Last week, we featured Joseph Caldwell’s book review of Thom Hartmann’s book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Here is the first part of another longer article reposted from Foundation.
Joseph George Caldwell, Ph.D.
Those of you who have read Can America Survive? and my other writings on the subject of the present and future state of the world know that I have always believed, and stated that I believed, that the solution to the crisis facing the world today (environmental destruction and mass species extinction caused by human overpopulation) will be spiritual in nature. In my early writings, I used the term “religious” more than “spiritual,” and I did not distinguish very much between religion and spirituality. Today, I do distinguish to a greater degree between the two terms, and I am more careful to use the more appropriate term, depending on the context.
I started writing Can America Survive? in 1993 or 1994, when I was working in Malawi, and I finished it, after long delays and two complete rewrites, in 1998. In 2000, my wife and I were vacationing in South Africa—Cape Town, the wine country, and the Garden Route. Near the end of our vacation, we rented a cottage near Cape Town and then a friend’s cottage on the Indian Ocean in the village of Plettenberg Bay. It was there, in those two cottages, that I wrote up a theology relating to overpopulation and planetary management which I called the Church of Nature.
Now, I had never heard of the author or the books, but the storeowner seemed so enthusiastic about them that, after leaving his shop, I walked up the street to a local bookstore and purchased them. I did find them interesting, but they were similar to other New Age / New Spirituality material that I had read, and they certainly did not change my point of view relative to religion or spirituality, or anything else. They ended up somewhere on one of my bookshelves in Clearwater, Florida, and that is the last that I thought of either Neale Donald Walsch or his Conversations with God.
Until about a month ago. Each morning, I check the SynEarth Community of Minds website to read the interesting articles that Dr. Timothy Wilken posts there. On February 14, he posted a short article about E. O. Wilson, the author of Sociobiology. Now, I had purchased that book when it first came out, and I am interested in Wilson’s views, and so I happened to print out the article. I usually do not do this, since the SynEarth articles are long and the printer that I have with me here at my home in Lusaka is a small inkjet printer that is “stressed” just to handle e-mails. I read the article, and at the end of it was another article, “Humanity’s Team,” by Neale Donald Walsch. Now, I read a lot of books, and I buy a lot of books, and the name did not ring a bell, even though I had read three of his books a few years ago. Nevertheless, I skimmed the first few paragraphs of the article, and I was interested to note that the author set forth the view that the world’s current serious problems would not be solved by economic or political or military means, but by spiritual means. Since Walsch’s view was similar in some respects to my own, I made a mental note of the author’s name, but, once again, that was that. At the time, I did not bother to read the entire article.
About a month ago, my wife left for a one-month visit with her daughters in Arizona. It was a spur-of-the-moment trip. We had just returned from a five-week vacation in South America, and neither of us was thinking in terms of another long airplane trip this soon. But one of her daughters was changing jobs and had some free time, and so it was an excellent time to go. It was a Thursday morning that we discussed this—her daughter had e-mailed us the day before that she had accepted the new job—and my wife was on the airplane to the US the next Monday morning (March 3, 2003).
Well, I did not have any personal projects under way at the time, so that following Saturday I visited the Manda Hill Shopping Mall to check out the bookstores for reading material (Lusaka, Zambia, has just one shopping mall, and it has the town’s two book stores). And there I saw, in the “personal development” section, a book by—you guessed it—Neale Donald Walsch. Now it was not one of the Conversations of God (CWG) titles (Books 1-3) that I had read earlier; it was a new title, The New Revelations: A Conversation with God, written in 2002. I purchased it, and read it that weekend.
Early the following week, I was in a health salon that sold “New Age” books, and I was surprised to see Books 2 and 3 of the CWG series. I purchased them and reread them over the next couple of days. I noted from the Introduction to these copies that the CWG books have sold incredibly well—millions of copies, translation into 24 languages, and many months on bestseller lists. (In case you are wondering how I can be so out-of-touch as to not be aware of CWG’s best-seller status, I shall mention that I have worked and lived overseas in third-world countries for much of the past ten years. I am not “up” on best-seller lists, and have little access to large bookstores or libraries. In Lilongwe, there was no bookstore. In Gaborone, one. In Lusaka, where I now live, there are two.)
