In the first article in this series, I outlined why I think the quantum physics revolution is so important for the future of humanity. I concluded it by providing some quotes from the early pioneers who, in their search for the ultimate building-blocks of matter, discovered that they don’t actually exist, that matter is in fact immaterial. Here I’ll outline the ensuing history of this idea. Since it is obviously going to take a long time to work through and review all this material, my purpose here is simply to make readers aware of this history, in case anyone would like to do some research of their own into this fascinating topic.

    The story is in two parts, with a dividing line in 1985. Relevant figures and books, in approximate chronological order, are:

• Fred Alan Wolf, Space-Time and Beyond, 1975. This is an early attempt to draw parallels between quantum physics and the viewpoint of ancient religions. Even though the author is a physicist, this is not exactly an academic book. It almost seems to be aimed at children, full as it is with cartoons and pithy aphorisms. It is nevertheless a useful compendium of the ideas about the nature of reality from a quantum viewpoint. In a later book he wrote: “Quantum Mechanics, perhaps more clearly than any religion, points to the unity of the world”¹.
• Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1976). This is the first detailed exploration of the perceived relationship between the new science and the Ancient Wisdom.
• Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: an Overview of the New Physics (1979). A non-scientist describes twentieth century physics (both relativity and quantum) for the general public. The back cover, presumably written by the publisher, describes the book as “an absorbing guide to the mind-stretching mysteries of the new physics (which) points out striking parallels with modern psychology and eastern mysticism”.
• Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics (1981). The back cover states: “The new physics, the physics of quantum theory, tells us what the mystics have been proclaiming for centuries”.

    Other significant books from this early period, more scientific and referring not quite so specifically to mysticism, were:

• David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980). He was the most spiritual of these later quantum physicists. This is his most significant book, which explores the idea of the material world emerging from other levels of reality, in agreement with spiritual traditions.
• Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (1983). He is more restrained than some of these others. He sees himself as a conventional physicist, not wishing to rush to adopt mystical ideas, rather to expand the frontiers of science. He is nevertheless very open-minded about the problems of materialist science. The back cover says that he explains “how the recent far-reaching discoveries of the new physics are revolutionizing our view of the world and, in particular, throwing light on many of the questions formerly posed by religion”. The book discusses the creation of the universe, and contains chapters on Mind and Soul, the Self, the Quantum Factor, Time, the Fundamental Structure of Matter, and the Physicist’s Conception of Nature. He later wrote The Mind of God (1992).

    At this point the story takes a strange twist. In 1985 Ken Wilber, Perennial Philosophist and prolific writer on spiritual matters, entered the debate with Quantum Questions². He says: “In the past decade there have appeared literally dozens of books (I must have missed some!), by physicists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, purporting to describe or explain the extraordinary relationship between modern physics, the hardest of sciences, and mysticism, the tenderest of religions. Physics and mysticism are fast approaching a remarkably common worldview, some say…”(p 3). Wilber wishes to challenge and put a brake on this tendency, and in this book quotes what the early physicists actually said. He claims that “these pioneering physicists did not believe that physics and mysticism share similar worldviews… (but) they nevertheless all became mystics”, and wonders why this is so (P ix).

    I’m not sure how much influence this book had, but in the following period this tendency to compare quantum physics to mystical ideas seemed to change course, or at least be less explicit. Ironically, however, when in 1990 Norman Friedman wrote Bridging Science and Spirit, he chose Wilber as the spokesperson for the spiritual viewpoint, and David Bohm for quantum physics, concluding that they were saying essentially the same thing. The foreword was by Fred Alan Wolf (see above), who said: “The gap of understanding separating the two seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints of spirituality and science can be bridged… These two approaches aim toward the very same truths”.

    In this later period, two trends are worth noting. Firstly, some physicists from a quantum viewpoint are critical of Darwinian evolutionary theory. (It is therefore reasonable to ask whether evolutionary biologists have taken on board the implications of quantum physics, the most successful scientific theory of all time.) Examples would be:

• Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint
• Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self
• Amit Goswami, Creative Evolution
• Also worth mentioning is the former Darwinian biologist Bruce Lipton, who completely changed his views following his discovery of quantum physics. He tells his story in The Biology of Belief.

    Secondly, following the quantum revolution, physicists suddenly became very interested in the nature of consciousness. This was a general preoccupation, but some of the more important examples are:

• Danah Zohar’s The Quantum Self. In one of her later chapters she dares to bring God into the discussion about the implications of quantum physics.
• Fred Alan Wolf’s Mind and the New Physics
• Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind
• Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World.

    Despite this apparent consensus in favour of a connection between spirituality and quantum physics, a small minority of physicists remain unconvinced, impervious to all these arguments. The most strident of the opponents, as far as I am aware, is the late Victor Stenger, author of The Unconscious Quantum, clearly a provocative title given the idealist tendencies of the majority of quantum physicists. He is also the author of God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (no comment.)

    Also noteworthy is Jim Al-Khalili, physics professor and populariser of science for BBC TV and radio. He is a physicist who does research into quantum biology; he nevertheless describes himself as an atheist and in 2013 become president of the British Humanist Association. I assume he hasn’t read much of the above literature!

    The latest development, at the time of writing, is that Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and populariser of science, has a new book out called Helgoland in which he attempts to explain quantum physics to the general public. I haven’t read it yet, but I heard him being interviewed on the radio for an hour last week. Two points stood out. Firstly, he would appear to be returning to what Fritjof Capra started, pointing out the connection with Eastern religions, since he has a chapter on the Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna. (I understand from a review that he also reflects on Hinduism.)

    Secondly, he is making the controversial claim that quantum entanglement (action-at-a-distance) is not real, but illusory (one review does say that he is putting his own interpretation of quantum physics centre stage). That will be an interesting read.

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Footnotes:

1. Taking the Quantum Leap, Harper and Row, 1989, p249

2. Shambhala, 1985

    I believe that quantum physics is the most significant cultural development of the last hundred years, not just for science, but for society and civilisation in general, and this for two reasons. It is at the vanguard of a new scientific paradigm, an emerging worldview that can potentially rescue humanity from the follies of scientific materialism. At the same time it is rediscovering and connecting with the ideas and the worldview of ancient peoples before the advent of the philosophical and scientific movement known as the Enlightenment. It is thus the foundation stone of a reunification of science and religion, a tool in the battle against atheism and secularism, which is a necessary way forward for humanity. These are, of course, not original ideas of mine; they are prevalent in much scientific literature of the last fifty years, which is where I found them.

    I recently gave a Zoom talk on these themes, which included positive references to several quantum physicists. I was surprised therefore when I received a comment afterwards via email, criticising me for praising quantum physics in this way. My correspondent wrote: “On the one hand you warn about the physicalist, reductionist science paradigm, yet you quote many quantum scientists. I started out as a physicist specializing in theoretical, nuclear and astrophysics, but always had difficulty with quantum mechanics. Being doubtful of theoretical physics (as you point out what is genuine science and what is metaphysical presumption), my career has been in practical materials science”. My critic then lists some of the appalling technology that, in his estimation, quantum physics has brought us.

