Category Archives: Commentary

The God Delusion, the Science Delusion, and the Middle Path between Spirituality and Science

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Delusion”, according to The New Oxford American Dictionary, is “an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument”. Delusion, despite—or perhaps because of—its negative implications, seems to be a popular subject, judging from a plethora of books that contain the word “delusion” in their titles. Even a cursory search on the Internet yields such titles as: The Atheist Delusion, The Biofuel Delusion, The Brand Delusion, The Capitalism Delusion, The Debt Delusion, The Democracy Delusion, The Disease Delusion, The End-of-the-World Delusion, The Green Revolution Delusion, The Food Delusion, The Free Will Delusion, The Hypnotism Delusion, The Infinity Delusion, The Job Delusion, The Leadership Delusion, The Love Delusion, The Mother Nature Delusion, The Net Delusion, The Self Help Delusion, The Two-State Delusion, and The Witchcraft Delusion. The diversity of subjects dealt with in these books suggests that almost anything can become the object of a delusion. To this large list of books whose titles contain the word “delusion” must be added two other recent books: The God Delusion and The Science Delusion.

There are actually several books with title of The God Delusion. By far the best known and most controversial among them has to be Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, originally published in 2006.1 As an evolutionary biologist known as the author of such popular books as The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1987), Richard Dawkins considers the “God hypothesis”, namely, the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”, a delusion because “creative intelligence, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it”. “Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design”, the subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker, succinctly shows why Dawkins considers the God hypothesis a delusion, an idiosyncratic belief, for it is contradicted by the accumulated evidence of evolution uncovered by biologists, cosmologists, and other scientists.

Considering that science relies on the rational argument of hypothesis building and empirical testing in discovering the laws of nature in the world around us, we would hardly expect science to be a delusion that shares the same kind of irrationalities with other idiosyncratic beliefs. In other words, the very expression, “the science delusion”, appears to combine two words that are mutually incompatible. But here again, there are several books with the title of The Science Delusion, some written by proponents of the God hypothesis in response to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and his reliance on the rational argument of science to expose an idiosyncratic belief in God.

Of the books bearing the title of The Science Delusion, the one by Rupert Sheldrake is noteworthy in that it is written by someone who is well known for his original contribution to science, including his innovative hypothesis of “morphic resonance” in evolution.2 Science, according to Sheldrake, is a delusion in the sense the prevailing dogma in science today considers the universe as purposeless, following the fixed laws that can be explained in terms solely of material causes. In fact, the idea that matter is the only reality in the universe, including our consciousness, instead of being treated as a paradigm, has been turned into an ideology, a belief system, which Curtis White calls “scientism” in his book also with the title of The Science Delusion.3 As a belief system, scientism has its own trappings of conformity, peer pressure, and prestige among scientists. So confident are scientists in the answers they have derived through their rational inquiry that they are trapped in what Sheldrake calls the biggest scientific delusion: “The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.”

That both religion and science can become delusions should not trouble us much as long as they constitute “non-overlapping magisteria”, as Stephen Jay Gould characterizes them, addressing to separate issues and employing different methods with different goals.4 The problem is that religion and science do overlap and concern themselves with the same sort of questions such as how the universe came about, how it works, and how life came into being. And it is because religion and science overlap in their endeavors to answer these fundamental questions that we witness the kinds of heated debates and vicious exchanges between religionists and scientists as illustrated by the appearance of books with titles like The Atheist Delusion, The Christian Delusion, and The Dawkins Delusion: Atheism vs. God.

What should our attitude be regarding delusions for the rest of us, who also seek answers to these questions, but do not want to be caught up in heated debates and vicious exchanges? Delusion, to be sure, is something to be avoided. Buddhists, for example, are well aware of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. As the Buddha reminds us, “a person who is greedy, hating, and deluded, overpowered by greed, hatred, and delusion, his thoughts controlled by them, will destroy life, take what is not given, engage in sexual misconduct, and tell lies; he will also prompt others to do likewise.”5

The Buddhist notion of “impermanence” seems to serve as a useful guide for us in dealing with delusions, in overcoming idiosyncratic beliefs. This is so because what is today regarded as a delusion may have once been treated as a reality, as an undeniable truth, and what is today regarded as a reality, as an undeniable truth, may turn out one day to be a delusion. What we need to do is, then, to treat every idea, whether in religion or in science, as a tentative proposition whose relevance and validity are defined only in a specific context of the world evolving around us, in which our consciousness is intimately involved.

What we need to avoid is to develop an attachment to a particular idea or view, whether in religion or in science, for attachment sooner or later turns into fundamentalism. To be sure, science has emerged as the most reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the world around us ever since the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth was shown to be a delusion. But science that treats consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity does not show us the path we need to follow in order to accomplish spiritual maturation, or enlightenment, for it alienates us from our own experience in our relationship to the world around us. Spirituality does have a place in our life as evidenced, for example, by the effect of prayer in maintaining health and that of meditation in cultivating compassion. As the God delusion represents one extreme and the science delusion the other extreme, what we need to do is to follow the middle path, in this case, between spirituality and science.

  1. Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
  2. Sheldrake, Rupert, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, London: Coronet, 2012.
  3. White, Curtis, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers, New York: Melville House, 2013.
  4. Gould, Stephen J., Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, New York: Ballantine, 1999.
  5. Anguttara Nikaya, 3:65.