As I mentioned, the purpose to this article is to relate Walsch’s views on the current world crisis to my own. I am doing this because I find it rather interesting that, although the methodologies employed to arrive at these views are quite different, some of the views are quite similar. Walsch’s approach is “revelatory.” He sits and waits (sometimes for years) for inspiration, and when he gets a thought, he writes it down. My approach is to use reason and logic and systems engineering. I am a scientist (a mathematical statistician, to be exact) and a systems engineer. My approach to solving a problem—either a client’s problem or a personal problem—is to make observations, describe and analyze the problem, develop a mathematical model of the situation (a simplified representation showing major entities and relationships, to assist understanding), synthesize alternative solutions, compare them, and select the solution that seems best overall. As you can see, these two approaches are quite different, yet they have reached conclusions that are in some respects similar. To me, this is interesting, and that is why I decided to write this article.
There is a little more to it, however, than just this. I am also a little struck by the fact that I had forgotten all about Walsch’s work (and his name), and noticed it coincidentally, simply because of my printing out an article about E. O. Wilson. I was also somewhat surprised to find Walsch’s books in the very small bookstores here in Lusaka. I had not remembered the name of his latest book, The New Revelations, from the SynEarth article (since I had not, at the time, read the complete article), and picked it up simply because the name Neale Donald Walsch nudged my memory. I was even more surprised, a couple of days later, to see his CWG books in the health salon. I have been in that store maybe a dozen times since arriving in Lusaka in February of 2002, and have purchased maybe fifty titles there, and never once noticed Walsch’s books there before.
Having completely forgotten Walsch’s name, and having left his books in Florida, I was somewhat surprised at seeing, all of a sudden, his name and books at every turn—in all three book sources that I visit here in Lusaka, and on the Internet as well! If you have read How to Know God by Deepak Chopra, you have read his chapter on “synchronicity.” If you have read James Redfield’s The Celestine Vision, you know how much stock New Agers put in coincidences. If you have read Walsch’s CWG, you will know of his view that nothing in the universe happens by accident—that there are no “coincidences,” in the “unusual random occurrence” sense of the word. I am rather surprised that, despite my definite tendency to forget all about Walsch and CWG, both are being set in front of me on a weekly and daily basis, to the point where I simply can’t ignore them—or forget them! So, I give up! Here are my views on Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, and The New Revelations!
Since all ideas that enter the mind of man are ultimately from God (since we are his creation), perhaps a better terminology would be to refer to revelation in the usual sense as “naÔve revelation,” or perhaps “complete revelation.” NaÔve revelation is not very interesting. Revelation viewed as clues or hints to solving a problem is part of a very interesting and challenging game of discovery. It is said, for example, that Edison tested 10,000 ideas for an electric light bulb before finally developing a successful version. How boring that process would have been, had he simply been given the solution on the first try!
A naÔve revelation may be accepted as true by some people, and not accepted by others. The decision to accept or reject the revelation is rather arbitrary—a matter of “belief” or “faith.” For those personally acquainted with the person who received and disclosed the revelation, that decision may be affected by such things as the charisma or reputation or sincerity of the receiver. For most people, the decision to accept a naÔve revelation is an accident of birth (i.e., governed by the religion or culture into which you are born).
As I have noted in earlier writings, a serious problem in accepting “naÔve revelation” at face value is the lack of external validity. The person receiving the revelation has no way of objectively determining whether the revelation is a product of his own mind, or a message from some errant spirit, or a “message from God” in the usual sense. Since God is creator of all things (by definition), it follows that all messages are ultimately from him. But that is not to say that they may be true or false, or deceptive or helpful, or malicious or benevolent, or useful or not useful. That assessment is to be determined by reason. From this point of view, it does not matter whether a proposition has been received via a spectacular vision from God (as in the case of Moses), or in the course of a daydream on a bus (as in the case of Einstein’s theory of relativity). Revelations are simply hypotheses, possibilities that may be considered and examined for usefulness.
