ULTIMATE REALITY

A writer offers a critique of scientific materialism coupled with an argument in favor of an ultimate reality beyond empirical confirmation.

Shute avers that people live in an “intellectually inhospitable world,” one in which “overcertainty,” an inelastic and hyperbolic confidence in one’s beliefs, serves as a prohibitive bar to philosophical progress. His principal example is the “dogma of materialist science,” a reductive interpretation of the universe that, despite its increasingly obvious theoretical failings, remains the dominant paradigm for scientists. The author raises provocative questions about the inadequacy of materialism—his discussion is especially stimulating when he considers Darwinian evolution and its limitations, a perspective considered “sacrosanct” despite its incoherencies. In place of these scientific pieties, Shute argues that an ultimate reality exists that transcends perception, a spiritual dimension to life that couldn’t possibly be fully captured by the pinched categories of scientific conceptualization. The author mines psychology, physics, and biology for evidence of these “extradimensional sources of influence on the material world” as well as various altered states of consciousness, including hypnosis and near-death experiences. Shute’s analysis is wide-ranging and ambitious—he considers intractable problems like the nature of consciousness, proposes a more searching understanding of causality than science currently provides, and suggests the reasonability of a mind that survives the death of the body. Despite these grand aims, the author is impressively cautious and restrained regarding his conclusions: “This book seeks to neither prove nor disprove the existence of any particular god, nor the truth or falsity of any particular religion. What this book hopes to do is lend credibility to the idea that an ultimate reality exists behind the doors of perception.” His critique of materialism is not original but it is persuasive, and one can’t help but be impressed by his call for an authentic skepticism, one that refuses to yield easily to facile belief or stubborn disbelief.

A thoughtful and intriguing account of the relationship between science and spirituality.