"For a man to conquer himself is the first and most noblest of all victories."
-Plato
What is reality? Good question. Perhaps the most important question there is. We endorse the reality that our eyes give us. Most people think reality is what our senses project to us. And, of course, science has gone along with that view for 400 years: If it is not perceivable by our five senses (or their extensions), it's not real. If I asked you to prove to me that the computer monitor you are looking at exists, more than likely, your response would be " It exists because I'm sitting here looking at it." Again, most people define reality as what is observable.
But even this "reality" appears one way when we look at it with our eyes, and another if we look more deeply into it with a microscope or an atom smasher. Then it becomes totally different, unrecognizable. Have you ever seen a galaxy? When you look at it, it looks like a swirl of light, but obviously you know that the galaxy really doesn't look like that, its billions upon billions of stars close together tightly packed. The swirls are simply composed of dots which are so bright that they give off the fleeting suggestion that the galaxy is actually a swirl. In actuality, we know that the galaxy is actually mostly made of space, with the stars here and there being the exception.
Consider this now, when you look at your own arm for instance, you obviously think it's solid, correct? But what else do you know about your arm? We know that the arm is actually made up of billions upon billions of atoms. We also know that between the protons, electrons, and neutrons that there is mostly space, and we know that there is a great amount of space between atoms. In reality, the arm isn't so solid, is it? Again, tell me how you know your computer monitor exist, and really, what are you looking at? This shall be touched on later.
And what about our thoughts? Are they part of "reality"? Take a look around right now. There are windows and chairs and lights and the ominous computer monitor. You probably think they are real. All of them preceded by an "idea" of windows and chairs. Someone imagined those windows and chairs and created them. So if the latter is real, is the idea real as well? And what about emotions, are they, real?
Having not come up with the answer to "what is reality?" humanity seemingly turned to the lab and tackled a simpler aspect. We abandoned Philosophy and Metaphysics and focused on Science and the Physical world, the world around us, and sought to learn what it was made up of instead of what reality was.
It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first had the idea of an atom, "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." And that was a great place to start. So out came the electron microscopes and atom smashers and cloud chambers, and we big people peered into the world of the little things.
Now when you went to school, you probably were shown a model of an atom, with its solid nucleus and orbiting electrons, and you were probably told "Atoms are the building blocks of nature." Unfortunately, due to quantum mechanics, it just isn't so.
It turned out that those solid little atoms, in their neat little orbits, were really just energy packets. Then it was discovered they're not really energy packets either, but momentary condensations of a field of energy. Of course, every atom consists almost entirely of empty space, so much so that it seems a miracle that we don't hit the floor every time we try to sit down on a chair. And since the floor is also mostly empty, where would we find something "solid" enough to hold us? The kicker here is that our bodies are made up of atoms too!
And now currently, quantum physics tells us that the so called "empty space" within and between atoms is not empty at all. In fact, it's so lively with energy that one cubic centimeter, contains more energy than all the solid matter in the entire known universe... So what did you say Reality was?
Long before the early Greek philosophers the sages of India knew that there was something important going on beyond the realm of the senses. Hindu teachers thought that the world of appearances, the world we see with our senses, is maya, or illusion, and that something underlies this material realm, something that is more powerful and more fundamental, more "real" even though it's completely intangible. Christianity speaks of heaven being more real than our current existence. He spoke of this life as fleeting, as mist dissipating from our mouths. The higher reality of heaven seems more fundamental that the material universe is according to most religious accounts.
Interestingly enough, this is precisely what quantum physics is revealing. It suggests that at the core of the physical world there is a completely non-physical realm. There is a debate split up into three separate but seemingly equal camps about what this realm is. Some say its simply information, others probability waves and the third camp say its actually the same makeup of consciousness. And just as we commonly say that atoms are what things are "really" made of, if this view is correct, we would have to say that this underlying view field of intelligence is, deep down, what the universe "really" is.
So then again the question stands, What is Reality? In our day to day lives, in our moment by moment decision about reality, is it simply democratic? Or to put it another way, at what point in agreement from those around us does something become real? If there are ten people in a room, and eight see a chair and two see a Martian, who is delusional? If twelve people see a lake as a body of water, and one person sees it as solid enough to walk on, who is delusional? So the kicker is this, does consciousness create reality? Is that why no one has ever come up with a good answer, because reality IS the answer?