To the receiver of a naÔve revelation (or to anyone else, for that matter), the “truth” of the revelation is totally dependent on whether it is “direct from God” (as opposed to from some creation of God, such as an errant spirit or the “devil”), and, unfortunately, this can never be established. In times past, very few people admitted to having “revelations,” because doing so might have them branded as a heretic and burned at the stake. As Walsch observes, major religions do not allow ordinary followers to promote their own spiritual revelations. But nowadays, millions of people—especially “New Agers”—are having lots of “revelations.” Since so many people obtain messages from “channels” or from reading the Akashic Records, it is hard to put much stock in someone’s “revelations” anymore (since they are ubiquitous, and disclosed without risk). Prophecies from psychics are notoriously unreliable (e.g., Edgar Cayce’s prophecies were often just plain wrong), and predictions from oracles are notoriously misleading. Lacking face validity, revelations are of value only when subjected to critical evaluation.
It is noted that the Jews of Biblical times had an interesting method of establishing the credibility of a revelation, or more specifically, of a prophecy. They approached the task indirectly, by testing the predictive ability of the prophet. They would require the prophet to make, in the name of God, a significant prophecy that could be empirically verified. If the “test” prophecy failed to come true, the prophet was put to death. If the test prophecy came true, the prophet’s revelations were henceforth accepted as credible. Today, however, few people are willing to undergo such a test, so we are forced to rely on reason, logic, and experience to assess the likely worth of a revelation. The Biblical approach to revelation credibility assessment is an ad hominem approach: revelations are trusted or accepted only if they are received from tested sources. It should be recognized, however, that just because a prophet gets a “test case” right does not mean that his next revelation / prophecy may not be completely false. It is necessary to look at the revelation itself, not at the prophet, to establish its validity or usefulness.
Since philosophers (epistemologists) have never satisfactorily solved the problem of how we can know the truth in an absolute sense, the “truth” of revelations is rather irrelevant. Revelation about physical matters, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, can be and are tested to determine their validity and usefulness. Revelations about spiritual (nonphysical) matters, however, deal with a realm that is subjective, not objective, and their truth (or spiritual source) cannot be resolved by objective means. All that can be determined about them is their usefulness, not their truth (or spiritual source). All that we may know or determine about spiritual revelations is their seeming reasonableness and their usefulness as a guide to living, in light of our experience and knowledge of the situation as we perceive it. To paraphrase General Douglas MacArthur’s famous remark about duty, “As God gives me the grace to know it.”
It does not matter whether a revelation about the physical universe, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, was proposed (received and passed along) by Einstein or Moses or you or me. The theory stands on its own merits. Its validity is not established by an “ad hominem”-type argument concerning its source. All that matters is whether it stands up to tests of validity. For exactly the same reason, however, it does not matter whether a spiritual revelation is indeed “direct from God,” or from a “disembodied spirit” posing as God. Since it is impossible to tell the two apart, the source of the revelation can never be established, and therefore the apparent source is of no relevance in establishing the validity of the revelation. The value of the revelation is totally dependent on how it stands up to rational scrutiny. And this may be determined either by logical reasoning or practical experience or both.
By “practical experience” is meant experimental or experiential means. For example, in the case of Einstein’s theory of relativity, rational analysis is used to determine implications of the theory. If any of those implications proves false or leads to contradictions, then the theory is false (this is the “false contrapositive” method of establishing proof). In the case of Einstein’s theory, the implications are usually tested by observation or experimentation in the real world. In the case of a revelation concerning spiritual matters, methods of validation include discussion in the light of experience, or putting the tenets or implications of the revelation into practice, and observing the results. If the results are as desired, the revelation “works,” and its credibility is supported, even if its validity is not definitively established.