All religions have spiritual practices. These practices help to connect people with each other and with forms of consciousness beyond the human level.
Until recently, most atheists and secular humanists took it for granted that these practices were a waste of time, if not dangerously irrational. But attitudes are shifting, especially in relation to health and well-being. While medical sciences have made huge advances, they do not confer a sense of meaning or purpose in life, nor are they about improving relationships or instilling values of gratitude, generosity, and forgiveness. We do not expect medicine to do these things. These are all roles that religions play, and they turn out to have major effects on people’s health and well-being. Recent research studies show that, on average, religious people suffer less from anxiety and depression than nonreligious people,1 and are less prone to suicide,2 less likely to smoke,3 and less likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs.4
Most of these studies did not disentangle the effects of specific spiritual practices and beliefs, and all religions involve a wide range of practices. Some of these practices can also be carried out in a secular context, including meditation and gratitude. Even for nonreligious people, these practices turn out to be good for physical and mental health.
In the twentieth century, many people believed that science and reason would soon reign supreme, and religions would wither away. Humanity would ascend to a secular, reason-based social order, liberated from the shackles of ancient dogmas and superstitions. But rather than dying out, religions have persisted. Islam has not faded away. Hinduism is alive and well. Buddhism’s prestige has increased in previously non-Buddhist countries, partly thanks to the Dalai Lama. The practice of Christianity is indeed in decline in most of Europe and North America, but is growing in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia and the Pacific, where there are now more Christians than in Europe.5 In Russia during the Soviet period, the state was officially atheist and religion was brutally suppressed, but since the Communist system ended in 1991, the proportion of Christians in the population has greatly increased. In 1991, 61 percent of Russians described themselves as having no religion, and 31 percent as Russian Orthodox; by 2008, only 18 percent said they had no religion, and 72 percent said they were Orthodox Christians.6
In response to these unexpected trends, there has been a revival of militant atheism. This twenty-first-century anti-religious crusade has been led by the so-called New Atheists, notably Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason; Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; and Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
The New Atheists do not believe in God, but they have a strong belief in the philosophy of materialism. Materialists believe that the entire universe is unconscious, made up of mindless matter and governed by impersonal, mathematical laws. Nature has no design or purpose. Evolution is a result of the interplay of blind chance and physical necessity. Consciousness is confined to the insides of heads and only exists inside brains. God, angels, and spirits are ideas in human brains; they have no independent existence “out there.”
Within this materialist belief system, religion seems like a morass of superstition and irrationality; it represents an evolutionary stage that humanity has outgrown. People who are still religious are feebleminded or deluded; they should be liberated from the prison of falsehood in which they are trapped, or at least their children should be educated out of it.
The materialist worldview has played a major role in the secularization of Europe and North America, which has been accompanied by a decline in traditional religious observance, especially among people of Christian backgrounds.7 In Europe today, only a small minority practices the Christian faith on a regular basis. In Britain in 2015, regular churchgoers were 5 percent of the population, down from 12 percent in 1980.8 A far higher proportion of the population, 49 percent, defined themselves as having no religion—the so-called “nones.” In the white population, nones were a majority.9
Except in Russia, a decline in Christian faith and practice has occurred almost everywhere in Europe, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant countries. In 2011 in historically Catholic France, only about 5 percent of the population attended a church service weekly,10 about the same percentage as in Sweden, which is historically Protestant.11 Even in countries where the Catholic Church used to be very strong, there have been dramatic drops in religious observance. In Ireland in 2011, only about 18 percent of the population attended weekly mass, down from nearly 90 percent in 1984.12 Even in Poland, the most religious country in Europe, the number of people attending church weekly declined to less than 40 percent by 2011.13
Most European countries are now predominantly secular and are often described as post-Christian. But the United States is more religious. In 2014, 89 percent of Americans said they believed in God, 77 percent identified with a religious faith, and 36 percent attended services weekly. The proportion of atheists was 3 percent, much lower than in most of Europe.14 But even in the U.S., religious affiliation and observance are declining.15
Now everything is in flux. The fundamental assumptions of materialism turn out to be very questionable when examined in the light of advances in the sciences themselves, as I show in my book The Science Delusion (called Science Set Free in the U.S.). Meanwhile, the very existence of human consciousness has become increasingly problematic for materialists, who start from the assumption that everything is made of unconscious matter, including human brains. If so, how does consciousness emerge in brains, when it is absent from the rest of nature? This is called the “hard problem” in the philosophy of mind.
Spirituality Outside Religion
These declines in religious affiliation and observance do not mean that most people have become atheists. In a survey in Britain in 2013, only 13 percent of adults said they agreed with the statement, “Humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element.” Over three-quarters of all adults said they believed that “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means.” Even among people who described themselves as nonreligious, more than 60 percent said there are things that cannot be explained, and over a third believed in the existence of spiritual beings.16
Whatever people’s avowed beliefs, recent studies have shown that spiritual experiences are surprisingly common, even among those who describe themselves as nonreligious.17 These include near-death experiences, spontaneous mystical experiences, and revelations while taking psychedelic drugs. The Religious Experience Research Unit, set up by the biologist Sir Alister Hardy, asked British people, “Have you ever experienced a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?” In 1978, 36 percent said yes; in 1987, 48 percent; and in 2000, over 75 percent of respondents said they were “aware of a spiritual dimension to their experience.” In 1962, Gallup asked Americans if they had ever had “a religious or mystical experience”, and 22 percent said yes; in 1994, 33 percent; and in 2009, 49 percent.18
These surveys do not necessarily mean that spiritual and mystical experiences are more common than they were; they may reflect a weakening of the taboo against talking about such experiences. Many people used to be afraid that if they admitted to mystical experiences, they would be classified as mentally unbalanced. But mainstream psychiatry and psychology are now more open to “anomalous experiences,” and it is more culturally acceptable to discuss them.19
Secularism has not led to an extinction of interest in spiritual realms, nor to an eclipse of spiritual experiences.20 But many people’s spiritual interests and experiences now take place outside traditional religious frameworks. For instance, millions practice yoga and meditation in a secular context. New forms of spirituality are emerging that are based primarily on personal experience. They fill a need that atheism cannot satisfy.
