In Defense of Magical Thinking: Essays in Defiance of Conformity to Reason

By Jack Preston King

Do arrogant Twitter atheists make your blood boil? When Richard Dawkins, the Amazing Randi, or Bill Nye the Science Guy smugly tell you how stupid you are for believing in God, or psychic powers, or ghosts, or the afterlife, or even your own immortal soul, do you want to just reach through the screen and strangle them?

You’re going to love this book.

Jack Preston King is not an apologist for any one religion or spiritual path. He’s a defender of the human spiritual impulse in all its forms. In these 16 rollicking essays, King makes the case for both the reality and importance of spiritual experience, citing psychology, neuroscience, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Philosophy, and even pop culture icons Philip K. Dick, the Face on Mars, and the 1980s console video game Frogger. Read this book, and the next time some jerk on Twitter says magic isn’t real, and human beings are soulless, chemically-driven animals inhabiting a dead, material universe, you’ll be armed and ready to make your stand In Defense of Magical Thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Paradigm Press
• Release date: May 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370406258

Jack Preston King

Jack Preston King is the author of "In Defense of Magical Thinking: Essays in Defiance of Conformity to Reason" and other books for rebels against the spiritual, creative, and cultural status quo. He writes unruly poems, short stories and novels, too. Visit him on the web at jackprestonking.com. He's also on Twitter, Medium and Facebook.

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Religious Believers and Atheists Have More In Common Than They Think

The Spiritual Brain

I’m currently listening my way through the Great Courses lecture series The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience. The lecturer, Andrew Newberg, is a neuroscientist and the Director of Research for the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital. He’s written several books, including How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, and The Metaphysical Mind: Probing the Biology of Philosophical Thought.

It’s worth noting early in this essay that if you’re thinking, "Oh, that Newberg guy is a scientist, so he must be an atheist out to disprove religious claims," you would be wrong. While, so far in the lectures I’ve heard, he hasn’t named one spiritual tradition he identifies with personally, he is very clearly not a religious skeptic. His scientific work studies the effects of religious/spiritual experiences on the human brain. But he is meticulously careful to caution against the erroneous conclusion that just because spiritual experiences effect, and can even be measured in, our brains, they must therefore be simple products of our brains.

Our whole experience of the outside world happens inside our brains. That does not mean the outside world is imaginary. Dr. Newberg would argue that we should apply the same logic to our experiences of God.

On my commute to work this morning, I listened to lecture #5, Believers and Atheists. Numerous scientific studies were cited, but I will flesh out only two of them here.

Who’s More Logical? Atheists Or Believers?

In the first study, a series of statements were devised to assess a test subject’s skill at logical thinking. There were two kinds of statements, mixed evenly throughout. Half presupposed a positive view of religion, while the other half presupposed a negative view.

For example, statement one might read:

To be successful in Tom’s society, it is necessary to be a Christian. Tom wants to be successful. He should therefore become a Christian.

Followed by:

Religious belief has been shown to increase depression in people already suffering from that condition. Tom suffers from depression. He should therefore disavow all religious belief.

Both statements are internally consistent, and the conclusion does follow logically from the premises that precede it. Test subjects may not personally agree that the first premise in each statement is true, but that shouldn’t matter. They are only being asked to judge whether or not each statement is logically sound.

The correct answer in every case was YES. The conclusions were all logical, based on the premises presented.

Religious believers, as a group, got the vast majority of the religion positive statements right (they said yes), and close to 100% of the religion negative statements wrong (they said no).

Atheist test subjects delivered exactly the same results (reversed, of course). They identified the majority of the religion negative statements as logical, and most of the religion positive statements as irrational.

What these results demonstrate, I think, is that neither group was actually applying logic in any objective sense. Both groups clearly read the test statements through a lens of preconceived bias. What they agreed with, they judged logical. What they disagreed with was illogical.

Contrary to popular belief, atheists do not think more logically than believers.

It’s a common assumption that they do, at least among atheist I have known or encountered on social media. But clearly that assumption is false.

In their failure to apply logic to religious/spiritual questions, atheists and believers are actually very similar.

Things Seen and Unseen

In the second study, a series of images were created on a computer. Scenes containing real objects, say a dog or a house, were twisted up to make those objects difficult to recognize, like a Rorschach inkblot, but with a known, concrete image hidden inside. In addition, random back-ground imagery and colors were warped to make them suggest, but not actually form, things not in the original image, like a tree or a bird. The test subject’s job was to identify every object they could make out in the picture.

