By day Michael Shermer is
the author of several bestsellers including The
Moral Arc and The Believing Brain by
night he is a world-renowned skeptic. How exactly does one build one’s
reputation as a skeptic? In Shermer’s case he founded the Skeptics Society and is
editor-in-chief of its periodical Skeptic
magazine he also contributes a column here and there to Scientific American. Shermer is perhaps best understood as a
scientific skeptic, that is, a skeptic whose opinions are informed by science
in its procedures and what it accepts as evidence. Heavens on Earth is Shermer’s latest book and in it he tackles the
human obsession with death and legacy.
Why can’t we live forever?
Would we want to live forever?
These are a few of the seminal
questions humans have contemplated for millennia. For human beings it is not
enough to simply desire life everlasting we also burn to know why mortality is
our lot—all the better to fight inevitable demise, one supposes. Human history
is dotted with written accounts of individuals who have claimed access to an
eternal realm, or seen the abode of the gods, or have experienced God himself
in his divine home. It is hard to know what to make of these claims. They seem
extraordinary and tantalizingly mysterious. For anyone who has lost a loved one
belief in continued existence after death may provide joyful solace. But are
these claims of proof in a life beyond the grave verifiable? The answer
ultimately is no they are not. Why not? Because science provides our best
standards for verifiability and these extraordinary claims of post-mortem
survival do not stand up to the rigours of the scientific method.
The same verifiability
standards set against the proofs for heaven are applied with equal precision to
beliefs in immortality, broadly conceived, and to the attainment of utopian
existence here on earth. None of these ideas and the evidence that supports
them fairs well under the lights of the scientist’s microscope.
The pattern in all cases is
the same. Shermer takes a belief and then subjects it to the scientific sniff
test. Beliefs (thoughts and feelings) turn out to be nothing more than chemical
reactions in the brain. Things that are seen or felt beyond the grave as, for
example, some have claimed to have experienced after a so called near-death
experience are illusions or the distortions that naturally occur when the
physical brain is under stress or in some cases damaged. After the analysis
ideas of heaven, immortality, even God are deemed unverifiable and likely
false. One can’t help feeling that we are left with a purposeless universe of
atoms moving in a void.
So no heaven no meaning to
life, right? Not according to Shermer. He argues that a purposeful life is
achievable despite the apparent purposelessness in the universe. Meaning and purpose in life is personal. You
get out of life what you put into it. Love and family, career, social and
political involvement, setting goals for oneself these are all ways that people
can have meaning in their lives without the need for any transcendent deity or
eternal heavenly abode.
It is hard to argue
against Shermer because he will accept no other court of appeal than the
physicalism of scientific experiment and verification. Atheists will find much
in this book to bolster their opinions. Shermer, it should be noted, isn’t
arguing against the fact that humans have hopes and dreams of immortality and
utopia. His point is much more circumscribed. He looks at what has been offered
as proof for the existence of a heavenly realm, and claims people make for
immortality. Each bit of evidence on offer is scrutinized and found inadequate.
To begin this brief book
review I wrote that Shermer was a scientific skeptic. I want to return to that.
To be a scientific skeptic is to accept as evidence for an argument such
experiential criteria that can be observed and quantified. Science is extraordinarily effective (and
useful) as an exercise in telling us what something is, what its parts are, and
also how that something works, that is, science can provide categories of
analysis and functional explanations for most of what surrounds us in the universe.
I wrote “most”. Beliefs about the afterlife and ideas concerning immortality and
utopias have much more to do with human desires, hopes and aspirations. Hope is
a notoriously difficult concept to pin down on the petri dish of scientific
experimentation. Why? Because there is something non-physical about thoughts
and ideas. Defining exactly what that “something” is, well that is another
story. The usual strategy for a scientific skeptic is to reduce all experience
to objective, physical stuff, but is this reductionism legitimate? Do we not
lose something … something important? I think we do. Life (or experience) has
an inside and an outside. The outside can most definitely be analyzed by scientific
methods and we can learn much from examining the world in this way. But the
inside subjective quality of experience cannot be reduced to atoms and void so
it remains stubbornly beyond the reach of scientific method. Physical proof of
heaven, nope, but hope springs eternal.
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