I'm "spiritual but not religious." Here's what that means for a physicist

[Tholkappiyan Vembian]

I'm "spiritual but not religious." Here's what that means for a physicist

I'm "spiritual but not religious." Here's what that means for a physicist Spiritual experiences can be explained in terms of a highly evolved brain. But they also can be extremely meanin...

https://bigthink.com/the-well/spiritual-not-religious-physicist/

I’m “spiritual but not religious.” Here’s what that means for a physicist

Spiritual experiences can be explained in terms of a highly evolved brain. But they also can be extremely meaningful.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think; Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Adobe Stock

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The great physicist Isaac Newton was a strong believer in God, as was essentially everyone in his day. He believed that the motion of the heavenly bodies required “the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” 
• Just in the last century, scientists have found physical explanations for many phenomena once thought to lie in the province of philosophy or theology. 
• Though all things can be explained in terms of atoms and fundamental forces, this does not rob them of their magnificence or meaningfulness.

Alan Lightman

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For many years, my wife and I have spent our summers on an island in Maine. It’s a small island, only about 30 acres in size, and there are no bridges or ferries connecting it to the mainland. Consequently, each of the families who live on the island has their own boat.

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My story concerns a particular summer night, in the wee hours, when I had just rounded the south end of the island and was carefully motoring toward my dock. No one was out on the water but me. It was a moonless night and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. Taking a chance, I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I laid down in the boat and looked up.

A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience. After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos — a merging with something far larger than myself. After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I’d been lying there looking up.

Spiritual materialism

I’m a scientist and have always had a scientific view of the world, by which I mean that the Universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff, and that stuff is governed by a small number of fundamental laws. Every phenomenon has a cause, which originates in the physical Universe. I’m a materialist, not in the sense of seeking happiness in cars and nice clothes, but in the literal sense of the word: the belief that everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more. No ethereal substances, no psychic energies, no heaven and hell.

Yet, I have transcendent experiences. I felt like I was part of the stars that summer night in Maine. I’ve made eye contact with wild ospreys. I have feelings of being part of things larger than myself. I have a sense of connection to other people and to the world of living things. I appreciate beauty. I have experiences of wonder and awe. Of course, all of us have had similar feelings and moments. While these experiences are not exactly the same, they have sufficient similarity that I’ll gather them together under the heading of “spirituality.”

Thus, I call myself a spiritual materialist. I’m a materialist, as I’ve said, in the sense that I believe that the world is made of material atoms and nothing more. (By material atoms here, I include subatomic particles and the quantifiable energy fields produced by those particles.) At the same time, I acknowledge and embrace the spiritual experiences we all have. 

I realize that many people associate spirituality with an all-powerful and all-knowing Being that purposefully created the Universe. I respect those beliefs although I do not share them. I believe that spiritual experiences, as I have defined them, can be explained in terms of a highly evolved brain, which in turn is rooted in material neurons, each of which is a special arrangement of atoms and molecules.

Meaningful matter

Essentially all neuroscientists and most scientists in general believe that the brain and the mind are the same thing. That is, there is no separate, immaterial essence responsible for our thoughts and mental experiences. According to this scientific view, to which I subscribe, all thoughts, emotions, and other mental activities including spiritual feelings are caused by physical processes in the brain — although we still have not filled in all the blanks to get from the material brain to our mental experiences, the most fundamental being consciousness.

By attributing spiritual experiences to a complex of interconnected electrical and chemical activities within the neurons in our brains, I do not mean in the slightest to minimize the magnificence of these experiences. They can be among the most meaningful moments of our lives. The human brain is capable of extraordinary feats, such as creating poetry and music, play, discovering the laws of nature, and conceiving cities and then building them. In fact, our brains, with roughly 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to a thousand other neurons, are the most complicated objects we know of in the Universe.

Most scientists are materialists. In fact, the vast majority of scientists are sufficiently committed to a materialist view of the world that even if they saw a wheelbarrow suddenly float in the air, they would look for some physical explanation, like a superconducting magnet under the wheelbarrow. If not finding that, they would assume that some new law of nature, yet to be discovered, was at work — but nothing supernatural.

A commitment to materialism

Several years ago, I surveyed a number of scientists to find out how many believed in miracles, defined as events that cannot be explained by scientific rules and laws, either now or in the future. Essentially all the scientists firmly and unequivocally rejected anything “supernatural.” For example, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore said to me, “If I could not find any way out of believing that a miracle had occurred would I then believe it to be a miracle? I think the answer is that I would still not believe it to be a miracle, only some outcome that I can’t understand.”

How and why do scientists and the scientifically minded among us make such a strong commitment to a material world, even though we all have the “spiritual” experiences mentioned above? I often trace the beginnings of my own materialist view to my childhood, where I converted a large closet into a laboratory and did experiments there. 

