The problem with Deepak Chopra

The famous guru once again shoots at science and misses

Deepak Chopra in 2006, Wikimedia, CC license.

Deepak Chopra, the renowned author of ninety (!) books, including several New York Times best sellers, has done it again: he has once more shot at science in a recent article entitled “The New Atheism and the Delusions of Science.” His target, in part, is the movement known as New Atheism, which is strange since there hasn’t been anything new about the New Atheism for years, and two of the four original “Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” have now passed away.

Before getting into the necessary details, it might be worth pointing out that I have been a vocal critic of the New Atheists, for some of the same reasons brought up by Chopra. And yet, as will soon become clear, our ways of thinking and worldviews couldn’t be further apart.

Chopra begins by noting that the number of people in the US who declare themselves unaffiliated with a major religious denomination has steadily been going up and now comprises about 1/3 of the adult population. Yet, he says, during the same period atheists have increased only from 2% to 4% of the total. Technically a doubling of numbers but, as he puts it, “a statistical sliver.”

He blames Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett for this, calling them “loud proselytizers.” More specifically, we are told that the New Atheism failed because of a number of propositions it advances to which the average adult is unresponsive. Here are the propositions:

i) Denigration of anyone who believes in the supernatural;

ii) Denigration, more broadly, of spiritual pursuits;

iii) Emphasis on science as the only rational system of thought;

iv) Self-reliance, dispensing with the social aspect of religion.

Let’s take a closer look. I will grant the first point, which is one of the reasons I have also criticized the New Atheists: they fail at a basic rhetorical level by seemingly not grasping the basic principle that very few people will change their mind by being told that they are idiots. (This, incidentally, applies to politics just as much as to religion.)

Even so, there are differences among the Four Horsemen in this respect, with Hitchens and Dawkins being by far the most vitriolic, while Dennett has always been more poised, and Harris has even declared his sympathies for Buddhism, from which he draws quite a bit, while of course rejecting the supernatural aspects.

Regarding spirituality, Dawkins has been nudging people to embrace and develop the same sort of natural awe that famously inspired Carl Sagan, and which can easily be considered a type of spirituality without mysticism. And Harris has written a whole book that articulates his point of view on this issue explicitly in the subtitle: Waking Up — A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. It is Chopra who is limited by his narrow conception of what counts as spiritual.

Things get even more tricky with the third point. It is certainly the case that several New Atheists—Dennett being the glaring exception—are contemptuous of intellectual pursuits that do not fall into a fairly restricted understanding of “science.” For instance, both Harris and Dawkins are notoriously dismissive, and grossly ignorant, of philosophy. But they are precisely on target, in my view, when they reject the sort of wooly-eyed mysticism that Chopra himself is famous for.

As for self-reliance, what’s wrong with that? Atheists and secular humanists do not see self-reliance as mutually exclusive with being social, as Chopra strongly implies. On the contrary, there is a keen appreciation in secular circles that human beings are social animals, and that being in the company of others, maintaining mutually satisfactory relationships, is crucial for both our survival and our mental wellbeing. Chopra must not have set foot into a meeting of, say, the Society for Ethical Culture, where the Sunday activities very much resemble what goes on in a regular Church.

Chopra then makes a major logical blunder when he writes: “Even a bright school child accepts that you can’t prove a negative, and proving that God doesn’t exist is just as hard as proving that God does exist.”

First of all, some negatives are actually very easy to prove. If I tell you that, right now, I do not have a million dollars in cash in my pockets it will be very easy for you to prove such a negative. So let’s not generalize too hastily.

Second, Chopra makes the epistemologically rookie mistake of putting the two propositions—God exists and God doesn’t exist—on the same level. They are not. If we were having this discussion, say, a couple of millennia ago in ancient Greece or Rome, the burden of proof would have been squarely on the shoulders of the New Atheists to make their case against God. That’s because our understanding of the world at the time was far more easily compatible with the existence of some divinity than not. But nowadays, after David Hume, Charles Darwin, and modern physics and cosmology, science has explained a lot of what needed to be explained in terms of how the world works, and the gaps for God to hide in have become smaller and smaller. So at this moment in history “God exists” is the extraordinary claim, and those who make it have the corresponding burden of extraordinary evidence.

Of course, Chopra would accuse me of scientistic arrogance (despite the fact that I wrote again scientism). That’s his prerogative. The argument doesn’t change just because he doesn’t like it.

He continues: “Across the board, New Atheists declare that science is the only viable way to understand reality, and this is simply deluded.” Is it, though? Here is a perhaps subtle but crucial point to consider. When New Atheists like Dawkins or Harris dismiss other ways of understanding and evaluating things, such as philosophy, they are indeed catastrophically wrong. Given the same facts about the world (science) there are multiple (though certainly not infinite) ways to understand, evaluate, and act on those facts. Science is in the business of providing knowledge, not wisdom.

