Houston Smith: Science, Religion, and Life

He used in Smith as an authority on the world's major religious. He's taught at MIT and UC Berkeley. He's written 15 books, including his latest, Tales of Wonder, Adventures chasing the Divine. In this interview, he talks about the relationship between science and religion, evolution. The brain is a reducing valve. The good Friday experiment at Boston College, in which Mescalin was administered, is friendship with Alges Huxley, the capacity of certain psychedelics to produce mystical states, and his enthusiasm for life. The science and religion often seem to exclude each other. How can science and religion come together in the search for ultimate truth? Well, by recognizing what science is? Science, dear, only with the material world that we can observe, and then eventually come to control its barements. So we know the laws by which things work. But to come to terms with religion or the rest of life, one has to rely the limitations of science. That it deals only with the physical, but that not all there is. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feeling are the primary medium in which we live, where we're living right now in our conversation. So there would be no problem. There's no problem with science. The problem is with, and it forced me to coin a word, scientism. Science is good. Science, tism, and the view that it's the only reliable way of truth is very bad. People who have near-death experiences describe an altered reality that is somehow congruent with quantum physics. But in the old science, it's ruled by what Dr. Amit Goswami, a physicist, calls upward causation. And from this we get the idea of evolution. From atoms to molecules to cells to brain. And from brain to consciousness as an epiphonomon of the brain. In this point of view, matter is the ground of all being. But what near-death experiences are showing us is what Dr. Goswami calls downward causation. And this view of the world, consciousness, not matter is the ground of all being. So that God is kind of a super consciousness. Near-death experiences feel that they come from this consciousness. And that this consciousness is their home. My question is, can evolution as upward causation exist with God as downward causation? In other words, can consciousness, can life be a product of both? All right. There's only one view. Downward causation. Loran Nicely and another world class scientist whose name escapes me. They say more and more the world is the universe is beginning to look like a great thought, not a great thing. And that right. And a downward causation we have spoken of this before of the mind being a reducing mal, imprints of all omniscient. But we couldn't manage if we were that omniscient. So it has to be reduced to this. Now, just make us, make us take a little far field. But you say the two points of view and I contradicted you. There is only one. There is no evolution. Now that sounds so startling that I'm afraid it may. I may lose all my credibility in making that and people just turn off the video and just count me out. But I sincerely believe that that is the case. But there are four combined, not down reasons against upward causation known as evolution. First is logical. The more cannot come from the list. Number two is biological. Parents always, mothers always give birth to their own kind. The third is statistical. A cell is so complicated that the chances that it just emerged by accident. It's so infinitive, it's not small. We don't even have numbers. You can't even put it in numbers, unlikely that is. Tealiel logical. Deaf, dumb, blind matter could not give rise to hearing, seeing and speaking. As for the false or record, it constitutes perhaps the various challenge to the evolutionary hypotheses. The gaps between the various forms of life in fossil preserved and fossil are immense. So much so that Darwin himself coined the phrase missing links. He realized that was the weak point in his hypothesis. But he had faith that those missing links between various stages would be discovered in time. However, in 150 years of intensive search, not a single missing link has been discovered. So I think that is to my mind, clear evidence that we did not evolve. So how did we get here? Who knows? How did the world get here? I think logically, it was created by a perfect intelligence. That created the universe. So now you can call it religious people called that perfect being God. But by what's so ever named? The miracle happened. The universe happened. And we are, or should be, and I certainly am grateful that I am a part of that miracle. You participated in the Good Friday experiment at Cambridge, and which Mescalin was introduced to the congregants. What was that experience like for you? Well, it was a controlled experiment in which there was a control group. They were given something for the little nicotine in cats and if something, the gaze of my buzz that would make them think they had the subs. They really didn't. That was a controlled group. And then there was the experimental group. I was in the experimental group. And well, it was utterly unexpected and extraordinary. What happened? Well, I remember there was a three hour Good Friday service in the chapel upstairs. And it was a pint down into this lower smaller chapel, which was sealed off from the rest of the world. And well, in part of it, why? At one point, beautiful soloist sang and I can still remember. My times are in your hand or lower. I will