by Patrick Glynn
This book had its origins in a spiritual awakening or, to put the situation somewhat less glamorously, after many years of being a philosophical atheist or agnostic, I finally realized that there was in fact a God. A God, a soul, a survival after death. This, of course, would not be news to most people. Depending on how you interpret opinion polls, upwards of 70 percent of Americans seem to share such beliefs. But for me, as I think would be true for many others like me, and possibly even for some of you, it was news. Big news.
For despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are believers, our intellectual culture has been dominated by skepticism. When I did undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard in the 1970s, for example, it was taken for granted that traditional religious beliefs were a thing of the past, invalidated by science, incompatible with a modern outlook. There were believers among the professors, of course. But the culture was agnostic. There was a certain tendency, which I came to share, to view religious belief and practice as manifestations of intellectual inconsistency, emotional weakness, or a lack of cultural sophistication.
This is an old complaint among religiously minded people, and I don't wish to add my voice to those of the complainers. I would argue instead -- and I try to show in this book -- that the situation is in the process of changing. The day, I believe, is soon coming when skepticism, unbelief, is going to be the minority position, not just among the populace at large, but even among intellectuals. What happened to me -- the rediscovery of the spiritual -- is happening to others and is on the verge of happening to our culture as a whole.
The reason lies in a series of dramatic new developments in science, medicine, and other fields that have radically transformed the old existence-of-God debate. Essentially, over the past twenty years, a significant body of evidence has emerged, shattering the foundations of the long-dominant modern secular worldview. These new discoveries, it seems to me, add up to a powerful-indeed, all-but-incontestable-case for what once was considered a completely debatable matter of "faith": the existence of soul, afterlife, and God.
I came upon these new discoveries rather late in the game -- long after I had decided, on the basis of intensive philosophical study, that there was no God in a personal sense, no afterlife, no soul. I embraced skepticism at an early age, when I first learned of Darwin's theory of evolution in, of all places, Catholic grade school. It immediately occurred to me that either Darwin's theory was true or the creation story in the Book of Genesis was true. They could not both be true, and I stood up in class and told the poor nun as much.
Thus began a long odyssey away from the devout religious belief and practice that had marked my childhood toward an increasingly secular and rationalistic outlook. I was not alone on this journey. In the 1960s, American culture was entering a secular phase. Vatican Council II -- the great leap of the Catholic Church into modernity -- had left even devout Catholics with many questions about their faith. The period was rife with experimental notions, and religious intellectuals were increasingly absorbing the secular themes and tendencies of the larger culture. In 1965, theologian Harvey Cox published The Secular City, an enormously influential book that argued that the churches should simply abandon all notions of transcendence and spirit in favor of a new model of positive social change based on secular social science. The following year, Time magazine, surveying the state of contemporary theology, asked on its cover "Is God Dead?"'
In the universities, He was dead, or appeared to be. When I left my Jesuit high school to attend Harvard in 1969, I plunged into an environment where the death or disappearance of God was simply taken for granted. In those days, the era of "New Left" ascendancy and anti-Vietnam War protests, the curriculum was dominated by the writings of the atheist Karl Marx, whose work had assumed an importance that professors of an earlier age might have granted only to the Bible. Even in my department, English -- which was largely free of political and Marxist tendencies -- the emphasis of the curriculum was on secular themes. English at Harvard was really a course in intellectual history, and Western intellectual history seemed to be the story of what Yale literary scholar J. Hillis Miller called "the disappearance of God": the gradual loss of faith by the novelists, poets, and great thinkers of the West.
It was not so much that the professors who taught me were antireligious -- the English department faculty (apart from a couple of practicing Catholics and a few other churchgoers) was marked by a kind of sad yearning for lost Christianity. It was simply assumed that religious belief had become impossible for rational human beings in the modern era, a fact that one accepted with a certain melancholy and nostalgia for previous ages when it was still possible for "men" to believe. Some thought, following the nineteenth-century writer Matthew Arnold, that with religion gone, literature would somehow have to take its place. But this was a halfhearted notion.