    I responded, asking for some clarification, specifically on the point that he seemed to be including quantum physics as part of the physicalist paradigm. In his reply he said that he was indeed saying “that quantum mechanics is part of the physicalist paradigm. This paradigm has been developing during the centuries of the modern era; QM is an extension of the physicalist paradigm, modifying it but does not break out from it. Most of QM thinking is abstract, theoretical and disconnected from any experience of nature, and while thinking in this space we lose sight of the scale and proportion to which it refers. I remind myself that QM is the mechanics of the very small, at the level of the atom and deals in idealized concepts and relations, and it is so easy to assume erroneously that these ideas apply to all realms; quantum in this context means small amount”. (All italics mine, in order to highlight the points with which I take issue.)

    I was very surprised by these comments, since my correspondent is highly intelligent, involved in and deeply knowledgeable about spiritual matters. I had always thought that the main problems preventing the new paradigm inspired by quantum physics from breaking through were, firstly, that its implications have not been sufficiently appreciated and incorporated by the other sciences, specifically evolutionary biology, and secondly that its implications have not sufficiently penetrated the consciousness of the general public. I had not considered the possibility that it could be rejected in principle in this way. I therefore thought it would be worthwhile to do a series of articles on the relationship between the quantum physics revolution, the new scientific paradigm, and their connection with the spiritual traditions of the past, hopefully to make these connections as clear as possible. In this introduction, I’ll begin by responding to these criticisms, leaving the most important until last:

    1. With regard to the technology developed from quantum thinking¹, any new knowledge can be used for both good and evil purposes. One obvious example would be that, as soon as humans developed powered flight, it was used to drop bombs. Also, the study of chemistry and biology increases our knowledge of life and the universe, allows advances in medicine, but humans can also use the knowledge to create chemical and biological weapons. So I would argue that knowledge is neutral, and that the underlying scientific theories cannot be held responsible for human behaviour.

    2. On the nature of the theory, my correspondent describes quantum mechanics as “ abstract, theoretical and disconnected from any experience of nature” and purely mind without emotion. We can easily agree that the maths and the equations are abstruse, and incomprehensible to anyone other than specialists, also that the theory is abstract. (It is not so clear that it is disconnected from nature, as I will discuss in point 3.) Quantum physics has been described as the most successful scientific theory of all time. By this is meant that its experimental results have been precisely confirmed many times over. There is, however, no general agreement about what it all means, i.e. the philosophical implications; there are various interpretations of the theory. Nevertheless, there is a certain consistency in many of the statements made by quantum physicists when, getting away from all the maths and equations, they write for the general public about what they think the experimental results of this obscure science imply.

    3. My correspondent believes that the quantum realms (the micro-level) are distinct from, and apparently unrelated to, everyday reality (the macro-level) where classical physics applies. He says that “we lose sight of the scale and proportion to which (quantum mechanics) refers. I remind myself that QM is the mechanics of the very small, at the level of the atom… and it is so easy to assume erroneously that these ideas apply to all realms”.

    He says ‘erroneously’, but the very least that could be said is that this is a minority viewpoint; I’m struggling to think of any physicist who makes such a bold claim. On the contrary, according to scientist/philosopher Bernardo Kastrup: “The scientific consensus today is that classical, macroscopic physics arises as the compound result of fundamental microscopic (quantum) laws, only the latter being metaphysically real”. On that point he quotes physicist Erich Joos: “Simply to assume, or rather postulate, that quantum theory is only a theory of micro-objects… leads to the endlessly discussed paradoxes of quantum theory. These paradoxes only arise because this particular approach is conceptually inconsistent… In addition, micro- and macro-objects are so strongly dynamically coupled that we do not even know where the boundary between the two supposed realms could possibly be found. For these reasons it seems obvious that there is no boundary”. “Whichever interpretation (of quantum mechanics) one prefers, the classical world has been ruled out”².

    4. Most surprising therefore was my correspondent’s belief that quantum physics is an extension of the physicalist paradigm, “modifying it but does not break out from it… QM is the mechanics of the very small, at the level of the atom”. I’ve never heard such a claim before and, to say the least, it is somewhat unusual. One can understand such a statement insofar as quantum physics was the continuation of the search for the ultimate building-blocks of matter. However, it went beyond the level of the atom to the sub-atomic realm. The word quantum may mean literally ‘very small’, but that is not what the early quantum physics revolution discovered. What they found was not the very small, rather that the ultimate building blocks of ‘matter’ do not really exist; the quantum ‘small amount’ actually disappeared:

• Sir James Jeans: “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”³.
• Werner Heisenberg: “The smallest units of matter are not physical objects… They are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”⁴.
• Sir Arthur Eddington: “The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions”⁵.

    This was a return to the viewpoint of the ancient religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and philosophers, most notably Plato, as expressed in his famous allegory of the cave. Jeans uses this allegory as the epigram for his book. Heisenberg mentions Plato specifically. Eddington was also clearly thinking of Plato’s allegory in his liberal use of the words ‘shadow’ and ‘shadowy’, not just in the quote above.

    Since shadows are non-material, these are decisive statements in favour of the philosophy of Idealism, in agreement with the ancient religions, that mind is the primary reality, and that what appears to be matter is an illusion. The early quantum physicist who made perhaps the clearest statement suggesting this spiritual interpretation was Max Planck: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter”⁶.

    To sum up, my correspondent had said that quantum mechanics “is an extension of the physicalist paradigm, modifying it but does not break out from it”. He was therefore comparing it to Einstein’s modifying and developing of Newton’s theories to accommodate greater velocities, while remaining a classical theory. This viewpoint seems to be contradicted by the quotes above. As Stanislav Grof says in Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science: “Twentieth century physics have questioned and transcended every postulate of the Newtonian-Cartesian model… (Reality) is entirely different from the seventeenth century model used by mechanistic science… The world of substance was replaced by that of process, event, and relation”⁷.

    In the next article, I’ll outline the history of the debate around quantum physics and spirituality.

Footnotes:

1. Some of the examples he offers are: nuclear weapons, drone technology, cyber warfare, propaganda, brain washing and indoctrination. It is not relevant to my argument whether or not these are actually developments from quantum theory or not.

2. Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, iFF Books, 2021, p 49. 

The Joos quotes are taken from ‘The Emergence of Classicality from Quantum Theory’, in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, P. Clayton and P. Davies (editors), OUP, 2006, p 74–76.

3. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, my edition 1947, p 137

4. quoted in Quantum Questions, Ken Wilber, Shambala, 1984, p 51

5. The Nature of the Physical World, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935, p 10–11

6. from lecture given in Florence (click here)

7. State University of New York Press, 1984, p 10

    This is the beginning of a series which has been in my writing plans for some time, but which so far I haven’t got round to. I’ve been spurred into action, however, by a Grant Piper article on Medium.com (click here) which claimed that Isaac Newton’s devotion to alchemy was a sign of madness. I therefore wrote this article (click here) as a preliminary response. Here I’ll begin a full treatment of the issues. My primary sources are Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer by Michael White¹, and In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times by Gale E. Christianson². (Unless otherwise stated, the quotes and page references come from White.)

    There is a well known saying, the winners rewrite history, and that is certainly true in the case of Newton. The winners in this context are the scientists of the so-called Enlightenment, who have created a fiction about him which, unfortunately, Piper is perpetuating. The story runs like this.

