Evidence is thin. Statistical significance levels are narrow. What few robust findings there are often prove to be either nonreplicable or contradicted by later research. And correlations (between, say, happiness and health) are not causations.
Hence it's no kind of realism, Shermer says, this pseudo-scientific embrace of optimism over pessimism as the royal road to happiness. Shermer does not believe in anything science and reason cannot verify.
I believe in something that science cannot grapple with: that the royal road to happiness lies in serving others.
All humans — all sentient creatures, including animals — have, to one degree or another, conscious experience. I believe that conscious experience can never be fully understood scientifically.
I believe that the mind exists, above and in addition to matter.
I believe, therefore, that there is such a thing as the soul.
And I believe that the connections we conscious beings forge between our souls and those of others are even more important than our possession of individual souls per se.
When I was about fifteen years old, my father, a police chief, was sent to the U.S. island possession of Guam to write a report on the institutions of public safety there. He was away for many months, during which time his brother Ralph was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Ralph quickly became bedridden, lingering on for many weeks in terrible pain.
One day, Dad did something unusual, considering the high cost of telephone calls in those days from Guam to Bethesda, Maryland. He phoned my mother and told her that the previous night he, Dad, had awakened from a sound sleep with the feeling of an enormous burden being lifted from his shoulders. Upon reflection, Dad had become convinced this had been a sign that Ralph had at last passed out of his long misery and died.
Dad was right. Ralph, who lived near our family in Cheverly, Maryland, had been pronounced dead at, as best we could calculate, the moment Dad had awakened on Guam.
Dad was a sound sleeper. He never woke up, once his head hit the pillow at night, until the next morning.
I believe in this odd co-occurrence. Whatever words you care to use to describe it — a disturbance in the ether perhaps, allowing whatever was happening to Uncle Ralph's soul at the moment of his death to ripple halfway around the world and cheer my father's sleep —it is something that I think really happened. It was not a coincidence or a fluke.
It could happen, I think, because there was a deep personal link between my father's soul and his brother's. No one ever wakes up from a sound sleep with a feeling of beatitude when a perfect stranger dies.
My father was not notably spiritual. He rarely was emotional. He never went to church. But I think that as he himself got older and older, knowing he had less and less time to live, he came to believe more and more that there is something beyond this life.
Those near-death experiences reported by people who ultimately got revived — walking through a tunnel of light, being greeted on the "other side" by predeceased loved ones — Dad believed in them implicitly. It always made me squirmy, to hear him talk on that subject. Now I don't know. I think the experiences may be real.
Or, at least, they tell us something important about the nature of reality: we forge links to others that survive our respective deaths.
That's why, I think, we get the most happiness from helping and serving others.
If true happiness arises from helping and serving, then that is something which might be tested. Tested, that is, not scientifically, in any ordinary sense. There is no objective meter for happiness. But tested, in a subjective sense. Help. Serve. See if it doesn't make you happy.
If it does, you have reason to believe that minds, souls, and the connections between them are not strangers to realism at all.