Such views reflected the confidence of the intellectual world that modern science had destroyed all rational foundation for the religious worldview. "We moderns" were the heirs of the two great scientific revolutions: the Copernican and the Darwinian. Copernicus had shown that, contrary to the suggestion of the Bible, humanity was in no sense at the "center" of the cosmos. The earth was merely one planet orbiting the sun, which, in turn, as modern astronomy gradually discovered, was merely one of billions of stars in a universe billions of light-years across. Moreover, Darwin had demonstrated that it was not even necessary to posit a God to explain the origin of life. Life, and the human species itself, was the outcome of essentially random mechanisms operating over the eons. The creation story set forth in the Book of Genesis merely reflected the ignorance and naivete of our ancestors, who had invented the idea of God as a kind of defense mechanism to help them cope with the rigors of survival. Humanity was not God's creation; rather, we were, as the atheistic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell once put it, "a curious accident in a backwater," the inexplicable by-product of what was often referred to, in those days, as the "random universe."
By the time I graduated from Harvard, I had thoroughly absorbed this modern, secular viewpoint. But I remained a genuine "agnostic." I thought the existence of God very, very unlikely, but I did not know. So, after a year at Cambridge University on a fellowship, I returned to graduate school at Harvard to plumb the depths of Western philosophy. By the time I received my Ph.D. at the end of the 1970s, I was a convinced atheist.
The embrace of atheism did not bring joy. Somewhere, despite my "agnosticism," I had clung to the hope that I might be proven wrong. The day I grasped that the entire tradition of Western philosophy, from ancient to modern times, was essentially a recitation of the religious worldview -- of the idea of God -- was not a happy one. But the conclusion seemed inescapable. Reason, I thought, was the only path to truth. Reason could know only the following: that there was some intelligence or coherence to the nature of things that made reasoning, and for that matter science, possible; that human beings had a yearning for the divine; that public morality was necessary to maintain the social order. The yearnings for God, for a life after death, for justice in the universe, were just that: yearnings, wishes, with no basis in fact. The notion that God or "the gods" somehow reward virtue and punish wrongdoing was common to all human societies. But human societies defined virtue and wrongdoing in vastly different ways. They also had widely varying notions of God or "the gods." All these were fictions, human "conventions," that human beings, in their ignorance, had mistaken for nature, for reality.
Nearly all the great philosophers had recognized this, even the philosophers whom the Christian world had mistaken for monotheists: Socrates and Plato. Socrates debates the existence of the afterlife on his deathbed in Plato's Phaedo because he is not prepared to believe it. Hamlet debates the existence of an afterlife when he contemplates suicide because Shakespeare had the same skeptical view of such human beliefs as Socrates (Shakespeare was a writer in the Platonic tradition). The difference between ancient and modern philosophy essentially came down to an issue of discretion: The ancient philosophers attempted to conceal their atheism, while the modern philosophers broadcast their atheism from the housetops. The ancients were more discreet partly because the stakes were higher: In the old days, you could be persecuted and even executed for heterodox beliefs -- witness the death of Socrates. But the ancient philosophers also felt that promoting atheism publicly would ultimately endanger the philosopher himself, since it would render society immoral and anarchic. Socrates learned this lesson firsthand when a number of students in whom he inculcated his atheistic views turned out to be a menace to Athenian society.
So there it was. Not a pretty truth. In fact, I thought, an ugly one. But truth nonetheless. No God in the personal sense, no afterlife, no soul, no inherent justice in the universe. We were on our own.
Ironically, at the very time I was plumbing the depths of philosophical nihilism, science itself, unbeknownst to me and to many other people, was taking a surprising new turn. In 1973, in a lecture to the International Astronomical Union in Poland, the physicist and cosmologist Brandon Carter called attention to something he called "the anthropic principle." The anthropic principle, as Western thinkers are only now beginning to understand, amounted to a recitation of the original premise of the overarching modern philosophical idea: that of the "random universe."
All of us intellectuals had been proceeding on the assumption that our appearance in the universe had been entirely accidental, a random outcome of collisions of matter and of the eons-long process of evolution. It turned out that the picture was not so simple. In the hundred years and more since Darwin first proposed evolution by natural selection, scientists' understanding of the nature of the universe had greatly broadened and deepened. Using insights from relativity and particle physics in combination with observations from astronomy, modern cosmologists had been able to go a long way toward reconstructing the evolution of the entire universe, from its origins in the big bang.