One experiment stands out. I read in Popular Science or some other magazine that the time for a pendulum to make a complete swing, called its period, is proportional to the square root of the length of the pendulum. (If you quadruple the length, the period doubles.) What a fascinating rule! But I had to see if it was true. With string and a fishing weight for the bob at the end of the string, I constructed pendulums of various sizes and measured their lengths with a ruler and timed their periods with a stopwatch. The rule was true. And it worked every time, without exception. Using the rule I had personally verified, I could even accurately predict the periods of new pendulums before I built them.

This pendulum law was an amazing discovery for a young kid. There was a profound lesson here: The physical world, or at least this little corner of it, obeyed reliable, logical, quantitative laws. I concluded that nature was material, and that it was orderly. No supernatural or ethereal elements were needed to explain the behavior of things.

I now think that the origins of my materialist worldview must be more complex than the experiments I did as a child. Strict materialism is part of a disbelief in the supernatural, which is related to the powers of God. The great physicist Isaac Newton, who did far more experiments than me, was a strong believer in God, as was essentially everyone in his day. In his masterwork, The Principia, Newton stated that the synchronized performance of moons and planets could never be explained by “mere mechanical causes” but required “the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” In particular, as he wrote in his Optics, Newton believed that friction would slowly degrade the motions of planets over time without the active intervention of God. “Some inconsiderable irregularities [in planetary orbits]… will apt to increase till the system wants a reformation” by God. The action of such a Being would, of course, represent a miraculous event. Thus, Newton was not strictly a materialist. He invoked something beyond the physical world to explain behaviors within the physical world.

A waning of religion

Newton’s era and culture were very different from mine. In Newton’s time, little was known about the physical world compared to today. Virtually everyone believed in some form of the supernatural. Virtually everyone believed in God. Religion was much more a part of daily life. In fact, until 1791, the government of the United Kingdom required attendance at the Church of England. By contrast, according to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, only 33% of scientists say they believe in God.

Just in the last century, scientists have found physical explanations for many phenomena once thought to lie in the province of philosophy or theology. We understand the nature and causes of many diseases and have developed antibiotics and vaccines to protect us, greatly extending human lifetimes. We have uncovered the instructions (DNA) for creating new life and can actually manipulate those instructions in the lab. We have discovered the energy source of stars and the distances to them. We know the origins of the atoms in our bodies: the nuclear furnaces of stars. We have strong evidence for the origin of our entire Universe, in an extremely hot and dense state called the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. And for 250 years now, we have known that the planets do not need to be continually spun up by the finger of God to maintain their orbits.

Although there are many things scientists don’t yet understand, we have drawn back the veil on much of the cosmos that was cloaked in mystery and attributed to God in Newton’s day. Even among the general American public, belief in God has decreased from 98% in 1953 to 81% in 2022. Science cannot disprove the existence of the supernatural, but it can impact the reasons for believing in the supernatural.

Conquering the Unknown

This conquering of much of the Unknown has become part of our cultural heritage. This enormous increase in knowledge, which many of us take for granted, has seeped into our view of the world. It has made us more comfortable being in this strange part of the cosmos we find ourselves in, and more confident of our ability to understand the world around us. And I think, as much as the experiments he did, this molded a young boy into a materialist. And now a spiritual materialist.

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[R Shanmuga Sundaram]

My kind of guy!

I have sat before a plant and talked to it.

I felt I saw God after a few days of guided breathing exercises.

After a week of very limited, controlled food (actually, liquids) intake, I felt light as air, full of energy and not tired at all on two to three hours of sleep a day.

I have felt oneness with nature on some very special occasions, with no guidance or any exercises.

On a very ordinary day, I woke up, felt everything around me was lit up with a soft luminous glow, felt every one around me was good and can do no evil and they are my brothers/sisters and I felt joyful and completely at peace. This lasted almost three days and how I wish I could experience that feeling again! This happened in Hosur and incidentally, Prem (my wife) had an identical experience at the same time.

On the other hand, I have had a few who tried to 'initiate' me and it never worked. May be, as one practitioner put it "இனி மேலா? இப்போது நீ காலி பெருங்காய டப்பா. முன்பே ஆரம்பித்திருக்க வேண்டும். இப்போது ஆரம்பித்தால், நடக்குமா என்று தெரியவில்லை".

With all these positive and negative experiences, I am a staunch materialist and believe that our experiences are born out of our brain and there is nothing more.

I write this not to start yet another round of discussions / arguments but to state that I completely concur with what is expressed in the article.

Regards/Shan

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[Mohan Mani]

Hi Shan and everyone else..

My first time replying to this group. Tholkapian added me after I had visits him in London with a friend. 