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Part 1- The Great Divorce
"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge, it marks the first step in progress toward victory."
-Alfred North Whitehead
I have learned much in College, but perhaps the most important thing I have ever learned while attending my school is that there is nothing new underneath the sun. While true Karl Marx was the father of Communism, would you be surprised that ancient Sparta were in fact he first to practice this type of goverment? Would you be interested to know that the first historical record of evolution comes not from Darwin, but instead Aristotle? Did you know that the Ancient Greeks first discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun? We didn't just arrive where we are in the 21st Century by mere accident. It is therefore necessary to do a History of Ideas on our current place, to trace the ideas which we currently hold and to ascertain where they first came from. In order to understand the Abyss, we must understand where we came from.
Our earliest known civilization, ancient Sumer (which believe it or not can be traced to 3800 B.C.!) saw the pursuit of understanding the world around us and the world of the spiritual as the same thing. There was a god of astrology, a god of horticulture and one of irrigation. The temple priests were the scribes and technologists investigating these fields of knowledge. The Sumerians knew about the precession of the equinoxes, the mutating of plants to produce fruits and vegetables, and built an irrigation system that brought water into all of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq).
Forward about 3,000 years to ancient Greece. Philosophers were asking questions like, Why are we here? What should we do with our lives? They also developed the theory of the atom, studied celestial movements and sought universal principles of ethical behaviour. For thousands of years, the only study of the heavens was astrology. From astrology came astronomy. From astronomy came mathematics and physics. Alchemy, the search for transmutation (the ability to turn lead to gold) and immortality spawned the science of chemistry, which later specialized into particle physics and molecular biiology. Today the search for immortality is carried on by the DNA biochemists.
The world that people believed in before the Scientific Revolution was alive. In China, people saw the world as a dynamic interpaly of energetic forces that are constantly in flux. Nothing is fixed and static, everything is flowing, changing, or forever being born.
People in the West believed that the world at large expressed the will and intelligence of the Divine Creator. Its component parts were linked in a so called "Great Chain of Being," stretching from God through angels to man, ahimals, plants and minerals, all of which had their proper place in a living whole. Nothing stood alone, every part was related to every other part.
The Goal of science in all of these cultures was to gain knowledge in order to harmonize human life with the great forces of the natural world and the Transcendent that all cultures sensed behind the physical world. People wanted to know how nature worked, not in order to control it or dominate it, but to live in accord with its ebb and flow. As the physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra wrote, "From the time of the ancients the goals of science had been wisdom, understanding the natural order and living in harmony with it. Science was pursued for the glory of God." All this changed radically, starting in the middle of the 16th century.
By the 1500's, the Catholic Church held a position of supreme power. Kingmaker, landowner, and purveyor of the truth, the Church took it upon itself to be the one knower of everything. Its dogma was law, its power absolute. Not only lwere they legislating the way of the spiritual world which they had perverted for centuries, they were also tellilng the physical universe how to behave.
In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus had the audacity to challenge the Catholic Church. He published a book suggesting that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our universe. The Church did the most logical thing when confronted with the notion that it might be wrong, it forbade its followers from reading it. It placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books and, remarkably, did not remove it until 1835!
Luckily for Copernicus, he died of natural causes before the Catholics could get to him. Two scientists who supported his work did not get off so easily. Giordano Bruno confirmed Copernicus' calculations, and speculated that our sun and its planets might be just one of many such systems in the universe. For this terrible blasphemy, Bruno was brought before the Inquisition, condemned as a heretic, and burned to death. Galileo Galilei also supported Copernicus' model. He too was called before the Inquisition, but because he was a personal friend of the Pope, he was merely locked under house arrest until his death. It's good to have friends in high places.
Galileo is often called the "father of modern science" because he was the first to base his work on the two pillars that have characterized the scientific enterprise ever since, empirical observation and the use of mathematics. Because of Galileo's discoveries in the early 1600's, knowledge was no longer the property of the priesthood. its validity would not be based on ancient authorities or ecclesiastical hierarchies. Rather, knowledge was to be gained through open inquiry and observation, and validated by agreed-upon principles, which soon became known as the scientific method.