The implications of this bigger picture were quite different from those that people had inferred from Darwin's theory. Suddenly, the universe, and human life, did not look so "random" or accidental after all. As Carter pointed out (in an unfortunately technical and roundabout way), life had to be, in effect, "pre-planned" from the very origin of the cosmos. In order to get life to appear in the universe billions of years after the universe began, you had to start planning very early-from the first nanosecond of the universe's coming into being. The possibility of producing life depended on everything's being "just right" from the very start-everything from the values of fundamental forces like electromagnetism and gravity, to the relative masses of the various subatomic particles, to things like the number of neutrino types at time 1 second, which the universe has to "know" already at 10-43 second. The slightest tinkering with a single one of scores of basic values and relationships in nature would have resulted in a universe very different from the one we inhabit -- say, one with no stars like our sun, or no stars, period. Far from being accidental, life appeared to be the goal toward which the entire universe from the very first moment of its existence had been orchestrated, fine-tuned.
Secular-minded scientists have not been happy with this discovery, for it seems to go one step short of suggesting that the universe is "designed" for life. Indeed, today the case for design looks very strong. Dissatisfied with such an implication, scientists have proposed numerous counter-hypotheses. For example, some scientists have speculated that there may exist billions of "parallel" universes -- which, mind you, we will never be able to detect -- of which ours just happens to be one. If there were billions of invisible universes, then the series of miraculous coincidences that produced life in this one might not seem so unlikely. One hears a great deal about "other" universes in cosmology today: "parallel universes," "baby universes," "bubble universes." But these appeals to invisible universes have a certain unpersuasive quality to them: They are reminiscent of medieval theologians' speculations about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin.
The anthropic principle marked an important turning point in the history of science: the first time a scientific discovery seemed to take us toward, rather than away from, the idea that there is a God. For hundreds of years science had been whittling away at the proposition that the universe was created or designed. Suddenly, scientists came upon a series of facts that seemed to point toward precisely such a conclusion-that the universe is the product of intelligence and aim, that in the absence of intelligent organization of a thousand details vast and small, we would not exist.
Two years later came another discovery, far afield from the realm of astronomy and physics. Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist, published a book called Life After Life, recounting what he called "near-death experiences," deathbed visions of people who had "died and made a comeback." Such people, victims of serious accidents, heart attacks, or other near-death crises, brought back detailed descriptions of what they called a realm beyond death. They described leaving their bodies and witnessing medical resuscitation procedures from a point above the operating table. They told of having a sudden sense of peace and detachment, an absence of pain. Some described moving through a "tunnel" to a heavenly landscape with vivid colors and encountering a "Being of Light" that emanated a powerful, unearthly love. Many identified this Being as Christ. Some reported being greeted by relatives who had passed away. A few actually recounted undergoing a detailed "review" of their lives -- a three-dimensional sequential replay of every thought, action, feeling, and event they had lived through, as well as the reactions of the people they interacted with -- during which the Being offered a critical commentary and in which they felt joy, shame, humiliation, or sorrow, depending on whether they had done night or wrong. Those who had such "near-death experiences" insisted that they were real, not hallucinatory. Many claimed the experience had changed their lives.
Initially, the scientific community was prepared to dismiss these experiences out of hand as so many hallucinations. Even today many scientists -- for the most part, those unfamiliar with the detailed research in the area -- still assume such an explanation to be adequate. But a small army of trained researchers following in Moody's footsteps have corroborated his initial findings, and several researchers have produced compelling evidence -- that is, closely documented cases of "autoscopic" perception-suggesting that so-called out-of-body experiences do occur. The majority of researchers who have investigated the phenomenon, generally professionals with medical, psychological, or other scientific training -- many of whom started out as skeptics -- have concluded that these experiences are authentic.
If the anthropic principle represented a rediscovery of order -- and seemingly of design -- in the universe, then near-death research offered the first systematic body of evidence suggestive of the existence of a soul.
