The Neural Buddhists -- David Brooks and Tom Wolfe

The Neural Buddhists I read this piece in the NY Times op/ed section, by David Brooks. Very interesting stuff and it got me thinking quite a bit. In the piece, he references a 1996 essay by the novelist Tom Wolfe, entitled, Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. Both of these pieces are brilliant. Tom Wolfe, describes how after over 100 years since Nietzsche declared that "God is dead", the new wave of neuroscientists, the New Freudian Psychologists, are trying their damndest to declare that the soul is dead, that we possess no soul. They are trying to show, through advances in brain wave scanning, that we are really nothing more than biology, genes and chemicals and no more, and all that this entails, including the abolishment of the idea of free-will. But an interesting thing has been happening in the last few years since Tom Wolfe wrote his piece, as discussed by David Brooks, science and mysticism are beginning to walk hand in hand.
Something that David Brooks said just really struck me:

"In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."

When I read that, it was like hearing someone describe a long lost relative, I screamed out, internally, "That's me!!!!" I too, feel the existence of the sacred, despite my scientific background and my rational, analytical brain. Yet, I too think all religions are basically a bunch of bunk piled on top of universal truths. In other words, even though I have all but abandoned my Christian upbringing, I still have NEVER been able to call myself an Atheist. I just can NOT believe that we are all just reducible to biology, It makes absolutely no sense to me, no more sense to me than the Bible makes sense though. I believe in God, just not a personal God, I am more Buddhist in my beliefs, more Deistic. One of my heroes is Tom Paine and his Age of Reason, one of my favorite reads of all time. It is actually one of the first things I ever read which convinced me that it was ok to not be a Christian. Then I read about all the other founding fathers who were also Deistic and members of Unitarian/Universalist churches. It was an eye opener

So definitely read these two referenced articles. They are fascinating indeed.

Oh and I also still have some major problems swallowing all of Darwinist Evolutionary theory and from my reading, it is not just those loony Creationists who have a problem with it. As Tom Wolfe says in his essay:

"Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."