The 17th Century French Philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, widened the gap between science and religion. "There is nothing included in the concept of body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in that of mind that belongs to the body." And thus the axe fell. Reality was split down the middle. If religion and science were having a divorce, Descartes was the lawyer who made it palatable.
Although Descartes believed that both mind and matter were created by God, he viewed them as compeletely different and seperate. The human mind was a center of intelligence and reason, designed to analyze and understand. The proper domain of science was the material universe, or nature, which he saw as a machine that operated according to laws that could be formulated mathematically. To Descartes, a great lover of clocks and mechanical toys, all things in nature, not only inanimate objects like plants and mountains, shared this mechanical nature. All the operations of the body, too, could be explained in terms of the mechanical model. He wrote "I consider the human body as a machine." The seperation of mind from body that Descartes made into a fundamental rule of science has caused endless problems, as we will see.
Francis Bacon, a British Philosopher, was also very instrumental in establishing the scientific method, which we can diagram like this:
Hypothesis---->researach and experimentation---->draw general conclusions---->test those conclusions by further research
Of course, this method has resulted in tremendous advances for humanity, from the pure delight of greater understanding of nature to improvements in health, engineering, agriculture, etc., to the first baby steps of space exploration. But that's only half the story. Bacon viewed the scientific enterprise in terms that were "often outright vicious." nature had to be "hounded in her wanderings," "bound into service," and "made a slave." The job of the scientist was to "torture nature's secrets from her." Unfortunately this attitude that sought to extract knowledge in order to control and dominate nature has become a guiding principle of Western science. Bacon summed it up in a phrase we all learned in school, "Knowledge is Power."
The person we most often closely associate with the formulation of the scientific worldview is Sir Isaac Newton, and the mechanistic model of the world is often referred to as "Newtonian physics" or "the Newtonian model." These terms are justifiable, as Newton took giant steps beyond his predecessors, synthesized their ideas and methods, and advanced the greatly. The conclusions he came to, and the mathematical proofs he provided, were so powerful that for nearly 300 years scientists the world over were convinced that they described precisely how nature works.
Newton, like Descartes, saw the world as a machine, operating in three-dimensional space, with events (like the motions of the stars or the falling of apples) taking place in time. Matter was solid, with tiny particles at its core; these particles, as well as giant objects like planets, moved according to the laws of nature, such as the force of gravity, which could be described with such mathematical precision that if we knew the initial conditions of any object, such as the whereabouts of a planet and the speed and pattern of its orbit, we could predict its future with absolute certainty. Newton's linking together of two such disparate events, the falling of an apple and the motion of a planet, was utterly revolutionary. The linking was mediated by a "force", in this case, gravity.
The mechanistic approach was soon applied to all the sciences: astronomy, chemistry, biology, and so on. With few variations (such as a more sophisticated view of the atomic level of reality) it's the world we all were brought up to believe in.
Consider this: As revolutionary as Newton and his colleagues were in their work, when it came to religion they did not question the dominant worldview of their age. They were immersed in it. Although they were responsible for initiating a radical new paradigm that would challenge and overturn understandings that had endured for centuries, they lived their personal lives very much in the midst of the religion that they had come to understand as being the source of the ultimate truth. Like other people, they believed that God was the master architect and builder of the world. Newton wrote in his major scientific work, Principia Mathematica,
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent, and omniscient. He governs all things and knows all things that are or can be. Why there is one body in our system qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the system thought it convenient."
As if to prepare the ages to come against the materialistic philosophy that would dominate Western thought in the name of Newtonian mechanics, Sir Isaac wrote, "Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors."
It was only later generations of scientists, focused entirely on the world machine, who found they had no need for God. Swept free of the constraints of religious dogma, the scientists reacted with a vengeance, proclaiming everything unseen and unmeasurable to be fantasy and delusion. Many became as dogmatic as the Catholic Church authorities, declaring with self-righteous certainty that we are strictly little machines running around in a predictable machine universe governed by immutable laws.
The followers of Darwin provided the final stroke in the materialist triumph. Not only is there no God, and thus no creative intelligence guiding the unfolding of life, but we ourselves, now at the center of the world, are nothing but random mutations, carriers of DNA's relentless quest for more, in a meaningless universe.
