Two stories from a recent issue of the excellent magazine, Resurgence, illuminate the shifting sands of Science.

Remaking the World

Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has recently upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world, giving us new scientific stories with which to reimagine our future.

The American writer Joan Didion once observed that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Of all our stories, it is the scientific ones that most define us. Those stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this we shape all our societal structures: our relationships with each other and our environment, our methods of doing business and educating our young, of organising ourselves into towns and cities, of defining the borders of our countries and our planet.

Although we perceive science as an ultimate truth, it is ultimately just a story, told in installments. We learn about our world in piecemeal fashion, a process of constant correction and revision. New chapters refine – and often supplant – the chapters that have come before.

Our current scientific story is more than 300 years old, a construction largely based on the discoveries of Isaac Newton, of a universe in which all matter is thought to move within three-dimensional space and time according to certain fixed laws. The Newtonian vision describes a reliable place inhabited by well-behaved and easily identifiable matter.

The worldview arising from these discoveries is also bolstered by the philosophical implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its suggestion that survival is available only to the ruggedly genetic individual.

These, in their essence, are stories that idealise separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world.

IT IS NOW clear that the story we’ve been told is about to be replaced by a drastically revised version. Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has recently upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world.

To continue reading this story, click here.

God is not Dead

The evolution of consciousness is taking us towards a greater capacity for processing the meaning of our lives and the world around us.

A paradigm shift in science is taking place. This shift is taking us from a divisive, God-denying, matter-based science to one that integrates science and God or spirituality. This new scientific paradigm rests on solid theory-based quantum physics and solid evidence-based empirical data, not on fanciful ideas. And like all creative endeavours, the paradigm shift has come with a surprise: that science itself has to operate within a spiritual metaphysics.

In the 1980s there was strong emphasis on the ‘holistic paradigm’ which incorporated ‘pantheism’ or Nature-based spirituality. Holistic thinkers dominated such avant-garde thinking: Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Eric Wantsch, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, John Lilly, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Pribram, David Bohm, Ervin László, and Roger Sperry. The list is very distinguished and very long. According to holism, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is greater because the emergence of novel phenomena cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Life, mind, consciousness, spirituality – all were explained as the holistic emergent phenomena of matter. Although holism was an integrative view, most holistic thinkers and writers still believed that everything was made of matter. Holism was not the only integrative track. Depth psychologists, starting with Freud and Jung, were openly positing the concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ that presupposed an irreducible consciousness.

Many holistic thinkers such as Capra depended on systems theory for their analysis; however, the scope of this kind of analysis is limited, as only generalities can be discussed. Others, Pribram, Bohm and Edgar Mitchell among them, expounded the idea of ‘hologram’, both literally and metaphorically. But the hologram is an object, whereas consciousness has both subject and object aspects. So how does subject-object awareness come about? This ‘hard question’ cannot be addressed from a materialist point of view.

Spirituality is more than pantheism, and an integrative theoretical foundation to provide a bridge between holistic thinking within science and psychological thinking within consciousness was lacking. Such a foundation came about only when quantum physics was properly interpreted in a paradox-free way.

To continue reading this story, click here.

Perhaps more than any other new paradigm writer, Michael Dowd has achieved a magnificent and well reasoned synthesis of science and religion. Widely diverse audiences that are hungry for his message include everyone from fundamentalists to athiests, from campus freethinkers to university departments of religion, from high school classrooms and homeschooling to local talk radio and NPR.

TGFE presents the history of the universe in which our generation has a cricial role to play. Its revolutionary perspective provides a new lens with which to view our past, present and future. By applying the inspirational language of religion to science and the grounded language of science to religion, a new heaven and earth emerges.

On a personal level, the book accomplishes the much needed synthesis of head and heart. From this reinvented place, our personal struggles, breakdowns, pain, our closed relationships, our choices about how we spend our time, energy and money and the well being of our community, country and world all become rooted in an evolutionary context. Evolutionary wisdom reveals itself in our most intimate relationships through respectful communications, touch and tenderness, playfulness and humor, meaningful songs and rituals and service. Continue Reading »