    Newton was a scientific genius. That part is certainly not fiction. White lists his contribution, impressive in that he achieved it single-handedly, thus:

• he made “unparalleled contributions to science — principles that have moulded the modern world” (p 1).
• he was the father of modern empirical science (p 29), in that he was the first to apply the modern scientific method fully (p 182).
• he unified Galilean and Keplerian mechanics “into a single, coherent, mathematically and experimentally supported whole” (p 221), a synthesis which “can be seen as a watershed in the development of physics”, some perceiving his work “as making possible the Industrial Revolution” (p 29).
• his primary work, the Principia Mathematica, “laid the cornerstone for the understanding of dynamics and mechanics which would, within a space of a century, generate a real and lasting change to human civilisation” (p 221).

    However, he also had a mad side because he was obsessed with alchemy, the ridiculous and impossible search for the ability to transmute lead into gold. Who on earth could take this seriously? This is an inexplicable paradox for modern scientists. As if that were not bad enough, the whole truth is even worse, because he devoted more time to alchemy than he did to science, writing over a million words about it (p 4); “the most respected scientist in history, the model for the scientific method, had spent more of his life intensely involved with alchemy than he had delving into the clear blue waters of pure science” (p 2).

    He also studied and wrote about natural magic, astrology and numerology, which for Piper must be more obvious signs of madness. He was deeply religious, a devoted — albeit heretical (Arian) — Christian, spending many hours on biblical exegesis, being especially interested in the Book of Revelation. This would also have been a mystery to Enlightenment scientists, who promoted the idea that he discovered the laws governing a mechanistic universe, which contributed to the foundation of modern materialism, with its atheistic implications. This is exactly the opposite of what Newton himself believed. In an early notebook he described God as a spirit penetrating all matter, and “he never swayed from his assertion that God was responsible for maintaining planetary motion through the device of gravity” (p 149). So much for a mechanistic universe! In reality he believed that the laws he discovered were a manifestation of divine creativity.

    Newton was also influenced by the ideas of the occultist magician John Dee; they shared beliefs, and both of them were deeply interested in Rosicrucianism, an esoteric secret society. He possessed a copy of the Rosicrucian Manifestos and other Rosicrucian texts, about which he made extensive notes.

    In passing, it’s also interesting to note that Pythagoras was a source of inspiration for Newton’s scientific ideas. By the 1690s Newton “had concluded that the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras had been acquainted with the inverse square relationship and had described how it governed planetary motion. He reached this conclusion from his reading of Pythagorean concepts of harmony and number. The Greek philosopher had supposed that the universe operated via strict numerical relationships. For him, number was all” (p 348). This is somewhat ironical, since this belief of Pythagoras was another target for Piper’s accusations of madness.

    This ‘mad’ side of Newton was kept from the world for a long time, which explains how the false portrayal of him as one of the founders of the Enlightenment, and father of modern science was allowed to develop. The truth came to light when a collection of his private papers was acquired by the economist John Maynard Keynes in an auction in 1936. They had been in the hands of the Portsmouth family, who had earlier made a gift of them to the University Library of Cambridge in the 1880s. However, “the manuscripts on alchemy and theology were soon back in the hands of their donors” (Christianson p 204), since they were deemed to be of no scientific value. That is arguably true. They were, however, obviously of immense historical value, since they would have given us many precious insights into Newton’s true nature. (I have read elsewhere that the University was embarrassed by what they saw, and preferred to keep quiet about it.)

    This Enlightenment myth about Newton continues in that these two sides are now deemed to be completely separate; he was this brilliant scientist, who nevertheless had a mad and inexplicable obsession with something completely unscientific. In the previous article I speculated that maybe it was because Newton was a genius that he was interested in alchemy. Perhaps it was his research into alchemy that led him to his scientific discoveries. That may seem an extraordinarily unlikely suggestion nowadays, but is nevertheless precisely the view of both biographers, who should know better than most, given their extensive research. Michael White’s unequivocal conclusion is: “the influence of Newton’s researches in alchemy was the key to his world-changing discoveries in science. His alchemical work and his science were inextricably linked” (p 5). Christianson: “There is no question that the roots (of the idea of gravitation) eventually found ready nourishment in the fertile field of his alchemical thought” (p 231).

    Further elaborating comments by White are as follows:

• “he constructed a detailed theory (of gravity) based on both alchemical knowledge and experimental verification… Without his in-depth knowledge of alchemy, he would almost certainly never have expanded the limited notion of planetary motion as he saw it in 1665/6 into the grand concepts of universal gravitation, of attraction and repulsion, and of action at a distance” (p 93).
• his scientific achievements were the result of “unsurpassed insight, peerless technical powers and a willingness to explore exotica such as alchemy. Newton saw the power of attraction and repulsion at the bottom of the alchemist’s crucible as well as in the movements of heavenly bodies and was able to make the imaginative leap that linked the two, establishing that all matter attracts other matter” (p 221).
• the Principia Mathematica is “probably the greatest single work of science ever written”, but it was “the mathematical, alchemical and religious ferment of Newton’s imagination (which) gave the book form” (p 190).
• there was a concluding section to the Principia found in his papers, two versions of which were not published during his lifetime. The reason for this was that “the basis upon which his ideas of subatomic forces operated was too obviously derived from alchemy and the hermetic tradition — he could not risk exposing his sources” (p 226). (The practice of alchemy at that time was illegal.)
• “the concept of what the alchemists called ‘active principles’ took on far greater importance and led him to a radical reassessment of how gravity operated… One Newton scholar has gone so far as to say that Newton could not have visualised attraction at a distance had it not been for his alchemical work” (p 206)³.

    How is it possible that the nature of motion and gravity can be inferred from an impossible search for the transmutation of metals? The answer must be that there is much more to alchemy than that; it depends upon a certain understanding of the nature of the cosmos, obviously one radically different from that of Enlightenment scientists. I’ll discuss that in the next article.

    We can see therefore that the portrayal of Newton and his ideas in modern science books is wildly inaccurate; he is “not the man that history has claimed him to be” (p 1). The truth is much closer to the titles of my two source biographies. Newton stood in the presence of the creator, and was the last of the sorcerers. Keynes, the acquirer of his papers, clearly exposed the falsity of the fiction I’ve been describing when he said: “In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason… (However) Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago”⁴. 

    Along similar lines, White says: “Ironically, although Newton was largely responsible for the development of the scientific enlightenment which swept away the common belief in magic and mysticism, he created the origins of empirical science and the modern ‘rational’ world in part by immersing himself in these very practices” (p 105).

    This leads us on to the question of why he would do that. What did he see in alchemy, astrology, numerology, and magic that persuaded him to spend so much time studying them? The answer, according to White, is that “he was interested in a synthesis of all knowledge and was a devout seeker of some form of unified theory of the principles of the universe… Newton believed that this synthesis — the fabled prisca sapientia — had once been in the possession of humankind” (p 106); “the most ancient civilisation was also the most knowledgeable, the most pure, the most advanced” (p 154). Such a suggestion would obviously be anathema to the incipient Enlightenment movement.

    Alchemy was part of this ancient knowledge: “Newton was motivated by a deep-rooted commitment to the notion that alchemical wisdom extended back to ancient times. The hermetic tradition — the body of alchemical knowledge — was believed to have originated in the mists of time and to have been ‘given’ to humanity through supernatural agents” (p 109).