But science and philosophy came into a crisis. Man, who was the greatest of all existence, who could compose symphonies, could paint masterpieces, could cure disease and pestilence, could feed the sick and the poor, could build engineering marvels which bended the mind in wonder, quickly became the ugliest creature in the Universe. On July 28th, 1914, mankind started a war which had never before been seen in scope nor magnitude. World War I would see 40 Million people die, senseless advances on trenches with men literally being mowed down by machine gun fire, men lined in trenches facing a maelstrom of artillery fire, and poison gas wreaking hell wherever it touched. At the pinnacle of mankind's achievements, evil permeated around every corner, with Philosophy nor science having anyway of explaining such elements.
As science dug even deeper into its dead universe, it stumbled upon, and unlocked a mystery. In the early years of the 20th century, immediately during and following and closely related to the madness of World War I, the stranglehold of materialism was being cracked open by scientists like Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger and other founders of quantum theory, who told the world: probe deeply enough into matter, and it disappears and dissolves into unfathomable energy. If we follow Galileo and describe it mathematically, it turns out it is not a material universe at all! The physical universe is essentially non-physical, and may arise from a field that is even more subtle than energy itself, a field that looks more like information, intelligence, or consciousness than like matter.
At this late date, the divorce between science and religion remains. Why? Not because reality is split, but because the adherents of their worldview are people. Remember why people don't ask questions? Because the answer they get may not be what they want it to be.
Well?
Does prayer promote healing? Are you able to affect physical reality with your mind? Can you perceive things outside of space-time? Can the existence of God be proven? Does the Higgs Particle Exist?
Wait what? What the heck is the Higgs Particle? Good question. Theoretical particle physics predicts the existence of the Higgs Particle, the particle that gives mass to other particles. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to build more powerful accelerators to find it. And yet I'm pretty sure most of the citizens of the planet Earth would rather know the first four questions.
Certainly answering those first four questions would have a massive impact on how we see ourselves and the world. Much more so than finding yet another particle. But the established world of science and philosophy does not want to look at something that is thought to be "outside of their domain." Funny, because that's where breakthroughs come from.
So who now hijacked the search the truth? First it was the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and now it is the new priesthood, the Scientists and Professors of this age.
Now that we have done a quick History of Ideas, we know where we stand, and from here, we can move forward into more interesting topics, next week of course!
-Alfred North Whitehead
I have learned much in College, but perhaps the most important thing I have ever learned while attending my school is that there is nothing new underneath the sun. While true Karl Marx was the father of Communism, would you be surprised that ancient Sparta were in fact he first to practice this type of goverment? Would you be interested to know that the first historical record of evolution comes not from Darwin, but instead Aristotle? Did you know that the Ancient Greeks first discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun? We didn't just arrive where we are in the 21st Century by mere accident. It is therefore necessary to do a History of Ideas on our current place, to trace the ideas which we currently hold and to ascertain where they first came from. In order to understand the Abyss, we must understand where we came from.
Our earliest known civilization, ancient Sumer (which believe it or not can be traced to 3800 B.C.!) saw the pursuit of understanding the world around us and the world of the spiritual as the same thing. There was a god of astrology, a god of horticulture and one of irrigation. The temple priests were the scribes and technologists investigating these fields of knowledge. The Sumerians knew about the precession of the equinoxes, the mutating of plants to produce fruits and vegetables, and built an irrigation system that brought water into all of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq).
Forward about 3,000 years to ancient Greece. Philosophers were asking questions like, Why are we here? What should we do with our lives? They also developed the theory of the atom, studied celestial movements and sought universal principles of ethical behaviour. For thousands of years, the only study of the heavens was astrology. From astrology came astronomy. From astronomy came mathematics and physics. Alchemy, the search for transmutation (the ability to turn lead to gold) and immortality spawned the science of chemistry, which later specialized into particle physics and molecular biiology. Today the search for immortality is carried on by the DNA biochemists.
The world that people believed in before the Scientific Revolution was alive. In China, people saw the world as a dynamic interpaly of energetic forces that are constantly in flux. Nothing is fixed and static, everything is flowing, changing, or forever being born.
People in the West believed that the world at large expressed the will and intelligence of the Divine Creator. Its component parts were linked in a so called "Great Chain of Being," stretching from God through angels to man, ahimals, plants and minerals, all of which had their proper place in a living whole. Nothing stood alone, every part was related to every other part.