The 1970s were a period of intellectual ferment, and other developments followed. One of the most important transformations took place in the field of psychiatry and psychology. Since the days of Sigmund Freud, psychiatry and psychology had been bastions of atheism. (At one point, no more than 1.1 percent of the membership of the American Psychological Association reported having any form of belief in God -- in contrast with the 95 percent of the American population who claimed to accept the existence of some sort of Supreme Being.) Freud, of course, had characterized religious belief not only as an "Illusion," but also as a "neurosis" -- in effect, a collective mental disorder that humanity was in the process of outgrowing. Yet beginning in the 1970s, evidence began to emerge showing a powerful correlation between religious commitment and overall mental health. A few mental health professionals began to insist on the necessity of factoring "spiritual" considerations into therapy. Most notable was psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, whose 1978 book, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, spurred a virtual revolution in thinking about therapy. Peck criticized the psychiatric profession for ignoring and denigrating religious belief and argued that mental health could not be separated from considerations of spiritual belief and morality. His book rocketed to the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for more than ten years. By the 1980s an increasing number of physicians and researchers were probing the so-called mind-body connection and the apparent link between religious or spiritual commitment and physical health. Today there is growing evidence that physical health, too, may have a spiritual dimension.
Not until the early 1990s did I become aware of these revolutionary developments, beginning with the literature on near-death experiences. Because I had surveyed the evidence relating to the existence of God so carefully in the 1970s (though still unaware of near-death research and the as yet little-known anthropic principle), I could see immediately how radically the intellectual landscape had changed. The totality of the evidence as I understood it in the mid-1970s suggested one conclusion. Today the evidence suggests quite a different one.
I am not claiming that anyone today can reason his or her way to faith in God. This was not even true in my case. For one thing, there was a stage in my life when I never would have bothered to pick up or read a book on near-death experiences, simply because such literature did not fit with my preconceptions of what was important or what was true. (Indeed, I came across a magazine article on one such experience in the 1980s. I read it, was puzzled, and then dismissed it from my mind. I thought I already knew the truth.)
St. Paul writes that faith is a "gift" of God. My own experience supports this. Two things were necessary, I believe, before I was able to open my mind sufficiently even to notice the new evidence. One was a decision that I made, and the other was an encounter that was given to me.
The decision that I made was to reject nihilism as a basis for moral decision-making. It took me many years to arrive at this point, and I did so only after finding through experience that a nihilistic outlook was existentially unsustainable. For years I had gone along accepting the "solution" to nihilism proposed by the twentieth-century German Jewish emigre philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss, a probing scholar of almost Talmudic meticulousness, had rediscovered the "esoteric" atheistic themes of the classical Greek philosophers but at the same time had recovered the rationale for their "esotericism" or secretiveness. Strauss had witnessed the disastrous social and political consequences of the modern death-of-God philosophies. He had watched as Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" -- and the latter's celebration of the "noble virtues" of barbarism and cruelty -- became the theme of German politics under Hitler. He had seen the man he always regarded as Nietzsche's rightful successor and Germany's most brilliant twentieth-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, enthusiastically embrace the Nazi regime, with its viciously anti-Semitic policies. As a Jew, Strauss was no longer welcome in the German universities. Like so many other German Jewish intellectuals, he was in exile from Germany by the 1930s, first in Britain, and later America, where he contrived to found his own philosophical movement, based on the insights he had derived from the Platonic tradition.
The point of his work was this: The philosopher who discovered that there was no God and that all values were relative did not want to broadcast this insight to the populace at large. It was important to sustain a decent social order, even if the philosopher, in some sense, held in contempt the naive beliefs on which the social order was based. The goal of life was to preserve the philosopher's freedom of inquiry -- and, at some level, to save one's skin. Modern liberal democracy, whatever it lacked in "nobility," permitted this: It provided both freedom and a stable social order. Strauss became a privately atheistic, aristocratically minded, and conservative defender of liberal democracy -- in particular against the surviving form of totalitarianism, Communism -- and encouraged his students to do the same. For many years, I made this cause my own as a political Journalist and later as an official of the Reagan administration. The byword of this way of life was "honor," essentially the sort of morality that Aristotle sets forth in his Nichomachean Ethics. But it was "skin-deep" morality, for at some level one had the secret atheist insight: If God is dead, then everything is permitted.
