I am currently reading a book called Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by the religion correspondent for NPR, Barbara Bradley Hagerty. It's pretty interesting, almost like a modern update to William James now that a hundred years of science have passed. (And, in fact, the author explicitly acknowledges James as her forerunner.) She looks at all sorts of studies that have been done on the border of science and spirituality: for instance, what do brain scanners tell us about the meditation of Buddhist monks and Carmelite nuns, what do psychedelic drugs really do to your brain and how is it similar to mystical experience, can people be healed from sickness simply by praying, etc.
I am not yet finished with the book, but it seems that in the last analysis time and time again, just like with William James, science can give no real answer as to whether mystical experience or prayer or God are real or just a delusion. For instance, when someone takes LSD and says they had a mystical experience of God, who is to say whether or not it was a "real" mystical experience? Yes, it was caused by certain chemicals in the brain, but the same seems to be true about mystical experiences brought on by prayer, and indeed about all mental phenomena. As we know from Kant, we can't say definitively that a mystical experience was "real," because that implies that we somehow know the true nature of supernatural reality, the noumena of the divine, so that we can compare it to the LSD experience and say "That's not it."
Anyway, the problem with reading a book like this is it can make it very easy to view everything reductionistically. If you can point to chemicals in the brain that accompany certain spiritual experience, you can show that it all proceeds according to physical laws, and thus one might conclude that there is no such thing as spirit, only matter. This is the real question of this post: is it possible for spirituality to coexist with psychology and neuroscience, or do the latter rule out the reality of the former?
This idea came to me while I was praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament today at the National Basilica (yeah, I'm so holy): The Eucharist may provide the key to understanding how psychology can coexist with spirituality. We tend to think that something is either matter or spirit—but why not both? The Eucharist is said to be something that is both divine and material—the union of physical and spiritual. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." Why might our minds/bodies not be the same way? I.e., both soul and body at the same time. (This can apply to all else in the world, too—all matter can be conceived as the stuff of God, in a way.) The only difference here is that with God, the Word is becoming flesh—it is an incarnation—a reaching down—whereas for us and our souls, it is a groping upward—a divinization—the flesh becoming Word, if you will. This makes me think of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, on "the teacher" and "the learner." In us, especially within our brains, the matter of the universe is striving to become spirit. As Carl Sagan once said, "We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." This also reminds me of the part in Paradise Lost when one of the angels is telling Adam how spiritual things grow out of the baser matter of the earth, like a plant rising from the dirt into a stalk and leaves and then flowering and bearing fruit, and how mankind might one day grow into a more clarified, etherized existence, like that of the angels.
-JMK
I am not yet finished with the book, but it seems that in the last analysis time and time again, just like with William James, science can give no real answer as to whether mystical experience or prayer or God are real or just a delusion. For instance, when someone takes LSD and says they had a mystical experience of God, who is to say whether or not it was a "real" mystical experience? Yes, it was caused by certain chemicals in the brain, but the same seems to be true about mystical experiences brought on by prayer, and indeed about all mental phenomena. As we know from Kant, we can't say definitively that a mystical experience was "real," because that implies that we somehow know the true nature of supernatural reality, the noumena of the divine, so that we can compare it to the LSD experience and say "That's not it."
Anyway, the problem with reading a book like this is it can make it very easy to view everything reductionistically. If you can point to chemicals in the brain that accompany certain spiritual experience, you can show that it all proceeds according to physical laws, and thus one might conclude that there is no such thing as spirit, only matter. This is the real question of this post: is it possible for spirituality to coexist with psychology and neuroscience, or do the latter rule out the reality of the former?
This idea came to me while I was praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament today at the National Basilica (yeah, I'm so holy): The Eucharist may provide the key to understanding how psychology can coexist with spirituality. We tend to think that something is either matter or spirit—but why not both? The Eucharist is said to be something that is both divine and material—the union of physical and spiritual. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." Why might our minds/bodies not be the same way? I.e., both soul and body at the same time. (This can apply to all else in the world, too—all matter can be conceived as the stuff of God, in a way.) The only difference here is that with God, the Word is becoming flesh—it is an incarnation—a reaching down—whereas for us and our souls, it is a groping upward—a divinization—the flesh becoming Word, if you will. This makes me think of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, on "the teacher" and "the learner." In us, especially within our brains, the matter of the universe is striving to become spirit. As Carl Sagan once said, "We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." This also reminds me of the part in Paradise Lost when one of the angels is telling Adam how spiritual things grow out of the baser matter of the earth, like a plant rising from the dirt into a stalk and leaves and then flowering and bearing fruit, and how mankind might one day grow into a more clarified, etherized existence, like that of the angels.
-JMK
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