them there. My soul, my heart, my life, my all. I will them too. I care. Now that conclusion is a great conclusion, as you can read, goes a done, DD, DD, DD, DD, DD, and at that moment, I had them on the profile, religious experience. I have ever had. I mean, yes, the was sang exactly as I felt. So, what was it like for me? It produced the profound, I just cannot imagine it being more intense and real than that experience than I just wanted nothing but God and feeling nothing but God. That does sound wonderful. I'm wondering, is it chemically induced mystical experience different from a spontaneous mystical experience? Perhaps a mystical experience born of religious practice? Well, as far as the fiction, the climbing ten, I only the real genuine authentic mystic would experience that. The rest of us cannot experience that without some help. But all us Huxley whose doors of perception put me on to this subject said that he experienced the nearest thing imaginable to the beat-typic experience. And I knew him we had a 30-year friendship and I said, what did it lack? That the beat-typic experience had and he said, carry over. If you had the beat-typic experience, why then it would change your life and let them near death experience to us. Perhaps. The point is not altered states, but altered traits. I see. Oh, why? So these injections can produce the altered state, but they cannot produce the altered traits change in behavior for the better. I think the you punish ours were inspired by something called Soma, which is generally considered to be a psychedelic mushroom drink. And then the Ellician mysteries, the experience there, was inspired by the Kikian, a drink that people took when they went into the initiation chamber, which was an air-got drink. Is it right? My question is, what value have psychedelics had and the evolution of religion? I know that in the Ellician mysteries you had to go through a lot of preparation before you actually entered the initiation chamber. It went on for months. So there was some training. So again, what value have psychedelics had and the evolution of religion? That value I'm balicking on that word, what influence would that be? All right, church. What influence? Well, is it legal even not to say appropriate in being interviewed like this to say at some point? I don't know. Oh, because I think that we are religious animals. Human beings are religious animals. And but I don't know about the stages. I think that without the end of the agenda, why the history of religion worldwide would have been the same as that has been. You cited the Al Jus' Huxley and his book, The Pryofilosophy, which I think in some ways changed the course of your life. What was Al Jus' Huxley life? Would you consider him to be a religious person? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The most amazing person I have ever met. His knowledge was in Cyclopebe. And he also his competence board him. So he went into things like the site without gossip and with cheating, they are seeing and his knowledge was as I say in Cyclopebe, Stravinsky said knowing Huxley was like having the library of Congress at the other end of the telephone line. One evening he called all of us and then what can you tell me about the derivation of scissors? And Huxley just told him on the end of the line. His capacity for conversation was extraordinary. I have been in restaurants with him where the people in the Jason tables fell silent just hoping to hear some words from this. And of which the bus being climb. And once when I brought him to MIT as a visiting a distinguished professor for his semester and every colleague in New York wanted him for a lecture and I drove him because I wanted to spend every moment of my time with him that I could. And once after his lecture and we were driving back to our quarters in Cambridge he said, you know Huston it's a little bit embarrassing to spend one's whole life pondering the human condition and to come up with nothing more profound in the way of advice to other people than try to be a little kind. That's wonderful. Can you have interview many, many important people in the course of your life? Can you think of one instance, one interaction with someone that did change the course of your life? Well I don't know how I would have any vantage point in answering that in one sense why every significant encounter changes one's life. My core ship and marriage took kind of change my life. Certainly. But I have no take on what my life would have been like and I not met and married her. So there is no point to come Paris. You've had such a long and colorful life growing up in China where your parents were missionaries. Do you ever wake up in the morning and take back on your long life and realize with a start that you are the world renowned scholar religion Houston Smith? No you don't have one. No. All right I'm just just me but I will make this claim that from the first back as I can remember I found myself enthusiastic in enthusiastic about life in enthusiastic about the people that I meet in enthusiastic that I was able to be a teacher professor and that I could write I could write book. So there would be this enthusiasm when was there but the way you put that you were the Houston. That's crazy for the bird. But you use the word enthusiasm and enthusiasm has a particularly potent meaning to it. It means to be filled with God. Exactly and that's so where I sense this enthusiasm is the spark of the divine that is within all of us.