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Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't, by Ralph Lewis
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Review
“Ralph Lewis asks and then answers some very big questions in this fine book. How are we to understand the world as it is, and how have we arrived at these insights in our long journey from the primordial swamp? Drawing from disparate disciplines, he skillfully weighs up competing scientific and religious theories. The result is an informative, highly readable tour de force, the modern person’s guide for the perplexed.” —Anthony Feinstein, professor of psychiatry, University of Toronto “In Finding Purpose in a Godless World, psychiatrist Ralph Lewis presents an interdisciplinary view of how our purpose, morality and meaning evolved. With recent ethno-sectarian conflicts seemingly on the rise throughout the world, whether for religious or other ideological reasons, a more global, humanistic vision is sorely needed. This is where the richness of his book shines through, since Dr. Lewis exemplifies an abiding respect for humans in their individual, complicated journeys through life, but is never patronizing. On behalf of reason—and purpose—secular humanists, too, would do well to become emissaries for compassion and understanding.” —Toni Van Pelt, president of the Institute for Science and Human Values, and president of the National Organization for Women“This book is a brilliant refutation of transcendence. Ralph Lewis convincingly shows that since we are biological organisms in a natural environment, purpose simply cannot fall from ‘on high.’ Purpose is bottom-up, not top-down; evolved, not bestowed.”—Dan Barker, author of Life Driven Purpose: How an Atheist Finds Meaning “Lewis’s personal life experiences, combined with his professional career as a psychiatrist, have given us a unique insight into the wonder, beauty, and splendor that comes from an indifferent but truly magnificent universe. Drawing heavily upon evolutionary science and psychiatry, Dr. Lewis provides a pragmatically sound argument demonstrating how, precisely, humans have evolved to develop values, care, and purpose in a universe that does not.” —Christopher DiCarlo, PhD, philosopher, past visiting research scholar at Harvard University, principal of Critical Thinking Solutions, and author of How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass: A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Asking the Right Questions “The question of life’s purpose is probably the main reason believers cannot bring themselves to reevaluate and reject the antiquated religions they’ve been indoctrinated to believe. Prompted by a personal crisis, Dr. Lewis has written a definitive answer to this question, one that I hope gains a substantial audience.” —John W. Loftus, author of Why I Became an Atheist and editor of The Christian Delusion “All my life, I’ve been torn between the burning pull of great purpose and the gnawing angst of demythologizing doubt. Finding Purpose in a Godless World is for all so troubled. I’ve hoped for transcendence, my PhD is in anatomy/brain research, and still I find in this book a sweeping journey of ultimate discovery and a hidden mirror for intimate self-reflection. I remain passionately agnostic.”—Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host, Closer to Truth“In an age where medicine, neuroscience and psychiatry have become increasingly more narrow and reductionistic, Dr. Lewis is one of those few ‘renaissance psychiatrists’ who engages the reader by integrating his rich clinical experience, neurobiology and philosophy in order to take on the really big question: How do we as humans create meaning in a time when religion is no longer the dominant force that it once was?” —Ari Zaretsky, MD, FRCPC, Chief of the Department of Psychiatry and Vice President of Education, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto.FROM THE FOREWORD:"Like other grand synthesizers and interdisciplinary thinkers—Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari come to mind—Lewis employs evolutionary theory, complexity theory, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to review the best evidence we have for why consciousness evolved out of primitive brains; where goal-directedness and will come from and how they drive us to strive for more meaning than other animals; and where our moral sense comes from and why we care about others, even those not related to us.”—MICHAEL SHERMER
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About the Author
Ralph Lewis, MD, is a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada; an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto; and a psycho-oncology consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto. Dr. Lewis writes a popular blog series, Finding Purpose, hosted and promoted by his hospital (http://health.sunnybrook.ca/finding-purpose/). He has published articles on a psychiatric understanding of belief and purpose in Skeptic magazine and the Human Prospect, and he has delivered presentations on these topics at the James Randi Educational Foundation's TAM conference, Institute for Science and Human Values, and Canadian Association for Spiritual Care. Dr. Lewis helps people who are seeking meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity, in addition to his extensive experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions. He is interested in the unreliability of intuition and subjective perception in shaping our explanations and beliefs, and the neural basis of motivation and purposiveness.
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Product details
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books (July 17, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 163388385X
ISBN-13: 978-1633883857
Product Dimensions:
6.3 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.8 out of 5 stars
6 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#286,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Author Ralph Lewis makes a strong case that purpose, meaning and values are all driven by instinct and evolution. Backed by scientific, philosophical and theological ideas, the author invites you to draw your own conclusions. He believes that the idea of some sort of higher force of nature is conscious, intelligent, self-aware and intentional is entirely incompatible with all that we know about the universe and the evolution of life on earth.The author being a psychiatrist in no way condems or belittles believers in any way in his practice, but instead helps them stay within their comfort zone to help them cope with what we all call "life". He does not come across as a "militant atheist" as some believers tend to look at other atheists like Richard Dawkins or David Silverman. His view is basically agnostic which tends to be more of a less aggresive nature.