    It would seem therefore that Newton was actually not the forward thinking and innovative genius that modern science claims; he was rather deeply rooted in the past, an “occultist, the seeker of the ancient flame of wisdom and arcane knowledge” (p 132). He openly acknowledged this in a letter to Robert Hooke where he said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”⁵.

    The motivation of the Enlightenment scientists for promoting a false picture of Newton is obvious. They want us to believe that humanity is marching onwards and upwards, through the progress of ‘science’, towards ever greater understandings, perhaps even to ultimate truth, and that we have left behind us the magic, superstition, illusions, and false religious ideas of the ancients. (A blatant example of this viewpoint is Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress⁶. The title says it all.) How embarrassing that their principal hero was deeply immersed in all this ‘nonsense’, which was actually the source of his scientific ideas. 

    Grant Piper’s accusation of madness is therefore completely misplaced. If it were not for Newton’s alchemy, we would not have had his science. 

    In the next article I’ll focus upon the practice of alchemy, how it might just be possible to achieve the desired transmutations. In a third I’ll explore those who may have achieved success.

Footnotes:

1. Fourth Estate, 1998

2. The Free Press, 1984

3. Richard Westfall, ‘Newton and Alchemy’, in Brian Vickers (ed.) Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, CUP, 1984, p 330.

4. in a 1942 lecture to the Royal Society Club, quoted by White, p 3

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants

6. Penguin Books, 2019

    This article is partly a response to a recent one on Medium.com by Joe Love, which was in turn a commentary on an article by Steven Ball, a Christian physicist. It is closer, however, to being my own thoughts on the topic under discussion, which is the supposed conflict between the modern scientific understanding of the universe, and the biblical account.

    Love believes that this conflict is illusory, and is aiming to reconcile the Bible with science by arguing for Old Earth Creation. He says: “I have great news for believers in science and believers in God. You are on the same team”.

    Old Earth is a sensible alternative to Young Earth Creation which, working on the assumption that the Bible is infallible, and counting up the years of the genealogies recorded in the Old Testament, comes to the conclusion that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, whereas science has arrived at the figure of about 4.5 billion years, and approximately 13.5 billion years for the universe as a whole. The most famous example of this nonsense was the calculation done by Bishop James Ussher who, despite being a prolific scholar and Primate of All Ireland, therefore presumably intelligent, nevertheless decided that the creation had taken place on October 22nd 4004 BCE.

    Merely agreeing with science that the Earth is much older than the Bible appears to claim, does not of course resolve the dispute. Love’s argument, following Steven Ball, runs something like this:

• the Bible is the inerrant Word of God as revealed to humanity
• science aims to discover the laws and principles of the universe, which originated with God
• therefore the Bible and science must be in agreement
• if they appear to be in conflict, it must be because we are failing to understand something.

    All we have to do, therefore, is to make sure we understand correctly. That is what I shall attempt to do in what follows, although I may arrive at conclusions different from those of Love.

    There are two major problems in his argument, the assumption that Christians have actually understood what the Bible is saying in the first place and, more obviously, the assumption that both the Bible and science are correct and therefore have to be reconciled. Why not at least consider the possibility that one or both might be wrong?

    Before I get round to some of my own thoughts, it’s worth noting that Love says some strange things, and I’m glad I didn’t have the Christian upbringing that he did.

• He describes the supposed conflict thus: “Battle lines have been drawn. You either stand with the bible, and with God, or you stand with those seeking to tear down belief in God’s Word”. Do the majority of scientists, even if some of them are atheists, really think that their primary motivation is “to tear down belief in God’s Word”; surely they are merely trying to draw conclusions about the universe from the available evidence, as they see it.
• Do we really have to stand either with the Bible, or with (atheistic) science? Why can’t we criticise both?
• “You are easily convinced; the bible is either all truth or all false”. Why are you so easily convinced? Why not say, the Bible was written by human beings, therefore contains their thoughts and beliefs; there may be some truth in it, provided you interpret it correctly, alongside things that are possibly false?
• “Suddenly you find yourself struggling to reconcile the faith you’ve been taught with the evidence you are presented”. Why should you have to do this? Why can’t you challenge the faith you’ve been taught? Why do you assume your teachers are infallible? Why not start from a clean sheet, with no preconceived ideas, and attempt to assess the evidence, and perhaps come to the conclusion that the Bible is sometimes wrong? Or even, why not consider the possibility that both your faith and science might be sometimes wrong, instead of right?

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    Love tends to quote the Bible as if it were ultimate truth, instead of the thoughts and opinions of potentially fallible human beings. If the Bible is ‘infallible’, and ‘the word of God’, why have Christians felt the need to mistranslate it?

    For example, as any biblical scholar will tell you, the Hebrew word translated as God in Genesis 1 is Elohim, which is a plural word. It is less often stated that the verb which follows it is singular. So an accurate translation might be ‘God in its plural form’ (It’s difficult to know which pronoun to use, because the later, most confusing section 26–30 says “God created humankind in his image”, even though his command had said “in our image, according to our likeness” — plural again.) Some time ago, however, I read a preface to a translation of the Bible (from memory I think it was an edition of the Good News Bible), where the translators said that they were aware that Elohim is plural, but that they had translated it as ‘God’ in order to conform with the Christian monotheistic tradition. They obviously meant well, but what they were actually doing was deliberately mistranslating the original text, in order to help Christians feel comfortable, and not have to face problematic questions about their beliefs.

    Historically, the Church has a bad record when it has tried to challenge developments in science — remember Copernicus, the trial of Galileo, the sun orbiting the Earth. As a consequence, it seems that some Christians are now frightened by science, panicking at each new development, and thinking that it has to be accommodated within their worldview.

    Darwinism has been perceived to be the main problem, the suggestion that living organisms have originated and evolved through natural processes without any divine, or otherwise supernatural involvement. This would obviously be a fatal blow to biblical literalism, if it were true, since it is in direct conflict with Genesis 1, where living creatures are said to have appeared because it was the will of God.

    Because Darwinism has been widely accepted as scientific truth, the Christian Churches have felt the need to accept it without too much protest.

    The Roman Catholic Church first addressed the issue in 1950 when Pope Pius XII stated that there was no conflict between evolution and Christian faith. Since then no Pope has said anything significant to distance himself from this position, and several statements have confirmed and indeed strengthened it. In October 2014 the current Pope, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, went so far as to encourage Catholics to believe in Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang. His statement seemed to leave room for a divine creator, but that role would have been restricted to before the birth of the universe. This is therefore tantamount to deism, even though the official name for the Catholic position is, I believe, theistic evolution.

    Such statements have pleased some, believing that the Church should move with the times, and not challenge the scientific consensus. Others have disagreed, because they thought the Church was falling away from a literal interpretation of Genesis. I would argue that the scientific consensus and a literal interpretation of Genesis are both wrong.

    The Church of England is no better. I was once fortunate to be able to pose the question directly to the top man Rowan Williams, at the time the Archbishop of Canterbury, on a radio phone-in¹. I had emailed my question in advance: “Richard Dawkins is fond of saying that even the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope accept evolution. This seems slightly surprising since one would assume that a man of religion might favour something along the lines of Intelligent Design. Please would you clarify the extent to which you accept evolution with special reference to natural selection, and the random, blind forces which are assumed to lie behind it”.

