Summary:
• The search for meaning, moral wisdom, and purpose is always worthwhile, even if you do not believe in anything supernatural. Genuine wisdom begins with humility, not with an assumption of certainty.
• A faith built on accepting permanent uncertainty cannot be demolished by new facts or discoveries. No one can prove nor disprove the existence of God. The most spiritually rewarding form of faith is a commitment to unconditional love, forgiveness, and doing what is right, even when that is difficult, unrewarded, or criticized.
• One of the arguments against a Divine Creator is the existence of widespread suffering in nature. Yet, out-of-body experiences (OBEs) show that a person can feel no pain even while the body is severely injured. Science cannot prove that consciousness departs the body; nevertheless, OBEs are genuine psychological events. And because OBEs reveal that the brain can block pain during extreme trauma, OBEs suggest that humans—and animals—may experience pain differently than its outward appearance.
• Long before civilization, our ancestors survived by relying on love, empathy, cooperation, and mutual care. Those values may now be deeply rooted in human nature. Near-death experiences, even if NDEs are not supernatural, consistently emphasize unconditional love, forgiveness, and deep respect for life.
• NDEs reveal how much emotional warmth that humans are capable of feeling. This also reveals that modern civilization has often failed to meet our emotional needs. That lack of unconditional love and dignity can lead to mental distress and cruelty.
• The solution is to reconnect with our deepest moral essence and then work to make the world better for everyone. You may need to release old beliefs that were shaped by fears or the ego. Instead, embrace humility, forgiveness, and unconditional love. That includes forgiving yourself—without conditions.
You may have asked questions such as these. Perhaps you still do. If nothing supernatural exists, this does not render spiritual questions meaningless. A search for meaning, moral insight, and wisdom are worth pursuing even in a purely material Universe. Uncertainty is not a flaw in understanding; it is a natural condition of being human. It is a crucial characteristic of wisdom is humility.
When a person is suffering extreme pain—and death appears imminent—the person may suddenly experience an out-of-body experience, or OBE. During an OBE, the person’s consciousness seems to leave the body and observes the body from above, as if floating. According to testimonies from OBE experiencers, the person’s consciousness no longer feels any pain, even though the body is actively suffering. After the OBE ends and the person is revived, the person may accurately describe activities that occurred around the body while unconscious, including specific people who were present such as medical personnel, and their specific equipment, and even the conversations they had during the OBE.
The body was unconscious. Was the person’s consciousness detached and viewed the scene from above, looking down? Material science says this is impossible. So, among the people who have ever reported an OBE, are all of them deliberately lying? Only someone completely ignorant of the OBE phenomenon would make that accusation. Skeptics who think more scientifically and are familiar with OBEs do not usually dismiss them as lies. Instead, they offer possible explanations based on biology or psychology. For example, instead of the person’s consciousness leaving the body, perhaps the brain was functioning well enough to hear the conversations spoken around the body and then the brain imagined the scene. The lack of pain could be due to a phenomenon called disassociation in which the brain blocks out pain signals from the body because the situation is too terrifying to contemplate, such as the likelihood of dying. Perhaps the brain is telling itself that the body is no longer its own, that somehow only the body is suffering the trauma, not the person’s consciousness. In other words, perhaps the brain is deceiving itself.
Whatever the true explanation is, an OBE is a genuine psychological event. And you do not need to believe in anything supernatural to acknowledge that.
A moral argument against the existence of God is the problem of animal suffering. For millions of years, animals have hunted, killed, and eaten one another. Why did God create a world where animals kill and eat each other? Humans can be cruel, but cruelty is usually a human choice. Most animals have no choice: they must hunt and kill to survive, terrorizing other animals in the process. This moral argument asserts that either God does not exist or God is not good. And if God is not good, then God does not deserve to be worshipped.
The OBE phenomenon should cause us to reconsider this argument. Whether supernatural or not, the OBE phenomenon means that a person’s brain can ignore a horrific experience and not feel any pain even while the body is suffering critically. This reaction appears to be a natural ability, though it is not voluntary. Not all people react this way, but a number of people have. And if humans have this natural ability, why not other animals? When an animal is attacked, we may see the animal showing panic and pain, but we do not really know if it is experiencing its own version of an out-of-body experience. What we do see is important, but it may not be the whole story.
A possible corollary of this moral argument is that if God has the power to create literally anything, then God should have created a world where no animals kill other animals. Most plants do not kill; they draw nutrients from soil, water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So why did God not create animals the same way? Beware of this path of thinking, however, because it can easily lead to many questions having multiple possible answers, none of which are facts, only opinions. And even many of the questions are based on opinions. One fact that we do know is that we live in one particular Universe, a material Universe. Only our human arrogance assumes that this Universe contains literally everything that exists simply because we lack material proof of anything else. Like the Biblical character named Job, we humans were not present when the Universe began. If the Universe was created by God, we cannot be certain of what God’s reasons were. We can only guess. But our guesses include possibilities that are not as horrific or as bleak as appearances might suggest. Perhaps we should be content with that uncertainty. Indeed, that uncertainty is a scientific fact.
