The hippie and New Age types have been accused of arrogance. They did not invent arrogance. They got it from their teachers.

Their academic teachers claimed that religion and spirituality was for the stupid, and that the facts of the universe meant that there was no such thing as spiritual experience. This lead to an arrogance that had these people thinking that they were the only sane and rational people in the world. When their students started having religious and spiritual experiences, that contradicted what they had been taught. So they thought that they were better than their teachers, while failing to consider that there was already a vast body of spiritual wisdom and that it existed in the religions of the world.

If you teach your students something that is untrue, it is only a matter of time before someone comes along and refutes it. This is what we see here. While any number of people who had these experiences used drugs, there were any number of others who didn’t. In my life, I have had many spiritual experiences that were not drug-related. I mean experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening, whose only possible explanations are spiritual and religious. And I for that reason do not have the luxury of sceptical beliefs.

What did happen? Well, what happened was that many people whose explorations of consciousness had experiences of the esoteric, and these then led to validating a theistic worldview. So a number of people who had been involved in consciousness and the occult converted to Christianity and used their knowledge to enhance the practice and understanding of Christianity. So now we see a much more sophisticated Christianity, that has understanding of things that it did not understand before.

Is religion for the stupid? It is certainly stupid to dismiss the facts of physics, chemistry or climate science. It is not however stupid at all to have spiritual experiences or to believe in God. The Earth is not limited to its crust. It also includes molten metal at the center, oceans and atmosphere, and all the variety of life that lives on it. If all you see and value is the crust, you will do the wrong things. And then it will require someone who sees what you don’t see to correct your errors.

Is it arrogance to militate against academic dogma? By that standard, it is arrogance for academic dogma to militate against Christianity. Science is a valid pursuit; materialistic bigotry isn’t. Valuable things have come out of science, but nothing valid is owed to materialistic bigotry. Science needs to know that there are things that it does not understand. Then it can actually grow and extend itself enough to understand these things.

As is the true spirit of science.

Science is a valuable pursuit; but so is spirituality and religion. If you teach wrong things, someone will come along and refute them. I started out as an atheist, but I have had many experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening whose only explanations are spiritual. As for arrogance, it belongs most to people who think that they are the only sane and rational people out there and that the rest of humanity is stupid or insane.