selected quotes from Why God Won't Go Away

"God is dead .....Nietzsche

Nietzsche is dead...God" --Graffito

When philosopher Nietzsche in 1885 made his famous proclamation that God was dead, he was saying, of course, that God had never lived at all. Like othe rgreat rationalistic thinkers of the ninteenth and early-twentiethcenturies .... Nietzsche regarded God as just another vestige of an unscientific past that humanity would soon outgrow...

God, however, has not obliged, and as we enter the new millennium—and age of unprecedented scientific and technological enlightenment— religion and spirituality continue to thrive....

Evidence suggests that the deepest origins of religion are based inmystical experience, andthat religions persist because the wiring of the human brain continues to provide believers with a range of unitary experiences that are often interpreted as assurances that God exists. As we have seen, it's unlikely that the neurological machinery of transcedence evolved specifically for spiritual reasons. Still, we believe that evolution has adopted this machinery , and has favored the religious capabilities of the religioius brain because religious beliefs and behaviours turn out to be good for us in profound and pragmatic ways.

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An evolutionary perspective suggessts that the neurobiology of mystical experience arose, at least in part, from the mechanism of the sexual response.

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The best that science can give us is a metaphorical picture of what's real, and while that picture may make sense, it isn't necessarily true. In this case, science is a type of mythology....science therefore is mythological and like allsystems of belief, it is based on a foundational assumption: all that is real can be verified by scientific measurement, therefore, what can't be measured, can't be verified by science isn;t really real.

This kind of assumption, that one system is exclusive arbiter of what is true, makes science and religion incompatible. If the Absolute Unitary Being does exist, then science and religion find themselves in a paradoxical situation: the more literally we take their own foundational assumptions, the deeper that are in conflict with each other and the further they fall from ultimate reality. But if we understand the metaphorical nature of their insights, then their incompatibilties are reconciled and each becomes more powerfully and transcendently real.