God : The Evidence

Patrick Glynn

Among the ranks of the Republican ascendance of 1980, Middle America met a new kind of conservative. Though atheists, they were staunchly anticommunist. They were hardheaded, "guns and butter" types, followers of Leo Strauss who make skepticism and democracy their gods. Patrick Glynn, the author of "God: The Evidence," had been one of those secular intellectuals. Late in life, however, the Harvard-educated philosopher and Washington policy-maker found God. And the semi-autobiographical tone of his book makes it a unique contribution to the flourishing debate over faith and reason, religion and science. "I am not claiming reason can bring one to belief in God," he writes." What I am saying is this: Reason no longer stands in the way, as it once clearly did." Mr. Glynn predicts that the utter skepticism of modern intellectual culture will soon become " the minority position... even among intellectuals." In his own life, Mr. Glynn sees a miniature of the past 50 years. Science and reason were expected to push back almost any frontier. If reason could ask a question, doubtless it could find the answer. But in the end, he writes, the West has fragmented itself with the knife of skepticism-a fragmentation epitomized by his own midlife nihilism. Reason alone is not to blame, according to Mr. Glynn. Behind the skepticism there was often a secular ideology-an aversion to God-that gave Darwinism, Freudianism and social science their power, while the word "science" lent them credibility. Now, Mr. Glynn sees the scales tipping. The book is built on four lines of evidence. First is a new development in physics and cosmology called the anthropic principle, which struggles with how the universe became so fine-tuned-from the first second after the Big Bang-that is stumbled upon carbon based human life. This principle, according to which the universe seems to have developed with man (anthropos) in mind, is "the first time a scientific discovery seemed to take us toward, rather than away from, the idea that there is a God," Mr. Glynn says. Second, he takes on the science of psychology, "the fifth estate," and suggests its main tenets have been proven wrong. Chief among these tenets was that religious illusion was tantamount to insanity. After a century of data collection, Mr. Glynn argues, the opposite seems true. Freud may have sounded very scientific, but his theory has not met a single scientific test. "The last quarter of the 20th century has not been kind to the psychoanalytic vision," he writes. "Most significant has been the exposure of Freud's views of religion ... as entirely fallacious." Instead, what seems to buttress mental health, surveys and clinical samples show, are age-old religious precepts. The key determinants of human happiness and psychological well-being, he says, "are our spiritual beliefs and moral choices." In what may be the most unique chapter of the book, Mr. Glynn surveys the phenomenal rise in modern society of "near death experiences." These, of course, point to an afterlife. The scientific battle rages here because of its newness. As more accounts come in, more skeptics are creating and testing theories to refute them. Mr. Glynn makes a convincing case that the scientific explanations for so-called near-death experience-false memory, oxygen starvation, birth canal memory, endorphins, too much carbon dioxide, right temporal lobe misfires-do not give a comprehensive answer to the phenomenon. Similarly, in one amusing digression, Mr. Glynn points out the absurd lengths to which cosmologists go to ensure that the emergence of human life, which seems mathematically impossible, is made more probable in a random universe. Mainly, he says, they "multiply imaginary universes" to increase the probability. Mr. Glynn asks whether these atheistic scientists don't sound just like theologians in their proposals of many worlds, baby universes and bubble universes. The fourth and final piece of "evidence" in Mr. Glynn's book is much in the headlines lately: Medical science has measured ht remedial effects of religious belief and behavior on the health and healing of the physical body. As an intellectual challenge, this is a book meant for Mr. Glynn's former circle of skeptics. For general American readers-most of whom are theists-the nice touch is the author's mastery of philosophy, especially the moderns. You know that he's actually read the works of Hobbes, Hume, Freud, Nietzsche-and Carl Sagan. Having done so, he then proceeds to point out the flaws. If the book sounds a little evangelical at the end, judging "the idolatry of reason," it does so as a gospel about the value of reason tempered by faith. And it must, the author says, follow the evidence wherever it leads. And history makes a case, he adds, that "where reason follows spirit, the results are good." (Washington Times, Saturday November 29, 1997)

Kirkus Reviews

An unconvincing attempt to prove the existence of God in a postmodern culture.

It's always refreshing when intellectuals admit their mistakes, and to hear this Harvard-educated philosopher gracefully concede that his atheism was "so dead wrong" is nearly enough to melt a reader's heart. But only nearly, because the journey that brought him to faith is almost impossible to translate as "evidence" to prove God's existence to others. Glynn's own watershed moments were based in science and psychology, and he examines recent developments in these fields that he sees as unmistakable proof of a higher being. Contemporary physics, for example, has moved toward a "triumph of mechanism over teleology" and shows that the chance of life's appearance in our universe is so slight that if any one of the many factors involved had been a tad different, we wouldn't be here arguing the point today. Fair enough, but it is still a long jump from this apparent randomness to Glynn's conclusion—that life evolved in this manner to make way for God's ultimate creation, humankind. The second part of this book is even more problematic; Glynn employs psychological findings and near-death experiences as evidence for God. He rightly criticizes Freudian psychology for its hostility to religion and then goes on to argue that religious people are more likely to report happier, less traumatic lives than the nonreligious. That may be so, but how does this functionalist exploration of religious faith prove the existence of God? And finally, his insufficiently skeptical chapter on near-death experiences damages the credibility of the whole book.

Although there are some intriguing arguments here, Glynn's is an entirely one-sided approach, and the connections between the "evidence" and his conclusion require too far a leap of faith.