Under such conditions, one's intentions may be generally good. But if you come to imagine that there is no moral order to the universe, the incentives to good conduct, particularly in private life, are, unfortunately, much weakened. There is little to justify great self-sacrifice or deep personal commitment. Indeed, it is hard, as I later saw in retrospect, to feel or express love to the fullest extent. Even if one cares for others and thinks one cares greatly, one is inclined to be guided in the final analysis by one's selfish wishes. What is there in the nihilist's universe to call forth sacrifice? And without a willingness to sacrifice, one's capacity to care for others is narrowly circumscribed. Such was my state in the early 1990s, when, rather than work on a marriage much in need of repair -- and badly strained by my uncompromising commitment to my own intellectual and political projects -- I sought a divorce, amicably, as the saying goes, more or less decently, but still with very painful consequences for my first wife and me.
The best explanation of this state of being I found much later in the work of a contemporary of Leo Strauss's, another Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, Martin Buber, who nonetheless, in my opinion, came much closer to true wisdom, partly because he did not suppose wisdom and goodness to be separate. Buber speaks of two "basic words" in which the life of a human being inheres: "I-It" and "I-You." It does not matter, as Buber points out, if the It is replaced by a He or a She. The world of I-It is the world of utility, of using, of means and ends. It is a world of measurement and of comparison. The world of I-You is fundamentally different. It is the world of what Buber calls "encounter." When an I truly encounters a You -- and this can be anyone from the love of one's life to a panhandler one meets on the street -- measurement and comparison disappear. The You, when truly encountered, is immeasurable and directs us back to the Immeasurable.
Yet the encounter with the You requires a certain vulnerability, a willingness to risk the unpredictable possibilities of encounter, and ultimately a willingness to sacrifice. "It is up to you," Buber writes, "how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you." In embracing reason as my idol, I had turned my back on everything immeasurable and with it on the entire realm of I-You. I had submersed myself in a world where, in the final analysis, there was only I-It. The problem with the I-It world is that in it the I itself becomes "deactualized," As Buber notes. It almost ceases to exist: "When man lets it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds, his own I loses its actuality, until the incubus over him and the phantom inside him exchange the whispered confession of their need for redemption."
Such was my condition when one afternoon in the early 1990s, with my Cold War "cause" and my marriage behind me, I made a decision. I decided that whatever I had done in the past, I now resolved to live honorably. Without exception. In small things and large. In the most private matters as wen as the public ones. It was not that I believed in a God or an afterlife. I did not. I merely had come to see honor and conscience as a psychological necessity, as the sine qua non of a stable identity. If you did not adhere to your conscience, if there was nothing that in some way absolutely limited your conduct in life, then who were you, I asked myself? What were you?
In my mind was a fragmentary insight from an old column by George F. Will, commenting on Robert Bolt's superb play A Man for All Seasons, about the great English statesman and saint Sir Thomas More. Sir Thomas, Will wrote, had accepted death at the hands of Henry VIII rather than compromise his conscience and thereby his very identity. This seemed to me a sound psychological insight. I opened my copy of Bartlett's to a passage I remembered from Winston Churchill. The quotation came from Churchill's tribute to his defeated political opponent, Neville Chamberlain, on the floor of the House of Commons in 1940. I began to commit the quotation, word by word, to memory:
"The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor."
I still regard this passage as the most concise, coherent, and persuasive argument for a strictly honorable life on purely secular grounds.
The first step, the rejection of nihilism, prepared me for the second -- an encounter with love sufficiently deep to bring an intimation of the divine. It was shortly after my decision that I encountered Gabriele. Someone once said that it is hard to fall in love without thinking of God. Such was my experience. Ours was a wonderful romance that would culminate in marriage two years later. But these romantic feelings pointed me toward something deeper. I read much later Buber's notion that every true encounter with the You points to the You of God: "Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You. Every single You is a glimpse of that. Through every single You the basic word addresses the eternal You. Such was my experience, though I had no words to describe it. Beneath the feelings was something else. Buber writes:
"Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. Jesus' feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one "has"; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its "content" or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force.... Love is the responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling -- the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that is nailed his life long to the cross of the world, capable of what is immense and bold enough to risk it: to love man."
For reasons that I hardly understood, I began to utter from time to time a little prayer of thanksgiving.
