This is the first time I’ve had an occasion to share with readers a dream I had overnight, but you’ll see where I’m going with it. In the dream, whose narrative is of course fictional, my 18-year-old son is irritable about a suggestion his mom has made about classical music or some great book he should check out. I tell him I’ve profited from many such suggestions from her, but I know that tastes in one’s youth change over time and you may not be open to such things right now.
But you won’t always be young, I tell him, and what you’re receptive to will evolve. So consider storing away Mom’s recommendations in the back of your mind, rather than discarding them, for when you’re older.
Afoot in the Culture
I mention this because as, Denyse O’Leary noted yesterday, there is something afoot in the culture on questions relating to God, the soul, the origin of the universe, and related subjects: people like political scientist Charles Murray, once content with a purely secular outlook, are reaching for something else. O’Leary mentions Murray’s new book, Taking Religion Seriously. His personal story reminds me of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s, and there are a range of other thoughtful, prominent people reaching the same conclusions by various routes.
Now, having read more about Murray’s book, what leaps out to me are similarities to The Immortal Mind, by O’Leary and her co-author, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor. The books were being written at about the same time but the evidence cited in them overlaps a lot. In the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Murray asked, “Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul?”
He writes,
We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.
He cites near-death experiences and terminal lucidity, just as Egnor and O’Leary do, at odds with the “central tenet of materialism…that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain.” He admits that “the nature of the universe and human consciousness is more complicated than I had assumed.”
Whoa, Dr. Egnor, call your office. Reviewing the book in the Journal on Saturday, Barton Swaim recounts Murray’s thinking on the historicity of the New Testament Gospels, and then this:
Mr. Murray’s conversion, if that’s what it is, began in the early 2000s, when he read a few theoretical accounts of the universe’s origins, among them Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” (1999). So wildly improbable were the conditions necessary for the so-called big bang, it seems to Mr. Murray, that the whole business, whenever it happened, sounded very much like what Christians call creation. “I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he recalls reflecting, “but it’s the only plausible explanation” — “it” meaning the divine origin of everything.
OK, Dr. Stephen Meyer, please call your office as well. That the universe had a beginning at a finite distance in time from the present is, of course, a key step in the argument in Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis.
Something Is Going on Here
From a very different corner of the book world, meanwhile, comes a novel that, again, was written at about the same time as The Immortal Mind yet draws on much of the same kind of material. Dan Brown is the author of The Da Vinci Code and other wildly bestselling thrillers, of which I’ve read and enjoyed all of them. Da Vinci did not endear itself to religious believers, Catholics in particular.* But since then, Brown, a thoughtful man and a thorough researcher, has been evolving.
His last book, Origin (2017), treaded right up to a potentially very awkward philosophical divide, pushing atheism and intelligent design, with mentions of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as well as two books by Phillip Johnson (Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism). It’s how I and others at the Center for Science and Culture got to know physicist Jeremy England, who protested Brown’s recruitment of him in the book.
The new novel, The Secret of Secrets, represents a further step along Brown’s journey. As in earlier books, the protagonist is Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. The story, however, is like a fictionalized version of The Immortal Mind. It’s almost all here: the existence of the soul as a “non-local” entity, not identical with the brain, as evidenced by near-death experiences and other scientific research.
If Egnor Were a Novelist
If Michael Egnor were a novelist rather than a pediatric neurosurgeon, with a hot literary property in the character of Langdon, and if he had spent a fair amount of time exploring the history of Prague and the legend of the golem, he would be Dan Brown…sort of.
A neuroscientist in the story, Katherine, who is Langdon’s love interest, has been working on a book that is in effect a (fictional) doppelgänger of The Immortal Mind. Naturally, the CIA takes an interest and gets involved — they always do. “As I wrote in my manuscript,” Katherine says, “I believe our views on death are about to change.” She continues, “Death is not the end. There’s more work to do, but science continues to discover evidence that there is indeed something beyond all this.”
A Comparison to Cloud Computing
I was intrigued by a statement by Langdon to Katherine: “You’re saying our memories function like cloud computing? All of our memory data are sitting elsewhere… waiting for us to access them.” This reminded me of paleontologist Günter Bechly’s apt comparison of biologist Richard Sternberg’s immaterial genome thesis to cloud computing: the genome is not instantiated in a material form alone, in DNA, but instead is elsewhere in a Platonic realm beyond time and space, “waiting,” so to speak, “for us to access” it.
As I was finishing my book about Dr. Stenberg’s thesis, Plato’s Revenge, I was startled to see that another scientist, biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University and Harvard, had come to a remarkably similar conclusion, including the language about Plato.
Cultures, as a seedbed for ideas, scientific or otherwise, mature in some very surprising ways. Ideas can evolve along remarkably parallel tracks. The existence of an immaterial reality, a soul, or a genome, is a concept that has been bubbling up, independently, across a range of minds: people probing at the shortcomings of materialist science and arguing that science points to something else, beyond.
As in my dream, a person may not be open to thoughts or suggestions at a given time in his life. But that’s not the end of the story. He evolves, grows, matures, and if the ideas are fruitful, and if they’re not prematurely discarded, they may take root and grow, to emerge in time in his mind, his immortal mind.
* Two friends from two different Christian traditions advise me that The Da Vinci Code does more than fail to endear itself. Instead, they say, it is fairly called anti-Christian. I stand corrected.