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Can Spirituality and Reason Ever Be Reconciled?
The power of strange events to shake skepticism
I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and had translated the correspondence between the two men — letters of great importance in the history of science — into English. A proud atheist, she always rejected any talk of the spiritual as superstitious nonsense. And yet when I visited her on her deathbed, she admitted with some shame that her lack of faith was wavering. She was afraid to die, and the psychological pressure to grasp at some straw of hope for an afterlife was strong. She recognised this as the desperate ploy of a fearful mind, but nonetheless struggled to resist it. Not long after this, she fell into unconsciousness for the last time, and I never knew if or how she resolved her inner conflict.
On her last night, a vigil of family members including her daughter and my aunt, the singer Olivia Newton-John, had gathered at her home. Olivia, a more spiritually open person than Irene, was alone in the room with her when her mother died. In the silence after her last breath, Olivia spoke, asking her mother for a sign. “If you’re okay, let me know by…
