On My Belief

While most will know that I am a Buddhist, I have never sought to explain or espouse my views in public and hardly even in private as well. However, I chanced upon an excellent article in The Straits Times today, that amazingly seemed to write out of my own brain. Honestly, I was very excited to read it, seeing my thoughts expressed so well and succintly by someone else. Entitled 'The neural Buddhist', it is written by Mr David Brooks and originally published in the New York Times.

"In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brillant essay titled Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To them, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behaviour. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

Wolfe understood the central assertion in this kind of thinking.: Everything is material and "the soul is dead". He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is an example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as The Origin of Species shaped social thinking, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world. And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it's going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

In recent years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosuncratic network of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuition. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. (Indeed these were my immediate reactions after reading The Selfish Gene!)

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Professor Andrew Newberg of UPenn has shown that transcendent experiences can be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant athiesm. Instead, it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is. (I couldn't have summed this up better myself.)

In their argument with atheists, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. (YES!!!) It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasise self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revalation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personalized God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behaviour day to day.

We're in the middle of a scientific revolution. It's going to have big cultural effects."

To wrap up however, I wish to state my only main contention with the article, which is its belief of a 'scientific revolution that will have big cultural effects'. Firstly, in my own circumstances, it was not the cognitive revolution or anything to do with science at all that made me have such thoughts from a relatively young age of about 10 years ago, it was more of me trying to understand myself and human beings. And it is this same belief in my understanding of human beings that leads me to think that it is highly unlikely that the new cognitive movement will bring about a change in thoughts as far as religion is concerned, because I do not think it is innate in the average (by average, I mean the general population, with no referral at all to intellect) mind to go beyond the black and white of reason and faith, into the grey of truth.