The Goal of science in all of these cultures was to gain knowledge in order to harmonize human life with the great forces of the natural world and the Transcendent that all cultures sensed behind the physical world. People wanted to know how nature worked, not in order to control it or dominate it, but to live in accord with its ebb and flow. As the physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra wrote, "From the time of the ancients the goals of science had been wisdom, understanding the natural order and living in harmony with it. Science was pursued for the glory of God." All this changed radically, starting in the middle of the 16th century.
By the 1500's, the Catholic Church held a position of supreme power. Kingmaker, landowner, and purveyor of the truth, the Church took it upon itself to be the one knower of everything. Its dogma was law, its power absolute. Not only lwere they legislating the way of the spiritual world which they had perverted for centuries, they were also tellilng the physical universe how to behave.
In 1543, Nicolas Copernicus had the audacity to challenge the Catholic Church. He published a book suggesting that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our universe. The Church did the most logical thing when confronted with the notion that it might be wrong, it forbade its followers from reading it. It placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books and, remarkably, did not remove it until 1835!
Luckily for Copernicus, he died of natural causes before the Catholics could get to him. Two scientists who supported his work did not get off so easily. Giordano Bruno confirmed Copernicus' calculations, and speculated that our sun and its planets might be just one of many such systems in the universe. For this terrible blasphemy, Bruno was brought before the Inquisition, condemned as a heretic, and burned to death. Galileo Galilei also supported Copernicus' model. He too was called before the Inquisition, but because he was a personal friend of the Pope, he was merely locked under house arrest until his death. It's good to have friends in high places.
Galileo is often called the "father of modern science" because he was the first to base his work on the two pillars that have characterized the scientific enterprise ever since, empirical observation and the use of mathematics. Because of Galileo's discoveries in the early 1600's, knowledge was no longer the property of the priesthood. its validity would not be based on ancient authorities or ecclesiastical hierarchies. Rather, knowledge was to be gained through open inquiry and observation, and validated by agreed-upon principles, which soon became known as the scientific method.
The 17th Century French Philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, widened the gap between science and religion. "There is nothing included in the concept of body that belongs to the mind, and nothing in that of mind that belongs to the body." And thus the axe fell. Reality was split down the middle. If religion and science were having a divorce, Descartes was the lawyer who made it palatable.
Although Descartes believed that both mind and matter were created by God, he viewed them as compeletely different and seperate. The human mind was a center of intelligence and reason, designed to analyze and understand. The proper domain of science was the material universe, or nature, which he saw as a machine that operated according to laws that could be formulated mathematically. To Descartes, a great lover of clocks and mechanical toys, all things in nature, not only inanimate objects like plants and mountains, shared this mechanical nature. All the operations of the body, too, could be explained in terms of the mechanical model. He wrote "I consider the human body as a machine." The seperation of mind from body that Descartes made into a fundamental rule of science has caused endless problems, as we will see.
Francis Bacon, a British Philosopher, was also very instrumental in establishing the scientific method, which we can diagram like this:
Hypothesis---->researach and experimentation---->draw general conclusions---->test those conclusions by further research
Of course, this method has resulted in tremendous advances for humanity, from the pure delight of greater understanding of nature to improvements in health, engineering, agriculture, etc., to the first baby steps of space exploration. But that's only half the story. Bacon viewed the scientific enterprise in terms that were "often outright vicious." nature had to be "hounded in her wanderings," "bound into service," and "made a slave." The job of the scientist was to "torture nature's secrets from her." Unfortunately this attitude that sought to extract knowledge in order to control and dominate nature has become a guiding principle of Western science. Bacon summed it up in a phrase we all learned in school, "Knowledge is Power."
The person we most often closely associate with the formulation of the scientific worldview is Sir Isaac Newton, and the mechanistic model of the world is often referred to as "Newtonian physics" or "the Newtonian model." These terms are justifiable, as Newton took giant steps beyond his predecessors, synthesized their ideas and methods, and advanced the greatly. The conclusions he came to, and the mathematical proofs he provided, were so powerful that for nearly 300 years scientists the world over were convinced that they described precisely how nature works.