There might be nothing supernatural about an out-of-body experience, but the existence of the OBE phenomenon shows that the human brain and how natural evolution developed the human brain are much more complicated than simple reasoning might assume. Likewise in nuclear physics, phenomena such as quantum superposition and quantum entanglement reveal a Universe that defies our common sense. Among physicists, there is a saying that if you think that you understand quantum mechanics, you do not really understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics even has a fundamental concept called the Uncertainty Principle.
Whether you are an atheist, an agnostic, a religious believer, or simply confused, beware of an obsession with certainty. That obsession may never be satisfied, and the illusion of certainty can be very dangerous. Human arrogance and the ego demand certainty, but there is less certainty in the Universe than many of us are willing to admit. Many people want certainty in their religious faith; as a result, when material facts contradict their religious beliefs, they either ignore those facts or those facts shatter their certainty, which also shatters their religious faith.
If you want a faith that is indestructible, then build your faith upon a natural uncertainty, a permanent uncertainty. No one can prove the existence of God. No one can disprove the existence of God. Accepting such uncertainty means that your faith can never be disproven.
There is another form of faith which you should also consider. It is a faith that is irrational and will always be criticized because it is irrational. Yet, this faith also encourages spiritual growth; and for that reason, it could be the most spiritually beneficial of all faiths. The essence of this faith is a commitment to unconditional love, to forgiveness, to doing what is morally right because it is right, and to avoid doing harm. This faith is almost impossible to uphold without some occasional failures. Many human societies are not designed to encourage this faith because they reward behaviors that feed the ego. Critics deride this faith as naïve and gullible, and some people will seek unfair advantages by treating it as a person’s vulnerability. If you uphold this faith, there is no certainty that you will be rewarded with material things. And there is no certainty that you will be rewarded in an afterlife because an afterlife may not exist.
Yet, this faith is at the core of most of the world’s religions. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Love your neighbor as yourself. If God exists, then this is the Divine message that appears again and again. If God does not exist, then this moral orientation is still deeply human. Before the invention of civilization, our distant ancestors lived this faith for thousands of generations. They treated love, empathy, cooperation, and mutual care as essential to their survival, and they were right. They also knew violence, just as every animal that hunts knows violence. Violence alone, however, was not their only trait. Their faith in love, empathy, cooperation, and mutual care was the basic faith of their tribes, the faith they upheld in their daily behavior, the faith that helped to develop the entire human species through natural evolution. That faith is now deeply rooted in human nature and therefore could be in our genes.
If you doubt that, then consider the typical near-death experience. If God does not exist and the NDE phenomenon is not supernatural, then the typical NDE still reveals insights into the human mind and likewise into the human brain shaped by evolution. What are the common features across so many NDEs? Unconditional love. An emphasis on forgiveness. A life review emphasizing the importance of treating others as you would wish to be treated. A profound respect for life itself. These are universal values. They appear in NDEs because they express our moral essence as human beings, as surely as a new mother loves her newborn child. Her love is both emotional and genetic.
Even the phenomenon of distressing NDEs often reveal these values: they warn against harming others and ignoring those in need, because those behaviors violate something essential within us. Such violations can generate so much shame and guilt that some people imagine that they deserve eternal punishment in a place called Hell. And their minds create that place as a distressing NDE.
The emotions felt in typical NDEs, including unconditional love and profound peace, are often described as more vivid and more fulfilling than anything experienced in ordinary life. In other words, typical NDEs hint at how much love and joy a human being is capable of feeling. When compared to the tense emotional state that prevails throughout most of human civilization, that gap in emotional intensity reveals how far modern humans have drifted from the loving emotional support that our distant ancestors knew for more than a thousand centuries before civilization. Our species evolved to need that much emotional support. Today’s humans desperately need that much emotional support. For without natural tenderness, humans can become cruel, and mental illness becomes common.
Quitting civilization is not the solution. The solution is to connect with our deepest moral essence and then work towards making the world a better place for everyone. That includes improving the moral aspects of this invention that we call civilization. Religions have tried to. Ideologies have tried to. Individuals have tried to. That history does not mean we should no longer try. It means the effort is worth doing, and that we should learn from the past as we strive to do better.
You do not need to believe in anything supernatural to recognize that our moral essence as a species has been suppressed, at least to an extent. Humans can be cruel, but humans are not cruel by nature. If you feel alone, strange, and out of place in today’s society, then one possible reason (not the only reason, but one possible reason) could be that you were taught ideas and customs that contradict your moral essence and encourage the ego. Feeling and expressing unconditional love involves risk, and risk can be terrifying, but unconditional love is much more natural and essentially human than this artificial environment we call civilization.
You might need to abandon old beliefs about who and what you are, including a belief in certainty. Your ego, shaped by fear, could be telling you lies, for it usually does. Instead of embracing your ego, embrace humility, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Unconditional love includes forgiving yourself, without conditions. If you want something to believe in, then believe in unconditional love, for that is enough.