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Deepak Chopra, Leonard Mlodinow, Is God An Illusion? The Great Debate Between Science and Spirituality. Rider, London, 2012, ISBN 978184043055, pb. pp315. $19.95.
The book takes the form of a debate between an atheist, Leonard Mlodinow, a physics professor, and a proponent of a spiritual view of the universe, the physician Deepak Chopra. Although the book is entitled Is God an Illusion?, Chopra is not arguing for the existence of God, exactly. 'We don't need God' he writes. He is arguing for 'Cosmic Consciousness', a term which survivors of the Sixties will recall, and which means that the universe is conscious. Every speck of matter has some form of consciousness in Chopra's view. It seems that he is arguing for a form of panpsychism, which looks like pantheism, i.e. there is a spiritual reality immanent in the universe.
However, Chopra quotes with approval from the Bhagavad Gita 'I am found in all creation. I am inside and outside all that exists' (p.267), which implies that God is both immanent and transcendent. That, of course, is the traditional Christian view.
Chopra does not seem to have made up his mind about the transcendence of God. Throughout the book it remains unclear whether what he says about cosmic consciousness is true of God as well. He writes at the end of the book that both spirituality and religion 'depend on a personal journey, leading in the end to the transformation of consciousness,' (p.301). Most of what he is defending a traditional theist would also defend, though the...