    He responded: “First of all, I have no problem at all with evolution. It’s a very credible theory about how things got to be the way they are. And I guess, like probably the majority of modern Christians, I’d say that God should make a world designed to evolve, designed to develop in that way, causes me no difficulties at all. You find that sort of view advanced even in the first centuries of the Christian Church — God makes the world that has the capacity to change, and develop”. Here, like Pope Francis, he would seem to be implying deism, which I found strange for someone in his position.

    He continued by saying that “the Intelligent Design idea seems sometimes to talk as if the original design was a little bit faulty, and God has to keep on stepping in to make a little link, rather than putting it all into the works at the beginning”. I read a lot of Intelligent Design literature, and I don’t remember ever reading anything like that, therefore wondered whether he had really understood the arguments. He then continued by offering, in my view, a faulty account of some of the history of evolutionary theory. I was not impressed.

    Without any inspiration forthcoming from their leaders, Christians have responded with books like: Developing a Christian Worldview of Science and Evolution, by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey², and Creation or Evolution, Do We Have to Choose? by Denis Alexander³. A long time has passed since Galileo, however. Is it not time for the Churches to stand up and be counted, to be willing to challenge the theories of modern science, not passively accept its findings? On the question of Darwinism, the Discovery Institute in Seattle has taken up this challenge, with the theory of Intelligent Design. Their arguments may not be infallible, but they are far more impressive than those of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, whose book Critique of Intelligent Design⁴ is one of the worst I’ve ever read of this polemical type. Their arguments are laughable, despite the praise heaped upon the book by several university professors quoted inside the front cover. Their subtitle Materialism versus Creationism From Antiquity to the Present, shows how clueless they are, not even being able to distinguish between Intelligent Design and Creationism.

    The second problem for Christianity, although less damaging than Darwinism, is Big Bang theory. Because it has been almost unanimously accepted by cosmologists and physicists, again it seems that we have to have a Christian response in order to accommodate it. One example would be Genesis and the Big Bang: the Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible by Gerald Schroeder⁵.

    I have written at length about the problems with Big Bang theory in previous articles⁶. I have absolutely no qualifications in physics or cosmology, so obviously I am wary of making definitive claims, and consider my point of view to be not conclusive, but worthy of further consideration. I believe the question is still open, and that, if Big Bang Theory is in any sense true, it would have to be accommodated within the spiritual understanding of how the material universe came into being. There are many accounts in the various traditions. Here I’ll use the version of Jonathan Black, who claims to represent the viewpoint of various secret esoteric societies down the ages⁷. I don’t believe that this differs significantly from other spiritual traditions and religions.

    According to Big Bang theory, the universe began from nothing (an infinitely dense singularity), with the potential for matter to form. According to Black, however, “All religions taught that mind came before matter. All understood creation as taking place by a series of emanations” (p68). The material universe is therefore “a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind”. Black says that these should be understood “as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it”. “At the lowest level of the hierarchy… these emanations… interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter” (p39, p40). These different levels are what we find in Genesis 1 — the higher and lower waters, and the dry land.

    On the same page he said: “Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids”. These correspond with the three levels just mentioned.

    The whole process is described as one impulse “squeezing out of one dimension into the next” (p30). This is consistent with Genesis chapter 1, where God makes dry land form out of the lower waters, and the findings of quantum physics. One could argue that Genesis 1 is in accord with science, but not necessarily with Christian thinking.

    As Black said, his account is the viewpoint of all religions, and I believe it to be the truth. Two questions arise:

    Can Big Bang theory be made to conform with this account? I don’t think it can, although it is strangely a kind of caricature of the spiritual understanding — the infinitely dense singularity expanding outwards needs only to be replaced by the infinite Cosmic Mind expanding outwards and downwards through the various levels. It’s also worth noting that many myths describe an original void, which is surely what the ‘universe’ must have been before the initial expansion, according to Big Bang theory.

    Black says all religions. It is easy to see how his account would fit with Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and esoteric systems like Theosophy or Rosicrucianism, for example, but not so easy to see how it fits with Christianity. However, we perhaps have to distinguish between Christianity as it once was, and what it has become, especially under the influence of modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. In the early days, there was a strong Platonic influence, and Plato would have subscribed to something like the account above. If one takes the biblical text literally, as Evangelicals and Fundamentalists tend to do, then a problem arises. If you believe that God created the material universe, as Genesis 1 appears to say, then you will believe firstly that the material universe actually exists, and secondly that this was an event which happened some time in the past.

    According to modern science, however, neither of these two statements are true. Quantum physicists say that there is no such thing as matter — it is an illusion — and that the universe, as we perceive it, is being thought into existence, some saying many billions of times per second (I have discussed this idea in an earlier article).

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    If the Bible is God’s word, then surely it has to be interpreted correctly. Yet some Christians, so it would seem, have no idea what the Bible is saying. In order to demonstrate that point, I’ll go into one bizarre example at some length. Again we meet a familiar problem, taking literally something which is clearly not intended in that way. In what follows, this stupidity is taken to extreme lengths.

    Genesis chapter 1 (v 6–7) says: “And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky”.

    Alan Hayward, in Creation and Evolution: The Facts and the Fallacies⁸, offers the following commentary: “It has become almost a recent-creationist dogma that ‘the waters which were above the firmament’ of Genesis 1.7 formed a vast canopy of water vapour above the earth’s atmosphere. This, they say, was all precipitated in the days of Noah, thus causing the Flood… The idea was popularized by Whitmore and Morris in their classic, The Genesis Flood. They have so much to say about it that there are about twenty page-references to it in their index. Yet they do not offer a single calculation in support of their idea. If they had, they would soon have discovered that it was insupportable”.

    Hayward goes on to explain the scientific flaws in their argument. Far from shutting up the Creationists, however, this merely inspired another one to come up with a revised version of the theory! This was Dr. Joseph Dillow who “has appreciated these difficulties. He spent years trying to produce a detailed scientific explanation of the vapour canopy theory, and recently published his findings in a book of nearly 500 pages”.

    Hayward then goes on to demolish his arguments, and concludes: “The supposed vapour canopy has been much talked about in recent-creationist circles, but very seldom thought about. A little thought soon shows there could never have been such a canopy, unless it was sustained by one long, continuing miracle. And that, of course, would be contrary to the teaching of ‘Flood geologists’, since they invented the canopy in the first place to explain how the Flood could have occurred by ‘purely natural processes’ ” (p151–152).

    Hayward, having established that the vapour canopy is scientifically indefensible, goes on to show “that their scriptural justification for such a belief is also dubious”. This “is a new interpretation of those passages. Even the great canopy enthusiast Joseph Dillow admits that ‘the usual and oldest view is that the reference is to the clouds in the sky’. He mentions that Calvin’s commentary on Genesis teaches this. To forsake this well-established and obvious explanation of the passage in favour of a new and exotic one needs some justification. What other Scriptures are there which can be brought in as evidence? The fact is that there do not seem to be any” (p179–180).

    All this prodigious time and effort spent on defending a ridiculous theory could have been avoided if the Christians concerned had interpreted the passage as it was intended to be understood, symbolically rather than literally. Even this earlier ‘obvious’ explanation of clouds would seem to be wrong, as it is also literal.