But Chopra would also reject a superficially similar statement which I find to be obviously true: science is the only way to gather knowledge about the natural world. And since I don’t think there is any such thing as a supernatural world, then science is not just the best, but the only reliable way to gather knowledge about the world and to put it into a sound theoretical context, which then provides the basis for other disciplines to develop an understanding of how things hang together and how to act accordingly.

Another way to put it is this: if the question involves empirical knowledge, then science is the only way to go about it. If Chopra disagrees he is welcome to provide examples of the bewildering discoveries made by mysticism, metaphysics, or religion. There are none.

Chopra complains that in the New Atheist worldview “in no way is Homo sapiens special where evolution proceeds through random mutations.” That’s right, human beings are not special, and we really ought to get away from this peculiar and very dangerous type of species-level narcissism that is wreaking havoc with the entire planet. Also, as an evolutionary biologist I’d like to point out that it’s yet another elementary mistake to think that evolution proceeds by random mutations. Those are one of two crucial components of biological evolution. The other is natural selection, which is not random. At all.

“Obviously it is possible to be rational without being a scientist. Moreover, plenty of rational people believe in God or some higher power.” Yes, it is most certainly possible to be rational without being a professional scientist. It is not possible, however, to be rational and reject the scientific worldview, which is what Chopra does in spades. The fact that (some) rational people believe in God is entirely irrelevant. Plenty of otherwise rational people also believe that vaccines cause autism, or that climate change is the result of a worldwide conspiracy of scientists. They are just wrong. Rationality doesn’t guarantee being right.

Chopra is incensed at the atheistic rejection of subjectivity, stating that “subjectivity is the source of all the highest values of humanity, including love, compassion, devotion, insight, curiosity, wonder, creativity, personal evolution, and higher states of consciousness.”

How does he know that? Could it be that such a conclusion is the result of third-person, i.e., objective, observations of human behavior? And what on earth is a “higher” state of consciousness anyway?

Once again Chopra confuses things. There is no problem with subjectivity per se, the problem arises when people want their subjectivity to override objective, fact-based analyses of situations. Take, for instance, the current (subjective) feelings among many Americans that inflation, unemployment, and crime are up. They are not. As it turns out, all three indicators have dropped substantially in recent times. Your feelings are not a reason to disregard reality. There are no alternative facts, there are only facts and delusions, and it is science that pushes us to accept facts and reject delusions.

“A pure rational person wouldn’t remotely be anyone’s ideal.” That’s right, but I’m not aware of anybody ever having suggested that, not even Richard Dawkins. Shall we call it a strawman?

And then we come to what I believe is the crux of the matter for Deepak Chopra: “The world ‘in here’ isn’t empirical or physical. No matter how stubbornly you insist that the brain is the mind, this is a fragile assumption, like saying that a piano is music.”

I don’t actually think that the brain is the mind, just like I don’t think piano is music. But pianos, and other similar physical instruments produce music. Music is not made in any other way but through physical instruments that obey the laws of physics. The same goes for the mind-brain relationship: the mind is what the brain (and the rest of the nervous system) does. It is misleading to talk of the mind as if it were a physical object. It is more like an activity: minding. Minding is what the brain does. And I would very much like for Chopra to provide me with a shred of evidence that minding is possible without a brain. Again, there is none.

But he insists: “You can’t get to consciousness if you have only physical, empirical data to work from. … People intuitively realize this. They don’t say, ‘I haven’t made up my brain what to eat tonight.’”

People’s intuitions are, again, irrelevant. People also have the intuition that they are walking on a planet with a flat surface. That intuition is wrong. People do not have the intuition that the chair on which they sit is made mostly of empty space. But it is. And so on.

And if we can’t get consciousness from empirical data about the physical, where, exactly, do we get it from? Everything we know about the mind—and, pace Chopra, we actually know a lot—tells us that it is the result of very physical activities, which can be measured in terms of chemicals and electrical impulses. No ectoplasms allowed, thank you.

Chopra, once more, is making an elementary blunder in confusing the lack of a complete current explanation of consciousness for proof of the impossibility of such explanation. Those are not at all the same thing.

At the end of the essay, Chopra says: “You can be spiritual and rational at the same time. Why not?” Yes, we can. And indeed I would argue that we should. But rational spirituality doesn’t look to me at all like the sort of woo that Chopra is in the business of selling. It looks more like what Carl Sagan was talking about in his famous Pale Blue Dot. Indeed, let’s enjoy it together, it will do us good: