Freeing the Scientific Imagination
Modern science, especially in the United States, is finding itself doing intellectual battle with religious fundamentalism, most notably in the arena of evolution versus creationism. As a professional scientist, I understand the necessity of combating the creationist hodgepodge of unsupportable alternatives to the evidence for evolution. Modern mainstream science, however, has become dangerously dogmatic itself, and tends to dismiss evidence that does not fit its own prejudices.
In its most extreme form, which unfortunately is so widespread that it may represent the majority view of modern scientists, the dogmatism of today's reductionist mentality is such as to preclude any meaningful engagement with a spiritual worldview because it regards such a worldview as pure fantasy. The modern reductionist might be comfortable in a limited scientific-spiritual dialogue, provided that spiritual beliefs are diluted to moral and ethical codes of conduct and religious practices interpreted as mere social and cultural events, as if there were no ontological difference between a Saturday night rave and a Sunday morning church service, in that they are both rituals of a community.
Incisive recent books by biologist Kenneth Miller and by theologian John Haught make a compelling case that Darwin and God are quite compatible. To state it bluntly, as both an astrophysicist and a Christian, I have no problem with evolution, a 15 billion-year-old universe, a Big Bang, and a Creator. What I do consider to be a major problem is fundamentalism on the scientific side of the fence: I call it fundamentalist scientism.
It is acceptable, in fact even fashionable, to publish scientific papers today on theories of entire universes, invisible to us, that may be adjacent to our universe in higher dimensions. Such ideas go by the name of superstring theory and M-theory, and are considered among the most exciting and prestigious forefront areas of modern physics. Even universes right on top of our own, penetrating the space right under our noses, are considered plausible, provided you express this with impressive mathematics in terms of opposite chirality particles and interactions, for example. I myself have postdocs working for me who are experts in these areas.
If a religious person, however, talks about transcendent spiritual realities, that is scoffed at. For some reason the 11- or 26-dimensional string worlds—take your pick—of the physicist are fine, but the supernatural realms of the mystic are judged to be mere superstition. The word "supernatural" has been tarred and tainted by the materialist-reductionist guardians of the "natural" (meaning the particles and fields of modern physics). The interesting thing is that the string and brane universes remain theoretical concepts, whereas mystics throughout the ages report coherent and consistent observations of transcendent, that is, supernatural, realities. As an astrophysicist, I am partial to observations.
The word "mystic" also raises a bright red flag in front of the scientific reductionist. One of my favorite mystics, however, is none other than Sir Arthur Eddington, who is widely regarded as the greatest astrophysicist in the first half of the twentieth century. His observations of the sun verified Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1919 (and made Einstein famous overnight). When the New York Times said that only 12 men (that is, alas, how they put it in 1919) in the world understood Einstein's new theory, Eddington was near the top of the list. He wrote groundbreaking scientific treatises like "The Mathematical Theory of Relativity" that explained relativity to the lesser geniuses of the time (and even half a century later to decidedly nongenius graduate students such as myself), and "The Internal Constitution of the Stars"... but he also went public with the book Science and the Unseen World in which he discussed his spiritual convictions and his belief in the existence of realms beyond the physical.
How to define this fundamentalist scientism that has quenched a large fraction of the scientific imagination? It is a dogma that the only possible reality is one that can be explored or conjured up by physics and limited to matter and energy. It is the belief (presented as fact) that science has proven that God and any possible subordinate immaterial intelligences or hierarchies are merely leftover antiquated myth, as any sensible person should know without question by now. It is the conviction that our own consciousness cannot be anything grander than a bit of brain chemistry, a mere epiphenomenon, albeit one that curiously has been carried a bit further than the exigencies of evolution might have been expected to do. Never mind the evidence of our own awareness that something else and more profound is really going on that even the most strident debunker directly experiences (and somehow argues himself out of . . . and I do mean "himself," since strident debunking appears to be very testosterone-related).
This dogma of fundamentalist scientism is dangerous because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that there can be no purpose behind the existence of the universe or its tenants. In this reductionist-materialist point of view, the life of any human being must ultimately be devoid of any meaning greater than perhaps a transient psychological satisfaction in a here-and-now job well done, be it sending the kids through college or firing up the kind of Sunday barbecue that makes friends and family salivate. Indeed, there is no lack of vocal scientific luminaries who, exuding a kind of stoic pride, draw precisely this conclusion.