    Even if we put to one side the thought that the text was once ancient Hebrew, and has passed through the hands of many interpreters and translators, so that we cannot be sure that the original intended meaning has been preserved, it still seems obvious that in Genesis 1, v 1–10, the words heavens, earth, waters, sky, dry land do not mean what we now understand by these terms. A clear indication of this is the very opening where it says that when the original ‘earth’ was created, it was ‘a formless void’. How could that be, according to any modern understanding of the world ‘earth’?

    One thing we can all agree upon is that Genesis 1 is a very cursory account of what was presumably a very complicated process; it is not exactly a detailed thesis. Despite the brevity, it still manages to be confusing, and it is hard to find a coherent interpretation of the chapter in its entirety in the modern translations.

    It seems to me that there are three distinct sections, verses 1–10 which describe the processes leading up to the emergence of the material universe, 11–25 which describe the evolution of the Earth before the appearance of humans, then 26–30 when humans arrive on the scene. They become progressively more confusing.

    As one example of the inconsistency in the text, up to verse 10 the word ‘dome’ seems to refer to a boundary between different regions of the non-material realms (“the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome”). In verse 14, however it seems to refer to what we now call the sky: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night..” These lights are presumably the stars, in which case the text then seems to contradict itself, “…and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth”. It can hardly be said that the distant stars achieve this feat, it is rather the more local Sun which does this.

    In any case, it is verses 1–10 that are worthy of most attention, since they contain an important portrayal of the nature of the universe:

• a directing creative principle, standing behind everything
• light as the basic building-block of the multi-levelled universe
• different levels of reality: the higher waters (spiritual realms, the heavens), and lower waters (psyche, astral levels) separated by a boundary, a line of demarcation (the dome)
• the material universe (dry land), which emerges from the lower waters.

    Let’s remind ourselves of the many hours wasted by those Creationists arguing for the water vapour canopy theory, because they failed to understand this obvious symbolism of the text. It is not the Bible that is false in this passage, rather the bizarre interpretation that some Christians have given to it. Thus the Bible and Christianity are not necessarily the same thing. There is the text of the Bible, and how it has been interpreted.

    On that theme, I’ll conclude with a quote from Carl Jung, following a profound personal experience, describing his father, a Protestant clergyman, who had serious religious doubts, but seemed unable to discuss them with his son: “He had taken the Bible’s commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfil without reserve the command of God”⁹.

    I hardly need to add that this God also stands above all scientific theories.

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Footnotes:

1. BBC Radio5live, interviewed by Simon Mayo, December 16th 2009

2. Tyndale House Publishers, 2001

3. Monarch Books, 2008

4. Monthly Review Press, 2008

5. Bantam, 1992.

6. See under ‘OLDER’ on the Science section of the Blog Index page.

7. The Secret History of the World, Black Quercus, 2010

8. Triangle, 1985, my copy with revisions 1994

9. The full story can be found in chapter 2, School Years, in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Collins Fount, 1977. I have also mentioned this in another article, click here.

    This follows on from part 1, and is the second in a series in response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium, which claimed that the ‘supernatural’ is a figment of humans’ imagination. My series will be a defence of the concept of the supernatural. My belief is that the material universe emerges from other levels of reality, often, though not necessarily, conceived of as being ‘higher’, which is why I call them supernatural. In this article I offer evidence for their existence, and later in the series I’ll discuss what might be found in them.

    This understanding can be found in many ancient traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Old Testament Judaism, Gnosticism — and also in modern esotericism, for example Theosophy, and various secret societies. Jonathan Black is a spokesman for their worldview, as explained in part 1, and I especially like how he expresses this idea: “For many of the world’s most brilliant individuals the birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained in just such a way. They have envisaged an impulse squeezing out of another dimension into this one — and they have conceived of this other dimension as the mind of God”¹. (In the Black quotes in part 1, he elaborates on this understanding, showing that he means several dimensions.)

    So is this some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo? Actually no; it is what quantum physicists have been saying for nearly a hundred years. They are at the vanguard of those scientists who reject the old materialist, mechanistic worldview which emerged from the ‘Enlightenment’, and quantum physics has been described as the best ever theory of physical reality in the history of science

    I assume that Wade knows about quantum physics but does not mention it in his article. In our correspondence he has mentioned: astronomy, geology, paleontology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, embryology, genetics and genomics, geology, radiochemistry, population biology, island ecology, and planetary science. However, as Plato might say, those working in these fields probably don’t realise that they are merely looking at shadows on a wall, and cannot see the (supernatural) source of those shadows. To push the comparison further, quantum physicists seem to represent that one prisoner in Plato’s allegory who has realised what is going on, and who is trying to wake the others up to the reality of the situation. They remain impervious to all attempts to persuade them, however.

    Here are some relevant quotes from quantum physicists down the years, beginning with the early pioneers:

• Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders, said: “Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. The smallest units of matter are not physical objects… They are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”².
• Max Planck, sounding remarkably like the Jonathan Black quote above: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter”³.
• Sir James Jeans: “Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter — not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts”⁴. (Jeans uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as the epigram for his book.)

    Also one of the early pioneers, Sir Arthur Eddington is especially important on these questions. He gave the Swarthmore lecture in 1929, the title of which is highly significant, Science and the Unseen World⁵. What is the unseen world if not the supernatural? The title of his fourth section is ‘Both a scientific and a mystical outlook are involved in the “problem of experience” ‘. (I think it is reasonable to equate ‘mystical’ with ‘supernatural’.) On that point, he considers the question, “is the unseen world revealed by the mystical outlook a reality?”, and thinks that it is better put “Are we, in pursuing the mystical outlook, facing the hard facts of experience?” His answer is: “Surely we are. I think that those who would wish to take cognisance of nothing but the measurements of the scientific world made by our sense-organs are shirking one of the most immediate facts of experience, namely that consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense impressions. We may the more boldly insist that there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted” (p 26–27).

    Earlier in the lecture he had said: “That environment of space and time and matter, of light and colour and concrete things, which seems so vividly real to us is probed deeply by every device of physical science and at bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow (referencing Plato there). None the less it remains a real world if there is a background to the symbols — an unknown quantity which the mathematical symbol x stands for”. Here I would equate the ‘background to the symbols’ and the ‘unknown quantity’ with the supernatural.

    Eddington continues, clearly saying that consciousness is not generated by the brain: “We think we are not wholly cut off from this background. It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism or at least not by symbolism of the numerical kind to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself” (p23).

    Among a later generation of quantum physicists we find:

• Fritjof Capra who, having understood the implications of the revolution in physics, wrote The Tao of Physics, comparing its findings to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen.
• David Bohm, whose concepts of explicate and implicate orders clearly refer to the material world and the hidden background out of which it emerges⁶.
• Danah Zohar likewise: “The quantum vacuum… is the basic, fundamental and underlying reality of which everything in this universe — including ourselves — is an expression”. The quantum vacuum “can be conceived as… a sea of potential… The vacuum is the substrate of all that is”⁷.

    Here this vacuum begins to sound more and more like an infinite God: “At the subatomic level of elementary particles, there is no death in the sense of permanent loss. The quantum vacuum, which is the underlying reality of all that is, exists eternally” (p124).