Anyway , my take, I find it strange that everyone is retreating into the personal here with how the idea m

Of the “spirit” animated our existence and emotions. It seems to be an almost refusal to engage with what

Is really political and societal as to the argument about “‘material” and what is “spiritual”. Coming from india 

And with that background of the battle between what those two and the political movements wherein to draw

Some paralllels , Gandhi talking about the mythical past and spiritualism and Periyar mounting his rationist 

Movement against that, the dynamic calls for a more engaged answer here. I would think that with the way the

Rationalist /periyarist movement happened in TN, we are well equipped to abide by that dictum

Of Baltimore that  “If I could not find any way out of believing that a miracle had occurred would I then believe it to be a miracle? I think the answer is that I would still not believe it to be a miracle, only some outcome that I can’t understand.”

Same with other materialist thought. Skepticism is it’s own reward, I cannot think of a world we’re we marry an amorphous spiritualism

With the concrete parameters of a robust materialism even if it hits justifiable limits a d we are at our wits end.

To succumb to arguments about the limits of rationalism, wherei the only recourse is to gl back t religion is abject poverty of the human essence.

This is not deny that people who would want to take the path of religion. It is a way of living in the world and so is the ratified air of “spiritualism”. Personally it does t answer anything except stew us into a state of mysticism and vulnerability into the same religious excesses we might want to escape. 

Who was it, Samuel Johnson, who said, after hitting his foot against a stone, that this disproves the idea go the non existence of matter.

I this in this world matter is matter, an elision into the empire of the spirit is just that, and escape and all religious figures / savants try to 

Make their way there, maybe it is the human condition, to get to a place to displace the weight of the burden of living , what is but matter.

The question of how to engage with this condition is key I guess, not if we have the right answers or not.

Regards,

Mohan

On Feb 27, 2024, at 12:07 AM, R Shanmuga Sundaram <rshan...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[R Shanmuga Sundaram]

Hi Mohan

Liked your answer, especially the important point "The question of how to engage with this condition is key I guess, not if we have the right answers or not.".

You can't argue against something that provides solace in a difficult world and therein lies spiritualism's appeal. No amount of logic, materialism, reasoning can refute such a belief system.

Marx was right after all and the full quote is poetic and accurate "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".

As to kicking of the stone, it's Samuel Johnson in an argument with Bishop Berkeley about idealism vs. materialism, who kicked a stone and said "I refute it thus"

Regards/Shan

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[Tholkappiyan Vembian]

I am also a materialist and scientific rationalist. My materialism and scientific rationalism, I like to think, is more open and wider. Nobody can escape materialism. Nobody, in the spiritual circle, proposes that we try to escape materialism.  There is no supernatural. What we understand as natural has been expanding and may expand further. Maybe I am wrong.

When we talk about science obviously we don't include pseudo science. The same applies to spiritualism. Straw-manning, pigeon-holing cannot be avoided. It is a psychological strength and can become a weakness after a limit. The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics) 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' is related to this.

Anyway, let us leave this topic and focus on many more topics where we are in agreement - social justice, fostering scientific attitude, the continuous challenge of maintaining unity with diversity, disseminating the hopeful real-world facts and the most important of all how we live, walk the talk, maintaining integrity and honesty with our values without which everything we talk is just hot-air and conceptual-drug (கருத்து போதை).

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[Mohan Mani]

Hi Thols, 

One final note before I drop this topic. First apologies for the many typos and grammatical errors in my earlier email. I was on a red eye flight and typing on ,my phone and didn't review and spell check before I sent that off.  

Anyway, to reply to your and Shan's notes - 

This from Shan - 

You can't argue against something that provides solace in a difficult world and therein lies spiritualism's appeal. No amount of logic, materialism, reasoning can refute such a belief system.

Yes, this is true, solace and refuge in a life that can be cruel and meaningless is a very human condition and that is the appeal and maybe the root of the rise of religion and god ( fyi, I am not a believer). and one can understand that, especially in the context of early hominids, and nascent civilizations where nature dictated the availability of food and subsistence/ survival of crops in later early agricultural societies, hence such  natural forces taking supernatural manifestations and thus the proliferation of deities in the image of natural forces ( agni/fire, vayu/air, indra/lighting in hinduism, and you can find equivalents across all civilizations - chinese, egyptian, aztec etc.. ) ... and thence to later gods until we reach the monotheistic single-gods abstracted away from any individual natural forces but in command of all natural forces. 

But yes, Marx's aphorism of religion being "the opium of the masses" is apt and very true, witnessing our own hindu delirium in so many rituals/festivals, the toruturing of flesh, walking on fire ( the extremes) to the soft delirium of everyday pious applying vibuthi/other religious marks that provide a "feel good" rush of possibly serotonin once performed. It symbolizes something, but is meaningless, because it can be substituted by something else totally if that something else is imbued with the same meaning.  And it is in other religions. Christians will do something and Muslims will do something else. That imbuing of meaning to that "something" is a totally cultural phenomenon and its is carried through over time, over generations. 

