Editorial: Science, spirituality closer than you think

Dallas Morning News

Pope Benedict XVI must be relieved. Contrary to the plot of Angels & Demons, scientists say it's practically impossible to create enough antimatter to blow up the Vatican, or anything else. But the blockbuster film does highlight the world's largest physics experiment: the attempt to isolate the so-called God particle, which holds deep secrets about antimatter and the universe's beginning.

Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman coined the term "God particle" to attach a media-friendly tag to the Higgs boson, an elusive particle believed to explain the mass in all matter. Not only are scientists hunting for the God particle, but some are searching in their labs for God himself. That's a rhetorical exaggeration, actually, but it's true that new frontiers of research are beginning to breach the high, hard wall between science and spirituality.

In the new book Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, National Public Radio correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty surveys various scientific fields and highlights discoveries – particularly in neuroscience and quantum physics – causing us to rethink our models of reality. They're also causing a growing number of scientists to reconsider the objective validity of spiritual experiences and religious teachings.

These results are controversial because, if validated, they fundamentally undermine the dominant scientific paradigm of a purely material universe. Nevertheless, reports Hagerty, more and more data pour in to challenge what has been settled consensus. Her reporting suggests that experimental results make it easier for scientists and religious believers to be open to, and learn from, each other's worldviews.

If funding comes through, Dallas could well play a key role in what might be a new scientific revolution. Southern Methodist University theologian William Abraham is leading a top-flight international team of neuroscientists, physicists, theologians, psychologists, philosophers and others to investigate whether mental activity can alter brain states and what the implications might be for free will. The idea is to look into, from a nondogmatic perspective, whether the latest findings in neuroscience and quantum physics should cause us to revise science's exclusively materialist model of the human person – and what that could mean.

One prominent member of the Abraham team is University of Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, who contends there is now convincing empirical evidence for the soul's existence – and that restless young scientists want to know more. Beauregard tells NPR's Hagerty, "It's only a matter of time before there will be a major paradigm shift."

We'll see. However it turns out, this unfolding scientific drama is more exciting than science fiction, precisely because it's playing out not on a movie screen but in real life.