e/scientific mechanism left over as a hang over from our days of primitive understanding of the world-the days when it was too painful and caused too much anxiety for humans to accept their mortal composition and inevitable return to a purely organic state. The inability to accept this existential and empirical reality caused me to keep searching externally for meaning. Now, I am ready to face the truth of God and spirit as a psychological and physiological mechanism and in so doing have discovered a whole world of meaning has opened up to me in the here-and-now-especially now that I am focused on the here-and-now as the only reality we hapless mortals can ever consciously know or the only one within which we will ever consciously exist.
The new paradigm shift Alper details invalidates most philosophers, poets and priests in the history of time as far as their being able to render a complete theory of meaning. More importantly to Alper it invalidates most of their theories because it develops a new paradigm for explaining God and spirituality. The new paradigm looks to the sciences not the philosophers to explore the mystery from a physical/functional/organic/evolutionary/cognitive/scientific perspective. Coupled with this the search is conducted internally for an answer and not externally. Genetics, evolution, nature, the biochemistry of the psyche, these and more are responsible for the universal commonality of the search for God, spirituality and meaning in human existence. For example, the author contends that because of our sheer terror in confronting the existential dilemma when we had a primitive understanding of nature from a lack of scientific development, man was programmed or “wired” to focus on a subconsciously produced lie that promised an afterlife and immortality through God external to the self. Without having developed this innate survival mechanism, we would have been frozen in inaction and meaninglessn...