Anyay I am not contesting that  spiritualism and by extension religion can lend meaning in the face of the meaningless of life, all I am contesting is the  retreat into an easy mysticism that in turn can legitimize a belief in the supernatural. 

And Thol, to your call to leave armchair philosophising and get back to things like social justice, scientific attitude etc. I must say this. When I say we have to engage, what I am meaning is the calls to spiritualism ( this has nothing to do with Shan's brief take) and in extension to religion is always a counter argument against a robust skeptical rational humanism that posits equality, justice and freedom of all people. 

Specific to hinduism, the Hindutva movement, immersed more and more now in  its atavistic call for a past glory that resides in a mythical Ram-rajya, one has to look at what was spiritual that was made material, the violence that the spiritual brings upon the real world. 

To distill Hinduism into a couple of concepts - Dharma and Karma - again , these are concepts, but engrained in mythology and in the religious texts, that if you perform your Dharma ( * caste dharma , that is), you are going to gain Karma ( some kind of spiritual currency), that will enable you to be born again in a better caste. That is the sum total of the kernel of Hinduism. 

But this very (spiritual ) concept, sanctioned in the religious scriptures ( ramayana/shambuka, mahabaratha/ekalaya etc.. ) has engendered in the physical world , on a civilization scale, that dwarfs South Africa's Apartheid, ot the US's Slavery, since it has been extrant  for more than two thousand years, in uniquely founding a despicable concept dehumanizing people as being Untouchable among other things.  in keeping a section of population outside on the pale, outside the mainstream of life, outside the village ( in their Dalit Cheris/Basthis) and made a quarter of the people aliens in their own land over two millennia. 

So what I want to say is, one can be materialist/rational and not talk about the spiritual, but one has to engage with the spiritual/religious ideas/memes to battle against real world consequences that they can result in. Marx said in so many words that the economic state of a person dictates the consciousness, and in parallel there is the social status ( discriminated caste/slavery/apartheid) that again dictates an individuals consciousness and this proliferates over generations on its own.. proving profitable to the owners/originators of the ideology that put that very ideology in place. 

Let me leave you with a poem I had written, when i was still writing, this is from 10 years back and it is obviously about india and hinduism/the country that was hailed then in some articles about being "The empire of the spirit" in some newspaper, which prompted me to write this, hence the title - 

My Empire of the Spirit

I know you well 

The constant stench of your millennia-old scat 

Spewing out of forked tongues fills my nostrils

I see you coiled in the orange eyes of the horde

Your tentacles creeping everywhere 

You squatted on a million square miles and chanted into being 

This grotesque world, Arranged a tradition brick by brick

A tainted catalogue of traits apportioned at birth

A knotted philosophy that makes a fetish of duty and deed

And has spawned this Geography of alienation

A landscape now coalesced into a million dots on the map

Dots outside your sight, outside the pale

Exiles in their own homeland 

You chiseled out a conceit out of purity and pollution

Doled out humanity in miserly measure

Hatched a history of hatred and spat squarely on our memory

Thanks for your patience and best regards,  

Mohan

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[R Shanmuga Sundaram]

Liked your poem. I also felt that it ended somewhat abruptly. Typically poems end with a bang, with the central idea getting reinforced forcefully or negated forcefully (does not apply to all poems though) or sometimes says something entirely different that contrasts the main body of the poem.

I am not trying to reduce the power of your poem. After all, I cannot write a poem to save my life! This is merely an observation based on the poems I liked. As an illustration of what I mean, here is a couple of poems I liked.

பூதத்தாருக்குச் சங்கிலி
மந்திரமூர்த்திக்கு குத்தீட்டி
பலவேசக்காரனுக்கு வீச்சருவா
கருப்பசாமிக்கு கோங்கருவா
பட்றையனுக்கு வல்லயம்
ஆயுதங்கள் எல்லாம்
சாமிகள் கையில்
பலிகளை மட்டும்
மனிதர்களே பார்த்துக் கொள்கிறார்கள்

-- ஏக்நாத்

I sit by the roadside
The driver changes the wheel.
I do not like the place I have come from.
I do not like the place I am going to.
Why with impatience do I
Watch him changing the wheel?

-- Bertolt Brecht

தும்பறுத்துக் கொண்டு
துள்ளிக் குதித்தோடும்
கன்றின் கண்
எல்லையற்றது
எனக் காண்கிறது
வயல் வெளியை.
அடித்த முளைக்குப் பக்கத்தில்
அசைபோட்டபடி படுத்திருக்கும்
பசு அறியும்
மடிப் பாலுக்குப்
பிடிப் புல்லே
அதிகம்.

- க மோகனரங்கன்

Regards/Shan

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