I wonder what I was drinking when I wrote this, to write a sentence that starts, “A millions (sic) years ago…” and doesn’t end with, “I wouldn’t have existed, but whatever we evolved out of would have been long dead at my age.”

Don’t know how I missed it 4 years ago.

I’m glad the post helped articulate your feelings. My disgust with Chopra and his ilk has not lessened with time, and in fact, I’m at the point now where I think people like him, and even people who follow him and mouth his praises, need to get called out.

By the way, it may well be that I was subject to “alternative medicine” experiments as a kid that makes me so outspoken about it.

As for Gogol Bordello… ahhhh, good stuff. :) I wish they would do a gig in Seoul! :)

First of all, great post. I agreed with the article almost in its entirety.
I know this was written over four years ago, but to me it remains relevant to this day. What I mean by this is, that this blog should be attributed not just to Deepak Chopra but to a significant proportion of the residents in my home town.

I live in the far East Coast of Australia, where alternative medicine, metaphysics and the seven rings of Chakra has been and still are at its height of popularity. The town is full of angst-ridden pseudo-intellectual hippies, in which many speaks highly of people like Chopra, and things like the Hare-Krishnan theory of evolution, to name a few of many examples. It disgusts me to think that these so-called faith healers and homeopaths are deceiving not just the public but themselves into believing in such fraudulence, under purely egotistic basis. It shouldn’t take the words of people like Dawkins, Dennet or Harris for people to realize the insubstantiality and the danger of pseudo-science. When I say danger, my sister(she was only 10 back then) was close to being tested as a guinea pig from her then-friend’s nutcase homeo(psycho?)path mother!

You couldn’t have articulated my feelings any better gordsellar. Thank you so much for the article.

Sparkle

p.s. On an unrelated note, you’ve got great taste in music too! Gogol Bordello played in my town, they were amazing.

Wait, you’re quoting the Bible to defend the charlatanry of Deepak Chopra? Hahahahahahahaahaaaaaaaaaa!

Oh, you’re probably just peeing your pants over that last comment. Well, I suggest you go read your Bible a little more, and find out about this god of yours. He hates interest rates. He hates blended fabrics. He approves of slavery and gang-rape of women as long as they’re from another tribe — in fact, he prescribes the latter as a regular, normal war measure.

Pride is a funny thing: there was a documentary in which Richard Dawkins talked to Ted Haggard, and Haggard started lecturing Dawkins on his pride. Which is an amazing irony: who is the one claiming to speak for the almighty, omnipotent deity that created all things? Huh? I mean, if this god wanted us to hear a message, wouldn’t it be able to deliver it itself, through some vessel better than a lying, hateful, profit-driven sack of shit like Haggard?

I assert that you’re the prideful one, Roy Bandle, presuming that your particular supernatural belief about the universe is so correct that you can go about telling others their understanding of the universe is all wrong, that you know anything of my nature, that you can issue me warnings on the basis of your idiosyncratic interpretation of one book written in a desert in the orient a few thousand years ago.

Meanwhile, I suggest you get a little humble and thank science and medicine for making your life as pleasant as it is today. It’s doctors and scientists — not theologians — who made it possible for you live long enough to get set in your ways as you seem to be, and to memorize the Bible, who spread education about hygiene and built the bridges that allow you not to be sick all the time or scrabbling in the dirt for food; it’s engineers and dentists, not theologians, that made humanity capable of the kind of humanitarianism and kindness we see in some places today.

The thing you don’t know about science and science-minded people is that they don’t strive to be their own god with a little g; we have no need of such things, because we have a way of looking at, figuring out, and engaging with the world free from the trammels of supernatural thinking. I would not even want to be a god with a little g: I don’t need or want a god. And any almighty deity who has a problem with that is too puerile to deserve worship. And surely your god looks comical portrayed as he is: more like a self-centered old CEO in a dysnfunctional company, and less like an almighty, loving deity.

(To be flatly honest, I like to imagine any gods that did exist as not being particularly interested in how people talked about or prayed to it, but rather interested in ethical use of one’s time on earth… with time spent lecturing non-religious and time spent singing in church considered a waste of good time where someone could have been doing unto others as one would have one do unto them.)

And if you think my nature has been addressed in the Bible — amusingly, since I don’t think the book was actually written in a world where someone much like me existed — I would tender that your nature is much more widely addressed. Look up the word “Pharisee.” I guarantee it’s an eye-opener… unless your heart is so hard that you fail to see the log in your own eye, so busy you are pointing out the splinter you think you see in mine.

Jeremiah 8:9 The wise will be put to shame; they will be dismayed and trapped. Since they have rejected the word of the LORD, what kind of wisdom do they have?

yes we can do great things with technology today. Things that 100 years ago would have been thought impossible. Just remember in the pride of all of your words, lives the great liar, and in all that you know you cannot possibly deny that in 100 years it will be shown that you simply know nothing important but the simplcity of school yard banter. God has a different plan for you, I suggest you listen, and if you can’t hear him, you arn’t holding your mouth right. He has addressed you specifically and your nature is an old one with your heart hardned, striving to be your own god with a little g.

