War of the Worldviews: Science Vs. Spirituality
Can We Know God, Or Is God An Illusion?
According to Metaphysics Teacher Deepak Chopra, Spirituality says…
One of the greatest failings of religion is the claim that it has a patented way to God. In the West we sorely lack a religious model for becoming illuminated, but we’re getting there. Ironically, we can thank science for forcing us to drop preconceived notions and rely on hard evidence. Reason tells us that the Buddha, Saint Paul, Bernadette of Lourdes, and Sri Ramakrishna underwent a common experience, and like scientists sorting out how an apple and a rose are linked to the same genus, we can fit unique examples of spiritual awakening into the same template.
Your life and your mind sit somewhere on the continuum of awakening, even if we have turned our backs on religion en masse. The conscious process of coming to terms with higher reality is personal, spontaneous, and never on schedule. Countless people have revised their view of material life and decided to walk the spiritual path — but then they stop. Sadly, as long as divinity means the God of organized religion, the spiritual path has little chance of going mainstream. Faiths promote their own agendas. They want followers who pose no doubts. They insist their dogmas were handed down by God, even when history reveals they were devised by powerful clerics.
According to Physicist Leonard Mlodninow, Science says…
We might have good objective reasons for the views we hold so dearly, and we might not, but either way it is best to be able to asses how convincing the evidence is. This is not always easy. If you ask a friend why she believes in God, or in a higher presence, she probably won’t say she came to that belief through a series of controlled experiments. More likely, she’ll say she feels it, or she just knows. Is God merely an illusion perceived by those who are looking for a divine presence? Science is the best method we know for discovering truth about the material universe, but the powers of science are not without limit. Science does not address the meaning of life, nor can it, for now, explain consciousness. And science will never be able to explain why the universe follows laws. So while science often casts doubts on spiritual beliefs and doctrine insofar as they make representations about the physical world, science does not — and cannot — conclude that God is an illusion.
Who Knows Anyhow? 