I'd like it to be otherwise. Nothing would delight me more than to
have real proof of a transcendental plane.
PT: Why?
EO: If the neurobiologists came through with enough evidence and
said, "There is another plane, and it is quite conceivable that the
individual essence somehow implanted there is immortal"--wouldn't you be
happy? I'd be very, very happy I'd congratulate my colleagues when they
went to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize for making one of the greatest
scientific discoveries of all time, and I'd be personally
relieved.
PT: Relieved of what?
EO: It would mean that human existence really is exalted and that
immortality is a prospect, providing this God is not a God of irony and
cruelty who is going to send everybody the other way.
That reminds me of an argument I like to give. Maybe God is sorting
the saved from the damned--the opposite of what most traditionalists
believe-and the saved will be those ,who have the intellectual courage to
press on with skepticism and materialism. They would be His most
independent and courageous creations, would they not? Particularly the
ones who faced the charges of heresy
PT: They get to heaven because they still wanted to, even though
they believed there was no heaven.EO: Right.
PT: I would be deeply disappointed if there were a God. The
universe looks so stunningly impressive because it can do this trick all
by itself. A deity undercuts it.
EO: I understand what you're saying. That the human soul was
selfcreated in such an astonishing way that we're only just beginning to
understand.
PT: A universe that needs a push to get it right every now and
then--that's just a second class universe.
EO: So the universe that made itself after it got started, however
it got started, is a first class universe. This is what I say, actually,
in Consilience. We're free, thank God.
PHOTOS (COLOR): E. O. Wilson
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JD SLOAN
FROM CONSILIENCE
For many the urge to believe in transcendental existence and
immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when
reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels
somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate.
That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism
continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma
point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the
United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest
denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but
only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the
leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism ....
Science has taken us far from the personal God who once presided
over Western civilization. It has done little to satisfy our instinctual
hunger...The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved
genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to
erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between
transcendentalist and empiricist world views?
No, unfortunately, there is not .... For centuries the writ of
empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of
transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the
scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the
rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars,
where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without
them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger
purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find
a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically
ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science
already possesses more content and grandeur than all the religious
cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced
through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that
conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations
of great moral importance. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from
which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos
evolved.
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