Well, if you’re reading a book about “How to know God” I don’t know how you can expect anything but fabrications: no human author can really demonstrate authority on that subject — let alone the existence of said subject — so you kind of asked for it!

I think we can do without the 250 false statements, but thanks!

Er, missed this last comment till now, but, er…

Panspermia theory I can find compelling possible. Tuned baby universe designed to give rise to complex life? Maaaybe. Neat idea, anyway.

Humans coming from another planet? Pbbbbbbbt.

From what we know, yes, the dinosaurs likely died as a result of the effects of asteroid collision. More may be discovered someday, and there seem to be a few other theories suggesting other causes for their extinction, but anyway, their dependence on evolutionary adaptation without intelligence to carry out technological adaptations to faster-changing conditions seems to have been crucial to their downfall.

By the way, you can’t call whatever random thing you think up a “theory” in a discussion of science. Scientific theories demand at least some modicum of evidence, you know. Extraterrestrial origins of humans doesn’t fit at all, given the overwhelming evidence that we arose on the same planet as all other life on Earth, let alone the lag between the beginnings of life on Earth and our appearance.

Primordial soup being our origins certainly seems less incredible than that we were brought here on ancient ships,m in the light of that — and in the absence of any evidence of ancient ships, or life out there that would bring us, or anything of the kind.

Drop me a comment here when we find an ancient spaceship parked on Europa, or a Clarkean monolith or something. Till then, your “theory” is merely a wacky idea.

Yes i am under the presumpption that there is a Creator. ( GoD ) watever you want to call it…

and i do agree with your point.

so as yet to date… why did the dinosaurs die? asteroid? natural selection? why did we survive not them? where did we really come from?

NOW, just to share my theory, as crazy as it may sound…

We may be the past of some ancient civilization, brought here from a dying adult and aged universe….

I dont thing the primortial soup theory is intircated enough to just create.

As you said.. Creation is art.. not a random accident. It must be intentional.

Try reading the rest of that sentence:

all I can conclude is that he’s an idiot who knows jack shit about science. OR, he’s a liar who is purposefully twisting the facts.

As for the scientific street cred won by bein a doctor, I’d say it’s probably slightly more than that won by being a science fiction writer (which is what I am) but not overwhelmingly so. Doctors mostly know about bodies and how they work in the here and now, including fetal development. There’s no penalty to a doctor’s professional abilities for having a thoroughly unscientific (ie. religious, New Age, or other) view of personality, the nature of human life, and more. In fact, in terms of dealing with religionist patients, there may be a slight benefit to believing patently unprovable things.

However, that doesn’t bundle Chopra’s beliefs about the New Age or souls into the realm of scientific objectivity any more than it does his fashion sense. A cardiologist can afford to be wrong about many, many things, as long as he’s right about your heart and circulatory system most of the time.

The fact that he’s been roundly criticized by scientists and even awarded an Ig Nobel award for contributing to mass confusion about quantum mechanics is good enough for me to leave some room for doubt: maybe he IS a lying, leech-like charlatan who is exploiting the fundamental science-ignorance of the contemporary Western world to turn a quick buck; or maybe he actually is just as science-ignorant as the people from whose book purchases he makes his living.

(Just as with that horrendously crap film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, it may be that Chopra actually doesn’t have a good handle on what we know. Or it may be that it’s more profitable to serve up misguiding mystical mumbo-jumbo as that sells more.)

I do not know your credentials in the science department, but deepaks is pretty heavy. Thats why when dawkins was interviewing him in his documentary about quantum mechanics I was a bit putt off coz dawkins is an expert in biological sciences like evolution and darwin stuff.

I saw a lot of idiots on the dawkins website calling deepak (Mr. Chopra) and even calling richard (Mr. Dawkins) I reckon, Chopra probably had higher academic credentials than anyone in that forum

Art is defines as a form of creation yes?

Well, if you define it that way, can’t we also define mass graves after a genocide as art, since they’re “creations” too? It’s absurd.

Logically, here’s what you’re doing:

Created things are art.
Human brains are art.
Human brains are created things.

Which is a faulty syllogism. You see how, yes, some created things are art, but some created things are weapons, or piles of dung, or trash, or Spice Girls CDs. This is not only logically untenable, it’s also philosophically lazy. Indeed, all kinds of things in nature have arise from very complex but wholly naturalistic processes.

For example, look at the solar system. We don’t need gods to explain any of it — the grandeur, the immense gravitational forces, all of it can be accounted for using physical science. A proper syllogism would be:

Art is a created thing.
The world looks like art.
Thus the world looks like a created thing.

[Thus, there "must" be a creator.]

