Much of my life since has consisted of working out that thesis. Increasingly, modern science is about our realization that we just don't know. That is, our questions about the cause for intellectual anxiety. Unfortunately, none of these three ways can answer all the questions we have. They can be looked at as if they were caused by something external, or they were caused by something internal, or they were caused by relationships between things. Scott Peck: All my work can be traced back to my Harvard college thesis, "Anxiety, Modern Science and the Epistemological Problem." I outlined three basic ways to try and look at things. Robert Epstein: Can you tell me more about the roots of your spirituality-about the intellectual and experiential side? Most people achieve this without being in therapy. And that's when you begin to move to stage four. If you become really good at stage-three doubting, you begin to doubt your own doubts. oÂne of the great sins of the Christian church is the discouragement of doubting. You have to go through a phase of doubting. To get from stage two to stage four-if you can in a lifetime-you must go through stage three. Jim's theory has six stages mine has four.ġ/ The fundamental stage, oÂne I call "chaotic antisocial," is a stage of absent spirituality.Ģ/ The second stage is "formal institutional," in which the fundamentalists fall.ģ/ Stage three I call "skeptic individual," where religion is either thrown out or seriously doubted.Ĥ/ And then there is stage four, which I call "mystical communal." Scott Peck: Are you familiar with James Fowler? He's the expert oÂn the stages of faith development.
Robert Epstein: You must have had some serious doubts. And oÂnly later did I begin to get in touch with his divinity, which was initially difficult for me to swallow. Some people who arrive at Christianity start with Jesus' divinity, and some with his humanity. And it was at that point that I began to take becoming a Christian seriously. Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person. Now I think a small part of the Gospels is made up. And just as I had felt with Jesus Christ Superstar, I was blown away. I lay in bed at night reading the New Testament. Robert Epstein: In the 1970s, when you wrote The Road Less Traveled, where were you at spiritually? But right off the bat, the wrestling match has been a gift of God to you. Everyone is different, so your spirituality is not going to be my spirituality your wrestling match is not my wrestling match.
And the experience is not necessarily oÂne we choose. But if you ask them whether they have ever had any personal experience with God, oÂnly about 15 to 20 percent will say "yes." Those few have also been judged as more mentally healthy than the others. And there is nothing particularly great about their mental health. A study shows that if you ask people whether they believe in God, probably 95 percent of Americans will say they do. One of my shticks is about why we need to do hard scientific research oÂn religion.