One prominent Nobel Laureate makes no bones about it, stating that the more we learn of the universe, the more it is obvious that it is pointless. Such a decidedly glum assessment of our present position and future prospects is hardly inspirational. Muslim philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr has observed that as values lose their grounding, not only does the danger to the natural world increase, so does the probability of human atrocities. The end result of a philosophy that espouses a pointless universe can be only ugliness and destruction, for no matter in what mantle of stoic nobility one attempts to cloak it, this philosophy is no fountain of hope but rather a poison brew of pessimism. To couch it in the language of its nihilist proponents, the only conceivable end result is the grim maximization of entropy. This position cannot—via any tinkering or contortion—be made life-enhancing.
Let us for the moment use the term "spiritual worldview" as a shorthand for the supposition that reality and our own nature, our conscious being, involve both tangible physical matter and an immaterial "something,"this "something" being intimately, indeed essentially, involved in the existence of consciousness and life and ultimately being traceable to a divine origin and purpose. The opposition of modern, mainstream science to such a spiritual worldview is immediate and forceful, for reasons both rational and irrational, for this feud between science and religion has deep roots that go beyond the intellectual repression of centuries past. Religion has been responsible, ironically and unconscionably, for vast swaths of death, destruction, and terror spanning the globe and most of recorded history . . . and it is by no means over today. It is a fair argument that the life cycle of religion as an institution of power, propaganda, and paternalism has gone far enough beyond its Biblically allotted years. But a spirituality rooted in the perennial philosophy—as summarized by Aldous Huxley, say—cannot be the evil influence that the majority of scientists seem to see, triggering their red-flag-in-front-of-the-bull response, for the simple reason that the truths therein must also be laws, as fundamental as gravity or electromagnetism but of a different order. It is up to us to find those laws amid the culturally fertilized religious overgrowth.
The most vehement proponents of materialist reductionism, such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett and biologist Richard Dawkins, point with almost ghoulish glee to the fear, pain, and terror that are part of the process of evolution, thereby making an emotional but cogent argument for atheism and nonspirituality. How could a benevolent God ever countenance the existence—and for millions of years at that—of monstrous eating machines such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and his associates who must have spent their days chewing up everything in sight foolish enough to move underfoot—a decidedly unbenevolent situation for the poor prey? If human beings really are God's children, why has it taken billions of years of all-too-often nightmarish, horrific natural selection to bring us into existence? Is a process like this really necessary, one that relies on hideously slow selection for traits that make a creature a bit less likely to be caught and devoured in the predatory jungle? What kind of creation is this, they ask? It is a fair question, but one for which a rational answer can be proposed that is quite the opposite of the one they advance, namely their view that evolution proves beyond a doubt that only pitiless, indifferent laws are at work in the universe, nothing else.
When mystics say, as they have to the endless annoyance of the reductionist, that the universe is the body of God, the reaction of normal folks is liable to range from "That's poetic" to "That's crazy," with quite a few "Sounds cool, but I sure don't get it" in between. Could this knowledge be more than just a poetic metaphor? The perennial philosophy maintains that there is a truth here, one that is capable of being elucidated—admittedly not to full human comprehension—but at least to a first-order level of understanding.
There seem to me to be three minimum foundations for a spiritual worldview:
- A creator who ultimately seeks benevolence—in spite of evidence that seems to contradict that notion—from our limited historical earthly perspective.
- Human beings as immortal spiritual forms evolving through temporary bodies.
Without at least these three pillars, one may have a system of morals and ethics or a philosophy of life, but not a spiritual worldview. With each of these pillars, what starts as a system of morals and ethics moves progressively toward a substantively new vision of spirituality in nature, marrying the values of objective scientific discovery with the subjective experience of a far larger reality than that yet grasped by science.
These three pillars are at odds with the tenets of fundamentalist scientism, but none of them is genuinely at odds with either the corpus of scientific knowledge or the scientific method as it is practiced today by the mainstream, because mainstream science limits its investigations to the physical world. Arguments against these three fundamental spiritual tenets are based on the dogmatic assumptions of fundamentalist scientism, not on any objective scientific evidence.