Religious believers got pretty much all of the concrete objects right. They consistently identified the dog or the house. About half the time, they also saw the tree or the bird. Believers consistently saw what was really there — and a little bit more.

Atheists, on the other hand, never saw the tree or the bird. 100% of the time, they were not fooled in the way believers were. However, a significant percentage of the time, they also did not see the dog or the house. Atheist test subjects never saw things that were not there. But they also often did not see things that WERE there.

Which leads to the unsettling conclusion, for believers, that a favorable predisposition toward religion/spirituality can lead us to sometimes experience things that don’t correlate to actual reality. Atheists would argue that one of these unreal experiences is God.

But the equally unsettling conclusion for atheists is that a predisposition toward skepticism in religious/ spiritual matters can lead us to mistakenly label real things in our environment illusory. Believers would argue that one of those skeptically-disregarded real presences in the world is God.

Common Ground

I’ve only finished 5 of 24 lectures, so I’m not ready to draw any overarching conclusions regarding The Spiritual Brain — either the Great Courses lecture series, or the cauliflower-sized mass of interconnected neurons busily scripting reality in each of our heads.

But based on the two studies outlined above, I think it’s safe to say that, in their lack of logic and objectivity, and their selective identification of reality, believers and atheists have a whole lot more in common, on an average day, than either would likely care to admit.

In Defense of Magical Thinking

What if Magical Thinking is the Key to Spiritual Development?

Magical Thinking

In lecture #6 of the Great Courses series The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience, Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg discusses spiritual development. He starts by laying out the seven stages of faith defined by James W. Fowler in his 1981 book of that title, and follows with a description of close parallels he has observed in his own scientific research into the physical development of the brain.

Fowler numbers his seven stages of faith stages zero through six (so zero is the first stage, with one being the second, and so on). Stage zero occurs from birth through two years, and not a lot goes on there spiritually, so I won’t dwell on it. Of the remaining six stages, I want to look closely at only two.

From Wikipedia:

Stage 1 — Intuitive-Projective faith (ages of three to seven), is characterized by the psyche’s unprotected exposure to the Unconscious, and marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. Religion is learned mainly through experiences, stories, images, and the people that one comes in contact with.

Stage 2 — Mythic-Literal faith (mostly in school children — [ages eight to eleven]), stage two persons have a strong belief in the justice and reciprocity of the universe, and their deities are almost always anthropomorphic. During this time metaphors and symbolic language are often misunderstood and are taken literally. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fowler)

Stages three through six map the process by which age and enculturation shape these early raw influences to match the conventional faith we are raised in, our breaking away from those conventions in mid-life (which not everybody does), and finally a universalizing of faith in old age, in which one comes to feel at home in the universe, and which often involves, if we rebelled at some point, a return to the family faith.

Does the physical development of the brain follow a similar structure?

Dr. Newberg says yes. During those stage one and two years, from ages three to eleven, a massive number of new neural connections are being forged in our brains. We are learning about the world for the first time, and our brains are weaving our newfound knowledge and experience into untold complex neural pathways that will shape how we understand ourselves and the world for the rest of our lives.

The remaining stages, from years 12 through old age, Dr. Newberg describes as a series of prunings of that explosion of neural connections made in early childhood. The brain is still capable of making new connections, but on nowhere near the scale it did when we had that early unprotected exposure to the Unconscious. Our brains, and the reality they allow us to perceive, now mostly follow a process of trimming away less useful neural connections, while those that show practical benefit are strengthened. The magical thinking of childhood is tamed into one brand or another of religious orthodoxy, maybe even all the way to atheism if our individual life path makes that beneficial to us.

Based on Newberg’s comparison of the stages of spiritual development with brain science, one clear implication I see is that if experiences, stories, images, and the people that one comes in contact with during a child’s formative years don’t actively support and encourage magical thinking, a child’s brain will likely never develop the neural connections necessary to consider reality in terms of beings and forces beyond the level immediately available to our five senses.

The child will never learn to believe in God, or in supernatural dimensions of reality in general. That part of his brain won’t develop at all, or at least not to its fullest.

When the pruning begins around age 12, there won’t be a lot of religious/spiritual cutting back to do.

Which sounds like an argument  public advocates of atheism like Richard Dawkins might make in favor of abolishing childhood religious