiritual and ethical questions for long. Even now, we can
see the first stirrings among psychologists and neuroscientists of what may one day become
a genuinely rational approach to these mattersone that will bring even the most rarefied
mystical experience within the purview of open, scientific inquiry. It is time we realized
that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and
awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with
reason.

In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to make both the conceptual

and the experiential bases for these claims explicit.

Coming to Terms with Belief

It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely
private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is
a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns
one. It should be easy enough to see that belief in the full efficacy of prayer, for
instance, becomes an emphatically public concern the moment it is actually put into practice: the moment a surgeon lays aside his
worldly instruments and attempts to suture his patients with prayer, or a pilot tries to
land a passenger jet with nothing but repetitions of the word “Hallelujah” applied to the
controls, we are swiftly delivered from the provinces of private faith to those of a
criminal court.

As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the mem- ber of a chosen people,
awash in the salacious exports of an evil cul- ture that is turning your children away
from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by
deal- ing death to these infidelsand flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than
a matter of being asked to do it. It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous. We all know that human beings are capable of incredible brutality, but we would
do well to ask, What sort of ideology will make us most capable of it? And how can we place these beliefs beyond the fray of normal dis- course,
so that they might endure for thousands of years, unper- turbed by the course of history
or the conquests of reason? These are problems of both cultural and psychological
engineering. It has long been obvious that the dogma of faithparticularly in a scheme in
which the faithful are promised eternal salvation and doubters are damnedis nothing less
than their perfect solution.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that
any of our books was authored by the Cre- ator of the universe. The Bible, it seems
certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for
whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely
on such a document as the basis for our worldviewhowever heroic the efforts of redactorsis
to repu- diate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just
begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see
that the greatest problem con- fronting civilization is not merely religious extremism:
rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to
faith itself. Religious moderates are, in large part, responsi- ble for the religious
conflict in our world, because their beliefs pro- vide the context in which scriptural
literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.