The Crisis of Faithlessness
Hardline atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are suspicious of spiritual experiences and tend to dismiss them as delusions of the brain or chemical side effects. But a growing number of atheists and secular humanists are willing to talk about such experiences, and indeed regard them as essential for human flourishing.
The children’s writer Philip Pullman, a prominent public atheist, had a mystical experience as a young man that left him with the conviction that the universe is “alive, conscious and full of purpose.” In a recent interview, he said, “Everything I’ve written, even the lightest and simplest things, has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.”21
The philosopher Alain de Botton, who was brought up as an atheist, has come to the conclusion that by abandoning religion, atheists impoverish their lives. In his bestselling book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, he shows how religion satisfies social and personal needs that a purely secular lifestyle cannot.
De Botton is the son of two secular Jews who, he says, “placed religious belief somewhere on a par with an attachment to Santa Claus . . . If any members of their social circle were discovered to harbour clandestine religious sentiments, my parents would start to regard them with the sort of pity more commonly reserved for those diagnosed with a degenerative disease and could from then on never be persuaded to take them seriously again.”22
In his midtwenties, de Botton underwent what he calls a “crisis of faithlessness.” Although he remained a committed atheist, he was liberated by the thought that it might be possible to engage with religion without subscribing to religious beliefs. He came to the conclusion that his continuing resistance to religious ideas “was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.” He says:
Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with . . . We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don’t go on pilgrimages. We can’t build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. The notion of reading a self-help book has become absurd to the high-minded. We resist mental exercises. Strangers rarely sing together.23
De Botton says he wants to enrich the lives of atheists by “stealing” these practices from religion. He turns to religion for insights into how to build a sense of community, make relationships last, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, and get more out of art, architecture, and music.
Another atheist, Sam Harris, best known for his anti-religious polemics, is at the same time a committed meditator. He spent two years in India sitting at the feet of gurus and has been initiated into the Tibetan Dzogchen meditative tradition. In his book Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion, he writes:
Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith. People on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within the context of science—apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. Until we can talk about spirituality in rational terms—acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence—our world will remain shattered by dogmatism.24
Harris now teaches meditation in online courses.25
Meanwhile, a new atheist church called the Sunday Assembly has been spreading rapidly. It was founded in London in 2013 by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans. Its services include singing, small-group bonding, and uplifting stories. Its motto is “Live better, help often, wonder more.”26 Jones describes himself as a “humanist mystic” and hopes the Sunday Assembly, unlike earlier humanist groups, will develop an ecstatic or charismatic brand of humanism.27
Many old-school atheists are willing to admit the validity of feelings of awe and wonder at the universe as revealed by science. But this is almost their only concession to the subjectivity of spirituality. A new generation of atheists and secular humanists is exploring the traditional territory of religion and trying to incorporate a range of spiritual practices into a secular lifestyle. Meanwhile, the effects of spiritual practices themselves are now being investigated scientifically as never before.
Scientific Studies of Spiritual Practice
In the late twentieth century, from small beginnings in the 1970s, scientists began to investigate a wide range of spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, community singing, and the practice of gratitude. In 2001, a comprehensive review in the Handbook of Religion and Health brought together the findings of more than 1,200 research studies.28 In this century, there has been a great increase in the amount of research, and a second edition of the handbook, published in 2012, reviewed more than 2,100 original, quantitative, data-based studies published since 2000. Many more have been published since. The results generally show that religious and spiritual practices confer benefits that include better physical and mental health, less proneness to depression, and greater longevity.29
The old-fashioned opposition between science and religion is a false dichotomy. Open-minded scientific studies enhance our understanding of spiritual and religious practices.
In this book, I discuss seven kinds of practices and review scientific studies of their effects. I am not including all possible spiritual practices, only a limited selection. I intend to explore several more in a subsequent book.
These practices are compatible with both a secular way of life and a religious way of life.
The practices themselves are about experience, not belief. Nevertheless, as I show in the discussions in this book, beliefs affect the interpretation of the practices. For example, over many centuries people have meditated within the Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, and other religious traditions. They have done so in the belief that their practices are connecting them to a level of more-than-human consciousness.
Materialists deny the existence of consciousness beyond the human level as a matter of principle. They think of experiences while meditating as nothing but changes within brains, confined to the insides of heads. Nevertheless, whatever their belief system, people who practice meditation often receive benefits that enrich their lives.
The seven practices I discuss in this book are common to all religions. All religions encourage gratitude. There is pilgrimage in all traditions: Hindus go to temples dedicated to gods and goddesses, to holy mountains like Mount Kailash, and to holy rivers like the Ganges. Muslims go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Jews, Christians, and Muslims go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Western Europe, Christians go to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Canterbury, and Chartres; Irish Catholics go to the holy mountain Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg, the sacred lake.
Reconnecting with the more-than-human-world is part of all religious traditions, and all connect in spiritually meaningful ways with plants. Rituals are an expression of spirituality and are found in all religions and secular societies. All spiritual traditions involve chanting and singing.
At the end of each chapter I suggest two ways in which you can gain direct experiences of these practices for yourself.