It would be a failure for this dialogue between science and spirit to lead to essentially no more than an agreement to politely disagree. I believe that engaging the scientific and spiritual imagination means seeking and acquiring new knowledge. Not surprisingly, this can take place on the usual two fronts: theory and observation/experimentation. In my 12 years of editing the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I have been exposed to a great deal of investigation of anomalies, spanning the spectrum from absurd to awesome. Within the pages of that journal alone there are enough substantive data to initiate productive research in areas that can engage both the open-minded scientist and the spiritually interested empiricist. Naturally, there are many other sources of information—including the mystical—but I cite the one with which I am most familiar.
Let me give one example. For 24 years the US government sponsored a remote-viewing program at a modest but not insignificant funding level of approximately $1 million per year, first at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) and then at SAIC (Science Applications International Company). Though not involved in it myself, I am well acquainted with the leading figures in this program. In 1996 I ran five articles commenting on this program in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. This was triggered by the declassification and release of a 270-page SRI report and a retrospective review of the program by the American Institutes for Research for the CIA. (Approximately 80,000 pages of program material remain classified, I am told.) The CIA-sponsored review came to mixed conclusions regarding the underlying reality of human psychic abilities. Jessica Utts, a well-known statistician at the University of California, Davis, author of the textbook Seeing Through Statistics, and Fellow (not just member, which anyone can become by virtue of check or credit card) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, concluded: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic function has been well established. . . . It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible."
Ray Hyman, a well-known skeptic, disagreed with this, but Edwin May, the director of the program from 1986 to 1996, has stated that neither Utts nor Hyman was actually privy to the best data in the first place. That was as much as he could state in public owing to classification issues. The SRI-SAIC program is just the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous other research articles in the journal, as well as elsewhere. Experiments suggest that acquisition of information using this ability has a baffling atemporal character. This makes me skeptical that neither electromagnetism, gravitation, nor strong or weak interactions will be capable of explaining these observations. I think that the understanding of this will require both a scientific and a spiritual way of viewing reality, and therein lies a promising program for future collaboration.
In terms of theory, modern physics and astrophysics today are overflowing with concepts of things that are not evident to the senses—ranging from particles of dark matter to alternate universes—and laws that are the opposite of mechanistic—nonlocality and superposition of states in quantum physics, for example. The possible similarity or connection between certain mysteries of science and certain spiritual mysteries is admittedly oversimplified in the flood of New Age-oriented books washing over the Western world, but I suggest that there is a dearth and thus an opportunity at higher levels. Two examples would be the work of Haught in the arena of evolution theory (entirely consistent with Darwinian natural selection), and the attempts to formulate a theological application of the field concept by Wolfhart Pannenberg and by Bruce Curtis.
Within the past few years, I have found myself involved in fundamental physics investigations having to do with what is variously referred to as zero-point energy, the zero-point field, zero-point fluctuations or the electromagnetic quantum vacuum. These terms now pop up in the modern metaphysical landscape like dandelions in spring, having fashionably become the "usual suspects" in attempts to draw deep connections between science and spirit of the most modern sort. From my perspective as a scientist looking at the physics of the electromagnetic quantum vacuum, most such attempts range from poor fit to no fit at all, but there is one Cinderella-like match that is striking: the connection between the origin of inertia of matter and the electromagnetic quantum vacuum that my colleagues and I stumbled upon and published in 1994, and have been studying ever since. Inertia is such a fundamental characteristic of matter that a stable physical universe could not even be imagined without this property. The electromagnetic quantum vacuum is a form of light, so what we have is an amazing but theoretically rigorous connection between light and matter.
At the risk of overstating the case, I will summarize by saying that this may be the first-ever "bottom up" insight on the "creation of matter involving light" concept that one finds in the "top down" cosmogonies of many esoteric traditions. The theoretical physics project is substantive: the research has been published in mainstream physics journals and supported by a multiyear NASA research grant. (Full details and links to published articles may be found at the website of the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics: www.calphysics.org.) The possible metaphysical connections I am suggesting are naturally far more speculative (and of course do not carry the NASA imprimatur).
Science consists of a spirit of inquiry and of methods to investigate and analyze. It is a highly successful enterprise for investigation of the physical world, but to claim that the investigation of the physical world rules out anything spiritual is fundamentalist scientism at its most irrational and dogmatic. Rejection of evidence that cannot yet be measured with instruments in a laboratory is contrary to the scientific spirit of inquiry. It is time to move beyond dogmatic fundamentalism in both religion and in science.
Presented at the State of the World Forum, September, 2000. For more information, see www.calphysics.org/haisch.
