Woo-master supreme, Deepak Chopra is back, and it is a familiar theme. The teaser starts well ..
After two centuries of the tug-of-war between science and religion, it’s clear science occupies the dominant position.
Ah but this is Mr Chopra, so you know that the “but” is just a few steps away, and sure enough it comes in the 2nd paragraph (he is very predictable) …
I’ve always felt that this lopsided advantage that we automatically give to science, and therefore to atheism, is unfair. In a new book, The Future of God, I turn the tables, proving as best I can that God isn’t just a humane, comforting, or moral choice but the most practical source of well-being.
Side note – what we also learn here is that the real reason for his article is to plug yet another book, so this article perhaps needs the byline “please help to make a very rich con-man even richer”.
Rarely do we hear that God is actually more rational than science and more practical than technology.
… and this is perhaps because the god concept is neither rational, nor practical.
So how does he turn all this around?
Like this …
1. Science isn’t by definition anti-religious.
One is evidence based and insists that you verify claims, the other makes claims and insists that not verifying them is a virtue- yep those are exactly the same … right?
2. Atheists have a point when they accuse organized religion of a litany of gross failings, including crusades, jihads, and the Inquisition. But religions are human institutions prone to every human failing. Religious history is about us, not about whether God exists.
The embrace of bad ideas inspires bad behaviour, and no you don’t get to pass the buck and claim that this bad behaviour is nothing to do with such god cliams when it quite clearly is.
3. God can be approached without resorting to the cultural mythology of a humanized Father and Mother watching over us from Heaven. Atheists largely attack this myth, but smashing a myth doesn’t mean you’ve smashed reality.
Notice the subtle ploy at play here – the claim is that the god myth “they”criticise is not the right one. Actually, no, all god claims are evenly dismissed, including Mr Chopra’s due to a rather consistent lack of evidence for any of them.
4. There is a rich tradition, both East and West, of an impersonal God. This God is the source of consciousness and all that we associate with consciousness: self-awareness, intelligence, creativity, evolution, etc.
… and of course the evidence that this god consciousness claim is viable and real is … yep, exactly, nothing at all, because Mr Chopra only does claims and never ever does evidence for those claims.
5. The experience of God is found inside our own consciousness, not “out there” in a supernatural realm.
Ah, so this is indeed perhaps a rather good confirmation from him that his god claim is not supernatural in any way, and is just a product of the human imagination.
Dawkins and his crowd know little about spirituality and less about consciousness
… (straw-man alert) and Mr Chopra might indeed pretend to “know”, but does not actually know at all.
He then goes on to dismiss the scientific methodology as something that … “can’t possibly lead to God” … due to the complete lack of evidence perhaps, and of course the Q word now pops up because a Chopra rant is never complete without having the “Quantum” word in it, and yes he likes to pretend he understands such stuff, but you can be darn sure he really does not, and just deploys such terms to befuddle. From there it is the usual dowanward spiral into utterly meaningless Chopra word soup that sounds impressive but actually tells you nothing at all.
The Chopra Drinking Game
Whenever you spot one of these words, take a drink …
- Militant (always as a prefix to Atheist)
- Quantum
- Consciousness
- Dawkins (he appears to have a bit of a crush on him, his name keeps popping up)
- Spiritual
You can also get bonus points for spotting things like “inner”, and “Awareness”.
You might have perhaps guessed that I simply cannot take this guy seriously, and so if you perhaps feel the same, then you might enjoy the random Chopra quote generator.
It is also perhaps worth remembering some of his previous popular books
If you do seriously wonder if he is on to something, just might have something to say, and is not just a con artist, then it might be worth remembering some of his previous “ageless” claims, and perhaps asking yourself how well that has been working out for him so far.
This was no metaphor, he seriously claimed that “by consciously using our awareness, we can influence the way we age biologically…You can tell your body not to age.”, an utterly absurd bit of complete bullshit.
