Making Belief: Essays Towards a Natural, Magical, Intelligent Faith

His father was a scientist and atheist, his mother a spiritual seeker. As a boy, he sensed magic, even God-in the woods that surrounded their rural New Hampshire home, in the music of the Beatles, and in the mystery of dreams. But how could any of that really be real? Surely, the science his father believed in told us what was really real: Our sense of having a soul is just chemicals. Our presence in the universe is just the result of impersonal laws and natural selection. And all our hopes are ultimately doomed in the eternal extinction of death. That last one was the biggest gut-punch. As a boy, Chris would sometimes lie in bed and contemplate that awful and seemingly certain fate-until it became unbearable and, with a shudder, he pushed it from his mind. But over the years, as he read, contemplated, and experienced more, he began to see things differently. He began to realize that you could be intelligent and open-minded-like scientists are supposed to be-and also embrace the reality of realms beyond. In fact, he came to see that the more intelligence and open-mindedness we bring to the question of ultimate reality, the less our conventional science looks like an authority on the topic. The essays in The Science Spell don't question the value of science. In fact, they push its critical thinking further than most scientists are used to. In easy, playful prose, these essays go where our most educated and well-respected citizens generally don't. In doing so, they explore a paradox: The idea of a universe devoid of magic may itself be a kind of spell.