Newton, like Descartes, saw the world as a machine, operating in three-dimensional space, with events (like the motions of the stars or the falling of apples) taking place in time. Matter was solid, with tiny particles at its core; these particles, as well as giant objects like planets, moved according to the laws of nature, such as the force of gravity, which could be described with such mathematical precision that if we knew the initial conditions of any object, such as the whereabouts of a planet and the speed and pattern of its orbit, we could predict its future with absolute certainty. Newton's linking together of two such disparate events, the falling of an apple and the motion of a planet, was utterly revolutionary. The linking was mediated by a "force", in this case, gravity.
The mechanistic approach was soon applied to all the sciences: astronomy, chemistry, biology, and so on. With few variations (such as a more sophisticated view of the atomic level of reality) it's the world we all were brought up to believe in.
Consider this: As revolutionary as Newton and his colleagues were in their work, when it came to religion they did not question the dominant worldview of their age. They were immersed in it. Although they were responsible for initiating a radical new paradigm that would challenge and overturn understandings that had endured for centuries, they lived their personal lives very much in the midst of the religion that they had come to understand as being the source of the ultimate truth. Like other people, they believed that God was the master architect and builder of the world. Newton wrote in his major scientific work, Principia Mathematica,
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent, and omniscient. He governs all things and knows all things that are or can be. Why there is one body in our system qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the system thought it convenient."
As if to prepare the ages to come against the materialistic philosophy that would dominate Western thought in the name of Newtonian mechanics, Sir Isaac wrote, "Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors."
It was only later generations of scientists, focused entirely on the world machine, who found they had no need for God. Swept free of the constraints of religious dogma, the scientists reacted with a vengeance, proclaiming everything unseen and unmeasurable to be fantasy and delusion. Many became as dogmatic as the Catholic Church authorities, declaring with self-righteous certainty that we are strictly little machines running around in a predictable machine universe governed by immutable laws.
The followers of Darwin provided the final stroke in the materialist triumph. Not only is there no God, and thus no creative intelligence guiding the unfolding of life, but we ourselves, now at the center of the world, are nothing but random mutations, carriers of DNA's relentless quest for more, in a meaningless universe.
But science and philosophy came into a crisis. Man, who was the greatest of all existence, who could compose symphonies, could paint masterpieces, could cure disease and pestilence, could feed the sick and the poor, could build engineering marvels which bended the mind in wonder, quickly became the ugliest creature in the Universe. On July 28th, 1914, mankind started a war which had never before been seen in scope nor magnitude. World War I would see 40 Million people die, senseless advances on trenches with men literally being mowed down by machine gun fire, men lined in trenches facing a maelstrom of artillery fire, and poison gas wreaking hell wherever it touched. At the pinnacle of mankind's achievements, evil permeated around every corner, with Philosophy nor science having anyway of explaining such elements.
As science dug even deeper into its dead universe, it stumbled upon, and unlocked a mystery. In the early years of the 20th century, immediately during and following and closely related to the madness of World War I, the stranglehold of materialism was being cracked open by scientists like Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger and other founders of quantum theory, who told the world: probe deeply enough into matter, and it disappears and dissolves into unfathomable energy. If we follow Galileo and describe it mathematically, it turns out it is not a material universe at all! The physical universe is essentially non-physical, and may arise from a field that is even more subtle than energy itself, a field that looks more like information, intelligence, or consciousness than like matter.
At this late date, the divorce between science and religion remains. Why? Not because reality is split, but because the adherents of their worldview are people. Remember why people don't ask questions? Because the answer they get may not be what they want it to be.
Well?
Does prayer promote healing? Are you able to affect physical reality with your mind? Can you perceive things outside of space-time? Can the existence of God be proven? Does the Higgs Particle Exist?
Wait what? What the heck is the Higgs Particle? Good question. Theoretical particle physics predicts the existence of the Higgs Particle, the particle that gives mass to other particles. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to build more powerful accelerators to find it. And yet I'm pretty sure most of the citizens of the planet Earth would rather know the first four questions.
Certainly answering those first four questions would have a massive impact on how we see ourselves and the world. Much more so than finding yet another particle. But the established world of science and philosophy does not want to look at something that is thought to be "outside of their domain." Funny, because that's where breakthroughs come from.
So who now hijacked the search the truth? First it was the Catholic Church in the middle ages, and now it is the new priesthood, the Scientists and Professors of this age.
Now that we have done a quick History of Ideas, we know where we stand, and from here, we can move forward into more interesting topics, next week of course!
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