Countering Deepak Chopra's Critique of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

D.P. Soppythawts

“Materialism can't deliver God, not because God doesn't exist, but because the solid, physical world is an illusion--as quantum physics proved long ago. Religion to my mind has one undeniable truth on its side: one must look inside consciousness itself to find God. If God is a universal intelligence, that will turn out to be a fact but of a strange kind that we aren’t yet used to.” This is Deepak Chopra’s punch paragraph (Skeptic, September 4, 2007, Vol. 13, No. 2) concealed in a string of incoherent claptrap, much along the same lines as his Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, where he flaunts his ability to leap from premise to conclusion with nothing to sustain him in such a reptilian flight. His position above, he claims, is a valid refutation of Dawkins’s tightly argued thesis on the merits of atheism.

Chopra's statement, “Materialism can’t deliver God, not because God doesn’t exist…” is grammatically correct, but it has no meaning, for it is akin to making up non sequiturs like “this squirrel is not pink because it is not also blue.” Kant noted that existence is not an attribute. With their pinkies in their mouths (like Mini-Me), the Chopras of the world ponder on the patently false position that a God which exists is better than a God that does not. The argument is false because the two statements, “an existent God” and a “non-existent God” are identical; hence it is impossible to assign the comparative “better” to either of them. If all this is too heavy, it suffices to note that we are mesmerized by the concept of a God for an understandably personal reason: we are afraid of dying. Since death is inevitable (despite Chopra’s flailing New Age attempts to “topple entropy”), desiring continuity, we further invented the “soul” to sit beside this materialistically contrived God, to comfort and be comforted. Illusion is not the opposite of existence as Guru Chopra seems to imply. Most certainly, it is not the opposite of reality; just ask David Copperfield. Hoisting existence to the status of an attribute leads to variants of the impregnable conclusion: “since God exists, God must exist.” For, as Chopra states, “One must look into consciousness itself to find God.” (Italics mine.) Tell us, Guru Chopra, how does one “look” into “Consciousness.” And what does that even mean? But let’s indulge. By the mere fact of having “looked” into this “C-mess”, would it not nullify illusion? (Curiously, I have no illusions about writing the preceding sentence.)

The God in the human psyche is the ultimate exemplification of materialism. God “exists” because human materialism delivered it. We labeled this UPS (Ultimate Personal Salvation) package “spiritualism,” a package more deadly than the anonymous anthrax-laced envelopes that reached some mailboxes a few years ago. Spiritualism is materialism camouflaged. This disguise facilitates the spreading of the only negative, infectious, uneasy, guilt-ridden aspect of materialism—religion— that is truly poisonous, for it has no antidote (by construction); just look at the overwhelming data ever since we collectively invented different versions of God, based on the cultures in which we grew up.

Guru Chopra’s reptilian instincts take flight as he leaps from linguistic gibber to complete nonsense. He proceeds to position his sesame-seed-oil enterprise (The Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla) by pampering it with “scientific” musing: “Materialism can't deliver God, not because God doesn't exist, but because the solid, physical world is an illusion—as quantum physics proved long ago.” (Italics mine)

Really? Show us! I dare Guru Chopra to show this “proof.” Is this the same kind of “proof” of the Grand Unified Theory you tried to pull off in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind? Indeed, Chopra had the nerve to categorically state that the Unified Field Theory of quantum physics is the same as the mentally challenged Alan Watts’s experiencing of “It”, as the dude wandered aimlessly in the Appalachian Trails. Oddly, Watts’s ancestral counterpart in this kind of chicanery claimed to have sat under a stoic tree for many years before claiming he too experienced “It”. The ancestor appears to have had more material success with “It”, as evidenced by the thousands of bald-headed, saffron-robed, male chauvinistic, unskilled, unemployed vagabonds that live off the charity of the decent, honest, hard-working, tax-paying individual. To defend his malnourished mental proclivities, Chopra will likely reach to physicists such as Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics, who find strange pleasure by injudiciously correlating colliding particles in quantum physics to the cosmic capers of the fictitious three-eyed Hindu deity, Siva. The social anthropologist, Ernest Gellner, observes, “It is interesting to note that the “unicorn” has meaning because something could satisfy the conditions for being a unicorn (though it so happens nothing does).” However, “Siva” has no meaning despite all the attributes the Hindus have assigned this Heismann trophy look-alike, of which existence is one.

Chopra and the tribe of Siva-physicists are a sorry specimen on this planet that wants to see but don’t quite know what seeing is.