Now, this we can argue about. But only because it does the intellectually honest thing and admits that the world “looks like art,” instead of claiming it “is” art, which leaves the “must” in the conclusion open to broader debate, as to what science has to say about the origin of life. And let me tell you, science has a lot more behind it than pile of scripture you care to choose. No, we don’t have all the answers in science — something scientists readily admit and something I’ve only rarely heard a theologian or preacher admit: “I dunno,” or “We have no idea,” is usually substituted with some aphorism about God or the gods — but we can have a workable answer with unknowns without having to plug deities in to fill those unknowns. Moreover, the track record for using gods to explain the unknown is pretty poor; as science makes new discoveries, those theories necessarily get discarded.

The reason dinosaurs didn’t evolve the way we did is because there’s no reason to do so. You’re mistakenly thinking of evolution as an arrow — from amino acids all the way up to the wonderful perfect final state of human beings. This is called “teleology, and it’s not a very credible understanding of evolution.

Evolution isn’t an arrow — its more like a tree, with all kinds of boughs, branches, stems, twigs, leaves, and flowers.

Sharks are a good example. They’re not smart, they’re not tool users, but they’re relentlessly efficient at staying alive and well-fed. They exploit one large marine predator niche like nobody’s business. They fact that they’re SO effective is probably overkill: overkill is common in nature, in cases where there’s no punishment for being too effective. Likewise, there’s no good reason to evolve language, as a shark, since they’re not all that social in areas that require coordination.

Humans evolved in a totally different niche: we’re gregarious, we’re hominids, we’re tool users, and we’re omnivorous. Gregariousness — as well as how we mate, and what we eat — caused us to need to have a sophisticated ability to read one anothers’ motivations and loyalty, and affected how we hunted. Hunting rewards coordination, especially when you’re hunting with rocks and sticks. Gestural or other nonverbal communication, which is widely seen in nature, simply developed over millions of years into rudimentary language, and the delicate, relentless system of natural selection had millions of years to improve on it. Then literacy exploded, not very long ago, and turned language into the most complex system(s) on the planet. And this helped us occupy a rather different niche in the world.

But we’re not in a final state. Natural selection is still acting on every living thing, though we’ve buffered it a lot, and though we’re starting to find hacks, workarounds, and circumvention systems.

As for your argument: I submit that you only argue that God (“or something else” is always just God in sheep’s clothing, in these arguments, unless you’re a raving Dänikenite) must have jumpstarted evolution because you have accepted the assumption of a god before the discussion even began.

If I ask you to set aside the assumption, and ask yourself whether it’s necessary to have anything supernatural — ie. not part of a wholly naturalistic universe, ie. not a deity or spirit — to “jumpstart” evolution, you might see what I mean.

The fallcy here is straight out of Aquinas, by the way. He asserts that the universe seems like a made thing, and that made things have makers, so there must be a God. It’s fallacious because the universe doesn’t look like a made thing if you observe it with eyes attuned to geological time. It looks like a rock in space precariously circling a sun, subjected to all kinds of natural processes, and also subject to all kinds of risks.

(Any sane God would not have perched His most prized creations on a rock so vulnerable to be extincted the moment a couple of neutron stars collide in the neighborhood.)

The world, and the universe, indeed, look exactly like a place where things like us happen by wonderful chance, and if the dice seem loaded, that is probably the result of evolution-like processes on universes themselves. (The concept of baby universes may help you here.)

RE: Deepak Chopra is a jerk Posted on Jun 9 2008 at 11:34am by solitude
Yes, DEEPAK CHOPRA IS A HYPOCRITE. This is classified information–this is why I am posting it on the INTERNET! Every time a friend of mine mentions him, I have to tell them the truth about Deepak Chopra. I used to work in a law firm and he used our services to try to fight someone in a case. When he knew he was losing the case, he came into our building and brandished a gun, threatening to murder the attorney working on his case. The security guards had to protect the attorney, until things settled down with Deepak. Until this day, it still makes everyone in the workplace CRINGE to hear his name! Just because he has a “foreign name” and rips off of Buddha (or tries to) doesn’t mean he’s an Englightened Being. He’s far from it.

I responded to Joshua (The Western Confucian)’s comment in brief, since I was traveling in currently-net deprived China. (Recent earthquake, underwater cable cut, whole national net is messed up.)

Of course, my response in comment #5 is my view in a nutshell, but I’d like to add one thing: it’s the theoretical restraint of science to deal with the physical universe that makes it so powerful. This is obvious. Science and technologies made possible by it have transformed our way of living. But of course, it’s done so quickly, and people like Chopra are profiteering off the laggards and others who haven’t quite brought themselves up to speed with what we know about the universe… in other words, he’s probably somewhat future-shocked himself, but he’s able to afford an education, so that’s willful… and that means he’s a lazy predator feeding on those even more future-shocked than himself.