Of Science Reporters and Meat Puppets
By Denyse O’Leary
Why don’t the popular science media “get” spirituality?
Do you pay much attention to popular science media on the subject of spirituality? If you do, here is what you could learn:
Science has discovered that belief in God is a gene, or maybe a module or circuit in the brain, or perhaps a form of epilepsy.
The reason you believe in God is that Alley Oop and Fred Flintstone believed. And as a result, they either did -- or did not -- leave more fertile descendants. The ol' Darwinian magic explains it both ways, you see. Religion is both a glitch that is good for you and a glitch that is bad for you.
No matter which version rules, the bottom line is that you do not believe because God is real and has revealed himself.
Actually, in that milieu, God can be anything at all except an actual cause of events. Any other thesis, no matter how preposterous, can be maintained as "science."
Your mind, too, is an illusion; it is simply the effect created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. It is not a cause of events. You are in fact a meat puppet, a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag, or a robot programmed by your selfish genes.
Free will? Not a chance. You merely evolved in such a way as to believe you have free will.
Now, these doctrines are not derived from evidence, they are imposed on evidence. Anywhere outside of popular science media, you will discover an entirely different set of facts -- not just speculation either but confirmed by considerable evidence:
You will know that
* When people choose to change their minds, they change their brains (this is key to treating some mental disorders).
* Spirituality is usually associated with better, not worse, health.
* Spiritual experiences change lives.
* As neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, my lead author on the just-released The Spiritual Brain showed, spiritual experiences involve complex mental events, like other experiences, and are not the result of a brain glitch.
* The most reasonable assumption to make about genuine spiritual experiences, based on the data, is that the people who have them do contact a power outside themselves.
The question that intrigued me through the many months of long nights, researching and writing on all these topics, was -- why do the popular science media accept so much nonsense when the facts are so readily available?
One possible answer is that most science writers simply know little about spirituality. I am one of the few who is a member of both a confessional Christian writers organization and a national science writers association. When you don't know much about a topic, you can easily believe things that you would never believe if you did.
But given the stature that science -- and science reporting -- has in our society, this situation is scandalous and long overdue for change. I hope that the just-released The Spiritual Brain will help by setting out the central facts that your mind is real and spirituality is good for you.
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Denyse O’Leary is a Toronto-based journalist and author. One of her blogs is the Post-Darwinist.