    And here she dares to use the actual word: “If we were looking for something that we could conceive of as God within the universe of the new physics, this ground state, coherent quantum vacuum might be a good place to start” (p208).

    It’s interesting to note that in the spiritual traditions mentioned above, the ultimate ground of being is described as a void or nothingness (vacuum?).

    And here is some idle speculation — I’m just letting my mind wander. If Zohar is correct in saying that elementary particles do not die, perhaps also they were not born. In which case, can it be true to say that there was a Big Bang? Perhaps the universe is eternal. If not, where were the particles at the singularity? Along the same lines, if the apparently expanding universe at some point begins to contract again, as some cosmologists have speculated, if particles do not die, then where will they go to at the Big Crunch, as the universe returns to a singularity? I assume that the quantum vacuum (God?) will remain, no matter what.

    In conclusion, to sum up neatly all the above quotes, here are the physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben: “We know that there is something beyond spacetime; we just don’t know what it is. Because Beyond Space-Time is non physical, unmeasurable… But what is beyond space-time is within everything”. That sounds like a pretty good description of the supernatural and its relationship to the natural to me. They continue: “Can it connect with us and influence us within space-time? Is it pure CONSCIOUSNESS?”⁸. 

    If it is pure consciousness, this would corroborate and vindicate what all the ancient spiritual traditions have been saying for thousands of years.

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Click here for part 3.

Footnotes:

1. The Secret History of the World, Quercus, 2010, p30

2. quoted by Ken Wilber in Quantum Questions, Shambala, 1984, p51

3. lecture given in Florence, quoted by John Davidson in The Secret of the Creative Vacuum

4. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, my edition 1947, p137

5. transcribed into book form by Quaker Books, 2007

6. The best example from his writings on this theme is Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

7. The Quantum Self, Flamingo, 1991, p207–8

8. Space-time and Beyond, Bantam, 1983, p56

    This brief series of articles will present an alternative viewpoint, therefore is in a sense a response, to a recent one on Medium.com by Ted Wade with the two items in his title reversed. The purpose of his article is to deny the existence of the supernatural, and to provide a psychological explanation for humans’ belief in it. This is a common theme among modern ‘Enlightenment’ scientists, and the background which leads to this way of thinking runs something like this.

    The universe began with the Big Bang. In the early stages there were only physical and chemical processes going on: the interactions of particles, the formation of primordial elements. There was therefore no consciousness present. Eventually stars, galaxies, and planets formed. At some point, primitive life-forms emerged on our planet out of non-life. As these life-forms became more complex, brains gradually developed in them, and at some later stage primitive awareness evolved as a by-product of these brains. We eventually arrive at the ape-like ancestors of humans, which were presumably too primitive to have fantasies of elves, unicorns, demons, gods and goddesses etc. These creatures eventually evolved into primitive humans. At some stage in this process a human self-aware consciousness developed out of the more primitive awareness of animals, and these humans did start having these fantasies. Since they are all illusions, and there is no such thing as the supernatural, we therefore have to come up with some explanation as to how and why this happened.

    This would seem to be the starting point for Wade’s article. I’m assuming the above to be at least an approximation of the belief system upon what he writes is based, although I haven’t checked the details with him. Interested readers can consult his article for the details of his argument. Essentially, however, it offers a psychological explanation (Theory of Mind) for why primitive humans started to imagine supernatural entities, with particular reference to Julian Jaynes (author of the well-known book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, although this is not mentioned specifically by Wade). One of the main features of his explanation, as is common in such analyses, is the false attribution of agency to phenomena like the weather.

     Wade is in the tradition of authors like Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark), and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). An even better example, and the closest to Wade’s thinking, albeit by a lesser-known author, is Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors, by Pascal Boyer¹. Digressing slightly for a moment, I’ll mention a few things about this book, since they reinforce Wade’s position, and therefore help to clarify the viewpoint that I shall be arguing against.

    The publisher’s notes on the back cover say: “Why are there religious beliefs in all cultures? Do they have features in common and why does religion persist in the face of science? Pascal Boyer shows how experimental findings in cognitive science, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology are now providing precise answers to these general questions, and providing for the first time, real answers to the question: Why do we believe?”

    There is praise from some of the usual suspects:

• Steven Pinker: “… a deep, ingenious, and insightful analysis of one of the deepest mysteries of the human species. …the most important treatment of the psychological basis of religious belief (since William James)” .
• E. O. Wilson: “An excellent book in the spirit of the French Enlightenment, broadly learned and with modern behavioural science added” .

    And also from novelist Ruth Rendell: “The wisdom in its pages will be revelation to any seeker after truth. …it lets daylight in upon magic… If faith is the last refuge of the would-be believer, Religion Explained takes it away but puts something better in its place, enlightenment and understanding” .

    So there we have one side of the argument about the supernatural; it is all an illusion. This worldview is summed up well by Steven Pinker who once wrote: “The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures…are factually mistaken”².

    On the whole it’s not possible to change the mind of anyone convinced of the truth of ‘Enlightenment’ science, so here I’m merely going to offer readers an alternative understanding. I believe it to be true but, because on the whole it lies outside the realm of normal scientific investigation, I’ll leave it to the reader to judge which version is more credible.

    Since his article, I have been corresponding with Ted Wade. One thing I’ve been trying to establish is a mutually acceptable definition of the terms ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’, therefore ascertaining what is considered to be above nature. Since he thinks that the supernatural is merely an illusory fantasy created by humans, it’s hard to make much progress on that one. So I’ve focussed on a definition of ‘natural’, and suggested that this should mean anything occurring within the space-time universe; anything beyond that would be existing at a different level of reality, and therefore ‘supernatural’. He has rejected this, however, saying that if there is anything outside the space-time universe, then that is merely the ‘natural’ waiting to be discovered by science.

    I’m therefore going to have to make up my own definitions. I’m going to reject his objection just mentioned, and say that anything which seems to exist beyond the space-time universe is supernatural. Another way of saying this is, anything that modern science doesn’t believe in, and considers impossible according to its accepted understanding of life, and laws of nature. One example of such phenomena would be discarnate entities which, if real, would exist at various levels of reality outside space-time, for example:

• spirits of various kinds, whether formerly human and now in the afterlife, or otherwise
• demons
• elemental beings, otherwise known as nature spirits, e.g. fairies, elves
• gods, goddesses, angels, and any other such high-level beings.

    According to my definition, there are some borderline phenomena that, if proved true, would have to be considered natural, since they happen to humans while in the space-time universe, for example ESP. There is, however, currently no explanation for this according to the laws of physics as understood by the paradigm outlined above. Another borderline phenomenon would be out-of-body experiences. Are they supernatural? They do suggest that consciousness is not dependent upon the brain, but nevertheless remains aware of the material world. So has consciousness moved to a different level of reality? Should this be considered a supernatural phenomenon or not?

    Because these questions are difficult to answer, I’m going to concentrate on two simpler ones: are there other levels of reality beyond the space-time universe, and do discarnate entities exist? I’ll deal with these in the following articles in the series. Here I’ll just make some preliminary remarks.

    There has been a longstanding battle between science and religion since the start of the Enlightenment. I’ve outlined the scientific understanding above. In what follows, I’ll be presenting an alternative spiritual or religious understanding, which is what I believe to be true. It is essentially what can be found in the various branches of the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that, despite their surface differences, at their core all religions are saying the same thing. Examples would be: Hinduism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Taoism and Gnosticism.