I had not changed my mind. Gabriele was a believer, not a churchgoer at the time, but a strong spiritual Christian. And we debated the issue of God extensively -- along with politics, psychology, foreign policy, and a dozen other topics. But I was not prepared to budge from a philosophical position that I had worked so hard to attain -- even if my conduct was strangely parting ways with my philosophical framework. What happened, however, is that my mind became sufficiently open so that when, by happenstance, during our second summer together I came across a book on the afterlife in Crown Books, I picked it up and read it -- first with interest and then with the dawning and somewhat horrifying realization that I had been wrong, wrong about everything, for upwards of twenty years.
Soon I worked my why through virtually the entire literature of near-death experiences-books by Raymond Moody, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and Melvin Morse. Eventually I spent several weeks in the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, poring over the scientific journals in which the more technical aspects of near-death research are explored and debated. I examined the arguments attempting to attribute near-death experiences to some form of hallucination, and I examined the analyses refuting these theories in turn. The evidence seemed to me overwhelmingly on the side of the nonskeptics.
Later I turned to the physical sciences and discovered that in the two or three decades since I had been introduced to the random, materialistic universe that is still the staple of modern education, this too had effectively been refuted or overtaken by an entirely new vision. I learned of the anthropic principle in cosmology and of the profound new mysteries of the Cosmos that science had unearthed and could no longer adequately explain. It was clear that the old materialistic paradigm, the fundamental modern framework of the random, mechanistic universe, on which we proud intellectuals had based all our atheism and anxiety, was coming apart at the seams.
I broadened my search to psychology and medicine, and found parallel developments there.
Rapidly a picture emerged of a universe entirely different from the one I thought I had been living in. Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that not only cast deep doubt on, but also, from any reasonable perspective, effectively refuted my atheistic outlook.
It was not just an intellectual realization. The discovery that I had been so dead wrong about the fundamentals of life sent me, I have to admit, into a bit of a psychological tailspin. I realized how wrong I had been, how selfish, how arrogant -- I will say it -- how sinful. It took time, reading, contemplation, reasoning, prayer, and a great deal of extremely patient help (and good humor) from Gabriele for me to work my way out of my spiritual froth back to an even keel, to determine what I did and did not believe about the nature of the spiritual universe, and to understand the limits of what indeed we could know about such things. But there were also spiritual experiences along the way -- beckonings, intuitions, and even minor miracles -- that, as every spiritually oriented person learns, are actually there for the perceiving, if only we quiet our hearts.
I have said I am not claiming reason can bring one to belief in God. What I am saying is this: Reason no longer stands in the way, as it once clearly did. The past two decades of research have overturned nearly all the important assumptions and predictions of an earlier generation of modern secular and atheist thinkers relating to the issue of God. Modern thinkers assumed that science would reveal the universe to be ever more random and mechanical; instead it has discovered unexpected new layers of intricate order that bespeak an almost unimaginably vast master design. Modern psychologists predicted that religion would be exposed as a neurosis and outgrown; instead, religious commitment has been shown empirically to be a vital component of basic mental health. Modern thinkers assumed that spirituality would be shown to have a physical basis; instead, something like the reverse has occurred: Health has been shown to have a spiritual underpinning. And, dogmatically, science and philosophy assumed that reason could never encounter evidence of a soul. But the application of modern research techniques to near-death studies has produced compelling data that no alternative hypothesis could explain.
"Some people learn from their mistakes," said Bismarck. "I on the other hand make it a practice to learn from the mistakes of others." Today, it seems to me, there is no good reason for an intelligent person to embrace the illusion of atheism or agnosticism, to make the same intellectual mistakes I made. I wish -- how often do we say this in life? -- that I had known then what I know now. That is my reason for writing this book-to lay out what seems to me the now overwhelming analytical case against the purely secular view of life, so that thinking skeptics can judge for themselves.
So having told my story, let me set forth my case. I believe you will find, as I have, that the road to the spiritual view of life -- the process of filling what theologian Michael Novak has eloquently called "the empty shrine" at the core of modern existence -- is the greatest of intellectual, and human, adventures.
- from God: The Evidence
© Copyright Patrick Glynn, 1999