Heavens on Earth
By Michael Shermer
Holt, 305 pages, $30

Imagining a Celestial Realm​

REVIEW by ANDREW STARK, WSJ​

If you ever have a spare minute, watch the YouTube video “30 Stars Thank God for Their Grammys in 60 Seconds.” There you will see the likes of Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood tearfully thanking the Almighty, exactly as they might their long-suffering agent or their inspirational first-grade teacher, for the help that propelled them to recorded music’s highest honor.
What you will also be witnessing, though, is the playing out of a theological conundrum. To not have thanked God for one’s Grammy would be arrogant. It would suggest that you and your creative team, mere handfuls of dust, did it on your own. It would be to deny that God’s hand is in everything we do in this world. Yet to thank God also comes across as arrogant. It seems to suggest that God himself wanted you to win the Grammy instead of Beyonce. It denies that God is anything other than
utterly transcendent, untainted by anything remotely this-worldly.
As Michael Shermer shows in “Heavens on Earth,” his inviting and informative tour of humankind’s various conceptions of where God locates himself, heaven is built to resolve such paradoxes. The major Western religions treat it as a place, but it is a place outside the ordinary workings of time. Generations of family members can die at wide intervals and yet be reunited in heaven in an eternal present, and we can sing God’s praises there endlessly without getting bored. More important, a heavenly God who sits outside of time itself, looking down compassionately on the temporal world, is at once transcendent and intimately concerned with us.
While in Western religions heaven is a place but somehow timeless, in eastern religions-especially their new-age versions-heaven is to be found by living in the “now,” yet it is somehow also “nonlocal.” That’s the word Mr. Shermer’s friend Deepak Chopra uses to describe the cosmic consciousness that pervades all of space. We can access it at any time through meditation and practice. But its nonlocality—it pulsates throughout the entire universe—ensures its claim to transcendence, to being above and beyond this sublunary world.
Mr. Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, isn’t buying any of this. He equates the Western concept—living eternally in the presence of an omniscient and omnipotent God—with residence in a “celestial North Korea” (here he gives a nod to Christopher Hitchens). He deems the Eastern version “woo-woo nonsense.” And he adroitly dismisses various “earthly” versions of these theological heavens, such as the Marxian promise of a communist paradise that abides outside of history or the trans-humanist prospect of digitally uploading our minds into a collective consciousness.
Mr. Shermer instead finds heaven in the laws of science-of relativity, say, or planetary motion-because they are both transcendent and immanent, embedded in the world we know firsthand. Beautiful mathematical ideas that lie wholly outside space and time, they nevertheless explain the observable reality of space and time perfectly. He also finds heaven in the natural world. Matthew Arnold put it best. When we sense the “glimmering verge of Heaven” in a forest, what we experience is something temporally ephemeral and spatially liminal, seemingly neither inside nor outside this world.
Of course, Mr. Shermer’s heavens contain no promise of life after death. But that’s no loss, he believes, since we can find a kind of immortality in his world, in the unique mark we make and the new generations we create. He notes that most Americans don’t want to live beyond 120 anyway, even assuming relatively good health. And yet a significant majority feel the need for some kind of heaven, as does he. So perhaps it fills some other role for us.
Although Mr. Shermer dwells on their differences, all of his major heavens share certain traits. As countless great pieces of art and literature testify, we are capable of richly imagining and describing the Western heavens that Mr. Shermer discusses. And yet they can never be experienced with our senses, which is why near-death episodes so fascinate us. Nor-think of all those tangled arguments about how resurrection works-can they be fully understood by our mortal intellects. It’s precisely because monotheistic heavens activate some of our cognitive abilities while lying beyond others that they feel both accessible and mysterious. The very idea of them is endlessly tantalizing.
Buddhist sages, meanwhile, say that humans can indeed directly experience cosmic consciousness; we can even comprehend its contradictions in the form of riddles and koans. But if you simply want the highest plane of enlightenment described in words, or think you can imagine what it’s really like, forget it. It lies beyond those faculties and so gains the allure that draws multitudes to ashrams around the world.
Even scientists yearn for the ability to directly experience or picture the heavenly beauty they can know only, as Mr. Shermer says, through “linguistic descriptions” and “mathematical” comprehension. Meanwhile poets grapple exquisitely with how to understand or describe what they so vividly sense and imagine whenever, in William Blake’s words, they encounter “Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
In bringing so many heavens together, Mr. Shermer does us a service. Among other things, he shows us why we are lucky that not everything can be fully grasped by our limited capacities. In our minds can be found the mixtures of immanence and transcendence that we call “heavens.” Like Grammy winners, we might think that we should thank heaven for being created that way. But, of course, it’s thanks to the fact that we were created that way that we have heavens.

Mr Stark is the author of “The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense of Death.”
(Wall Street Journal - pg - 01/27/2018)