    It’s worth noting that this alternative understanding, which follows below, can also be found in a book by Jonathan Black (which is a pseudonym, real name Mark Booth) called The Secret History of the World³. He claims that it is an account of the understanding of the universe, a “secret philosophy”, according to various Mystery traditions and secret societies, especially Rosicrucianism, which goes back many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. This is knowledge which they have attempted to keep away from the general public, but which he claims has been subscribed to by various figures, including some acknowledged geniuses, down the course of history. He mentions, among others: Dante, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Newton, Goethe, Beethoven. (It’s a very impressive list. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether this is true or not.)

    Even though Black calls it knowledge kept secret by various societies, some of what he says, at least in a simple form, can be found in published texts, including the scriptures of the spiritual traditions mentioned above. In his introduction he cites as some of his sources “cabalistic, hermetic and neoplatonic streams that lie relatively close to the surface of Western culture”, Sufi elements, and “ideas flowing from esoteric Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a few Celtic sources”. He says that this teaching will “fly in the face of common sense”. This presumably explains why science has felt the need to come up with an alternative; Black says that a scientist will not like his secret history at all.

    This is a worldview, therefore, that has been known and survived for thousands of years. It is good to know that it is still alive and well among educated, highly intelligent modern people. How these ancient sages discovered it is an open question; it may have been in deep meditation, through a psychic ability such as clairvoyance, or through altered states of consciousness as a result of psychoactive substances — for example soma, kykeon, amanita muscaria. Or perhaps they were just messengers from a high level, sent down to teach humanity.

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THE ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDING

    Any argument, whether scientific, philosophical, or otherwise needs to be built on firm foundations; the quality of the conclusions will depend upon the truth or otherwise of the starting assumptions. In this current debate, that means examining how true the worldview of modern science outlined above actually is. Even though it is widely accepted, there are still some difficulties, or leaps of faith involved. For example, there is no real explanation as to how living organisms could emerge from inorganic matter, or how consciousness emerged from the brain. (The latter is still called the Hard Problem, and philosophers and scientists are tormenting themselves trying to come up with a solution.)

    Perhaps more controversially, despite the general acceptance among scientists of the truth of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolutionary theories, there are still good reasons to doubt them. In the specific context of this discussion, there is a problem with the Big Bang theory if there is an accompanying assumption that at the beginning and during the early stages of the universe, only unconscious particles existed. Such an assumption would lead to some of the later problems just mentioned.

    According to the alternative understanding:

• the ultimate source of the material universe is a Cosmic Consciousness (what we might call a Divine Mind), and it comes into being through a process of progressive densification of this spirit/consciousness, which creates different levels of being, the lowest being the physical universe we know⁴. As Jonathan Black puts it: “According to the cosmologists of the ancient world and the secret societies, emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood… as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it. These emanations have also always been thought of as in some sense personified, as being in some sense also intelligent” (p39). (The personification would explain the belief in deities.) In similar vein he says: “Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids”.
• there is nothing in this multi-levelled universe, therefore, that is not a manifestation of this Divine Mind; there exist only various forms of consciousness. This solves the problem of how life ‘emerged’ from non-life. It didn’t; everything is alive, a form of consciousness. This understanding also offers a solution to the so-called Hard Problem. How does the material brain produce consciousness with subjective experiences? (You need to explain this if you subscribe to the scientific paradigm outlined above.) Answer, it doesn’t — when a problem seems insoluble, it’s always a good idea to stand back and consider, are we asking the right question?
• even if the evolution of life-forms took place in any way close to the conventional understanding (and it is not certain that it did) — single-celled organisms through to humans — it could only have been guided by supernatural intelligences, not by a blind, unguided process of natural selection. (It is interesting to note that, as frequently mentioned in evolutionary literature, Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. However, the writer either doesn’t know, or omits to mention, that Wallace went on to believe in Intelligent Design and God as the underlying evolutionary principle, as is clear from the title of his 1914 book The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.)

    Ted Wade has raised the evolution question in our correspondence. He says: “Evolution by something like natural selection is supported by the fossil record, embryology, genetics and genomics, geology, radiochemistry, population biology, island ecology, planetary science. The list goes on and on. Nothing about our knowledge of the living world makes sense without an origin in an evolutionary process”. I think this statement was intended to persuade me of the correctness of his argument, in which case it wasn’t necessary because I couldn’t agree more. Only biblical Creationists try to deny an evolutionary process. This statement, however, has made the debate very vague, when it needs to be very precise. ‘Evolution’ means merely change over time. An evolutionary process of some kind is not the same as saying evolution by natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations, which is what the neo–Darwinian synthesis claimed. And what does “something like” natural selection mean? I agree that an alternative to natural selection is behind the evolutionary process. But is that something very close, another similar ‘natural’ explanation? (I’m not sure what that would be.) Or is it something outside what evolutionary biologists normally allow, something supernatural?

    As I said above, I’ll address the question of whether there are other levels of reality beyond the space-time universe in later articles. I’ll discuss this from the point of view of quantum physics in part 2, and I’ll discuss Jungian synchronicity as potential evidence in part 3. Then in part 4, I’ll discuss whether discarnate entities exist.

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    In these earlier articles I’ve discussed at greater length some of the issues raised here:

    I discussed in detail the problems associated with the Big Bang theory in a talk I gave in June 2019. There are two versions on Medium.com; links can be found, click here. The relevant material begins about halfway through. I extracted the Big Bang material, published it in separate articles, and then added new material in this series:

Part 1. What the ‘Experts’ Say

Part 2. Was There a Big Bang? — Probably Not

Part 3. a follow-up to parts 1 and 2

Part 4. An Alternative Spiritual Explanation

Part 5. A further article, restating some of the above, in the light of four articles in New Scientist magazine, click here.

Part 6. Further material in the light of a response I received to part 5, click here.

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    A more accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness, I believe, is provided by the Transmission Model of William James. Click here.

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    I discussed Alfred Russel Wallace, and how his views on evolution have been misrepresented. Click here.

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    The physicist Paul Davies has serious reservations about neo-Darwinism, as outlined in his book The Cosmic Blueprint, and leans in the direction of what I would call a supernatural explanation, although he would see it as a need to expand the boundaries of science. I’ve discussed his ideas, click here. 

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Footnotes:

1. Vintage, 2002

2. “Science is Not Your Enemy”, The New Republic, August 19th 2013, p33

3. There is an earlier edition of this under the name Mark Booth. My copy is an updated edition under the name Jonathan Black, Quercus, 2010. It is described as an ‘International Bestseller’. Publishers often say that, of course. If true, however, it would suggest that such ideas are being spread more widely.

4. If the Big Bang theory is in any sense true, it could only be true if understood from within this alternative understanding. Strangely, the conventional version of the theory is a kind of weird caricature of this, the infinitely small singularity being the equivalent of the ultimate nothingness (void) of the spiritual traditions — Brahman in Hinduism, the Tao in Taoism, the Ayin of the Kabbalah etc. — which expands outwards, and densifies, until it eventually becomes the material universe, the “Ten thousand things” as the Tao Te Ching puts it.