Ralph Lewis takes on a big job - setting out how purpose and meaning work, without a religious context to provide answers, after explaining why such a religious context is problematic. I appreciated the survey, as he looked at scientific arguments for explaining things on a material basis and how our tendency to see unseen forces in events mainly represents some kind of trick our brain is playing on us, as well as philosophical, psychological and social issues that shed light on the whole argument about God being needed to orient people toward doing good.His strength is the use of cases from his experience treating patients with mental illness or facing death. Although he says he altered them to guard anonymity, they have the ring of truth and you can get a feel for how easily the quest for meaning goes wrong. Like Shermer's tiger that isn't there, he has a consistent argument that we are programmed to see patterns and to see ourselves as the center of the universe (not so much collectively as individually). He also engages the anxiety people have about nihilistic lack of meaning if there is no God to judge us, and concludes, interestingly, that the issue is generally beside the point for people's lives. You can find the world existentially empty of meaning and still engage with things that matter to you, and quite the opposite, you can believe in rules and standards imposed from above and still be depressed or disconnected or obsessed, etc.Someone I was discussing the book with pointed out to me where this book fits in the "literature" of atheist engagement. With his conclusion that we provide meaning by being present for other people, and that the "ripples" of good from our actions are sufficient to justify an investment in virtue, he puts a more human and compassionate face on the intellectualism of the new Atheism, which has mainly featured combative stands by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Shermer (as well as others, of course.) I think this is accurate, and also gives a lot of insight both on the strengths of the book and its weaknesses.In the way of strengths, I would count Lewis' humane approach and honest discussion. He says he doesn't confront patients/clients about their religious faith, and I believe him. He seems to have considerable sympathy for the emotional attachment people feel to their beliefs, and only moved himself into the atheist column (from agnostic) after his wife's cancer led him to reject the platitudes and directive claims of the religious folk who meant to be comforting them. He does spend considerable effort to make arguments that help to understand why supernatural perceptions about things are generally motivated by something other than honest effort to understand. For those who want the whole set of issues set out and, to some extent, dealt with, this survey is likely to be fairly satisfying. And for those wanting reaffirmation that other people are what makes life worth living, nothing here will take away from that.I would also mention that his grasp of the science in human behavior is really good. His chapter 9 is worth buying the book for if you are not a specialist in the biology and psychology of empathy, as he surveys the forces behind moral emotions and altruism and the high points of evidence that help to understand it. He does not shrink from the debate (presented here more or less as Haidt vs. Pinker) about the relative roles of emotion and reason in how we sort out moral issues.In the way of weaknesses, I found that the lack of depth was ultimately disappointing. By attempting to address the full range of issues (and tell stories about human distress in the process) he never gets far enough to deliver useful answers to the challenging issues that lie outside his conclusions.He does not really settle anything about religion, opting to accept "abstract theism" (which is where I would put myself, and where most Protestant mainline clergy are) without needing to conclude anything about it, as long as people don't indulge in speculative claims, traditional or New Age, about supernatural forces getting involved in their cancer or their search for a parking spot. Which is nice, from my point of view, but never goes into enough depth about this path to understand why it is meaningful to those of us who follow it. In particular, the community of interaction in a church or synagogue would seem to be a valuable resource given his conclusions about the importance of human relations, but he doesn't take the discussion that far.He wants to have it both ways about the tension between logic and emotion, rejecting intuitive claims about a need for God to explain things, but recognizing that it is human interaction that animates our sense of purpose. I don't disagree with either position, but would have appreciated a little more reflection about how one squares that circle.So I guess I am reaching the conclusion that the main weakness is that he tries to do too much by both confronting the range of excuses people give for their interpretations about the supernatural and, at the same time, giving some sense of how meaning and purpose work without those interpretations. In the end he is not making an argument, but he is giving a good sense of how to avoid errors of orientation relative to the issues.
Written with extraordinary clarity, vision and the gentle humanity of a sensitive psychiatrist, this slender volume first methodically dispels both religious and non-religious constructs of an externally imposed guiding hand, but then resurrects a powerful template for recognizing, appreciating and finding joy in the gift of life and in a moral compass that amazingly derives from the indifferent forces underlying history and life itself. This work is transformative, both in sweeping away vague and wishful concepts, and in replacing them with a window into the eternal and profound contributions that can almost effortlessly flow from each individual life, as we touch and ripple through one another. I can not recommend more highly this prescription for a life well lived.
One of the most frequent questions posed to those who can’t believe in God is “how is it possible to live a meaningful life if there is no ultimate purpose in the universe?†Dr. Lewis sets forth to answer that question. He does so masterfully. Many non theists have attempted to answer that question so Dr. Lewis’ book is not unique in that regard. It is unique in that as a practicing psychiatrist he draws from his extensive relationship with patients. I have read many books critical of religion and arguing for atheism. This is the first I recall reading by a psychiatrist.While not specifically trained in evolutionary biology, astronomy, cosmology or neuroscience Dr. Lewis exhibits broad and deep understanding of these scientific disciplines as he uses them to show that the universe evolved through a random process unguided by a divine mind. He shows that purpose, morality and meaning has arisen in our species and is not dependent on religion or divine beings contrary to what many believe.Though Dr. Lewis is not a believer in the supernatural he finds value in his Jewish heritage and in his practice he makes no attempt to change the beliefs of his patients so long as those beliefs are not contributing their pathology. Many people need their faith and the community provided by their religion to cope and it would be detrimental to undermine it. His understanding and empathy with his patients is everywhere evident.The personal element in the book is compelling as he gives account of his own experience with his wife’s struggle with cancer. Indeed, it was this internal conflict that led to his “preoccupation with formulating a more coherent, solidly substantiated world view†and the subsequent writing of this book.
A wonderful book that does a great job of explaining the universe for what it truly is. Packed with facts, science, data, and sound logic, this book is required reading for any open minded individual who has the curiosity to learn more about the universe and our place in it.
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