Art Comes to Bentonville

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

When you think of a great city with great museums, you are likely to think of a city like London with its British Museum, National Gallery, and Tate Modern, or Paris with its Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and Centre Georges Pompidou. Or you may think of New York with its Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, and Guggenheim. It is unlikely that you would think of a small city in a southern state in the United States as the site of a great museum. Maybe, it is unfair to compare Bentonville to a great city like London, Paris, or New York. Yet, there is something to be said about this small city in the northwest region of Arkansas and its art museum, Crystal Bridges.

Bentonville, though its population is growing, is still a small city, with the population of about 40,000. Unless you are from Arkansas, or from one of its neighboring states, you may not recognize the name of Bentonville until you are told about the city’s connection with Sam Walton (1918-92) and his Walmart. With stores scattered all over the United States and the world, Walmart is now the world’s largest retail chain. But Sam Walton had a humble beginning in Bentonville with a small retail store, which still stands in Bentonville’s Town Square, next to the museum whose exhibits trace Sam Walton’s life and his accomplishments.

With the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum in November 2011, Bentonville is now becoming widely known as one of the places to visit among art lovers. With generous funding provided by Sam Walton’s daughter Alice Walton, Crystal Bridges is built in the lush Ozark forests, with its buildings designed by Moshe Safdie, who is known for his innovative designs such as the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City. Designed as the covered bridges over the creek-fed pond, Crystal Bridges blends nicely into the surrounding landscape.

As its full name, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, suggests, Crystal Bridges has an impressive collection of American art, from the colonial era to the present. Much of it comes from Alice Walton’s personal collection—estimated to be worth over $2 billion—prior to the museum’s opening. Just looking at the list of artists represented— Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Edward Hopper (1887-1967), Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1998), Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), Jackson Pollack (1912-56), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Andy Warhol (1928-87) and others—you will be convinced that Crystal Bridges is one of the best museums in the United States, or in the world for that matter, when it comes to displaying the works by American artists.

One other artist whose name is worth mentioning among the artists whose works are displayed at Crystal Bridges is Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). Benton, although his last name suggests that he might be from Bentonville, is actually from Neosho, a small town in the southwest region of Missouri, not far from the border with Arkansas. Known for his majestic mural, America Today, which is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Benton is well represented at Crystal Bridges with such works as Ploughing It Under, Tobacco Sorters, and Study for the Slow Train through Arkansas. These works show that Benton was well familiar with the life and scenery in this part of Arkansas. In fact, Deep South, one of the mural panels in America Today, marvelously captures the people and the landscapes he witnessed while traveling south from Appalachia to New Orleans.

What makes a visit to Crystal Bridges such a delightful experience is the way it is built as a park with nature trails with names such as Dogwood Trail, Orchard Trail, and Tulip Tree Trail. Along the trail named Art Trail, you will find sculptures such as Nancy Schon’s Tortoise and Hare, Dan Ostermiller’s Shore Lunch, and Andre Harvey’s Stella, all delightful and expressive depictions of animals. These and other sculptures built on the trails offer visitors to Crystal Bridges a whole new experience about “art and nature”, with artistic creations blending harmoniously into the natural environment.

There is another sculpture along Art Trail that is definitely worth visiting. This is James Turrell’s The Way of Color, which was installed at the current location in 2009. Calling himself as a “sculptor of light”, James Turrell is known for his Skyscapes. A Skyscape is an enclosed space created within a structure usually made of stone and concrete with an aperture in the roof, which is rectangular-shaped like Open Sky (2004) at Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, or round-shaped like The Way of Color at Crystal Bridges. But the shape of an aperture is immaterial, as the whole point about a Skyscape is the opportunity it provides to experience light as it is. “Light is not something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation,” says James Turrell, as quoted in a companion volume to JAMES TURRELL: A RETROSPECTIVE, held at Los Angels County Museum of Art from May 2013 through April 2014. As you look up the sky through an aperture of a Skyscape, you see light filtering through it sometimes as waves but other times as tiny particles, reminding you of the dual nature of light as discovered by modern physicists. Light is also the source of colors as it interacts with our perception in different contexts, which The Way of Color demonstrates with programmed LED light displays of changing colors projected on the walls and the ceiling at dawn and dusk.

It is not just visual art that Bentonville offers. If your preference is for culinary art, there is an interesting restaurant called Sushi House, a widely popular restaurant that requires you to stand in a long line on weekends. Here you have a chance to taste a specialty of the house: “deep fried sushi”. Purists may be repelled at the idea of deep frying sushi, which would certainly kill off the taste of vinegar that is part and parcel of good sushi. But this is Arkansas, a region that boasts deep fried catfish among its favorite dishes. Indeed, you can hardly blame Arkansans for inventing “deep fried sushi”, considering that Japanese have invented such adaptations of imported food as “rice burger” and “anpan (bread with red bean pastes)”.

Having asked the usual question, “Is this art?” at some of the works exhibited at Crystal Bridges Museum—and at 21c Museum Hotel nearby, a boutique hotel which also serves as a contemporary art museum—you have every right to ask the question, “Is this sushi?” at some of the dishes offered at Sushi House. If nothing else, the very opportunity Bentonville offers you to ask these questions makes this small city in rural Arkansas an interesting place to visit. To be sure, Bentonville still has a long way to go before it can be called a great city with great museums, but it is already a charming city with a marvelous museum.