The language of science, the language of spirituality – Lent 2025: Day two

 I woke up at quarter to four this morning with the following words on my mind:

{{ Belief shapes reality }}

[For new readers, double curly brackets in my blog denote an unbidden thought, channelled words or insight that came in a dream.]

Today, I want to go further into the topic of the scientific vs. the spiritual worldview. The spiritual can be regimented and packaged into religion, whilst the scientific outlook also tends to be packaged. And once boxed up, a mind tends to be set in one worldview or the other. To religious fundamentalists, dogmatic adherence to a structured belief system precludes the possibility of any other way of thinking about things, set out literally in their holy book. And physicalist materialists, wedded to the scientific system, can be equally dogmatic in how they see reality – nothing more than the interaction of forces upon matter across space and time.

The language of science and the language of religion frame our mindsets. We can describe ourselves as 'rationalists' and decry any room for the paranormal or metaphysical in our universe. Everything can be defined within the Standard Model of particle physics, the four fundamental forces and Relativity. Or else we can explain the universe as the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God.

Two completely separate worldviews. The religious one goes back to the dawn of humanity. The scientific worldview has a far shorter heritage going back to the beginning of the Enlightenment, when alchemy gave way to a more systematic approach to studying the physical world. And yet the advances in technology and the benefits it has delivered to our quality of life since the 18th century have been so astonishing that many humans have lost all contact with the spiritual, as they pursue purely material goals. [Image by Google Gemini Advanced 2.0 Imagen 3.0]

It's easy to mock New Age spirituality (healing crystals $50-$400, Native American dreamcatchers $75), yet it was New Age mystics that started introducing scientific terms ('vibrations', 'frequency', 'harmonics', 'fractals') into the context of human spirituality. Books such as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) or Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) blended oriental spirituality with modern physics. By using the language of both religion and science, first tentative steps were taken to reconcile the two. 

The interface between science and spirituality is to be found at the mystery of consciousness. The word (which appears only once in The Dancing Wu Li Masters!) is now on the tip of the tongues of particle physicists and cosmologists, more and more of whom are convinced of the importance of the conscious observer in the measurement process. And philosophers are more comfortable in tackling the 'hard problem' once shunned in academia.

But as we get beyond consciousness and deeper into the spiritual questions ("is there a God?" "is there life after death?"), again we stumble into difficult territory. For example, take those scientists at the cutting edge of paranormal studies, who are determined to prove, scientifically, that precognition, telepathy or psychokinesis are real, but who deny the existence of a divine power. 

I am happy to use the language of science as a metaphor, one that resonates with people who have grown up in a materialist mindset. But intuitively I can't accept that a physicalist version of science can end up defining reality to my satisfaction. In the same way that few take the Biblical account of the creation of the world literally, but most are happy to accept it metaphorically, we should take the language of science metaphorically (how else can we see 'spin up, spin down', 'colours' of quarks, wave-particle duality, dark matter and dark energy?).

In a 1931 interview with the Observer newspaper, Max Planck, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, said: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." And my big question for today is: is that consciousness God? An aspect of God?

Can belief shape reality?

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Lent 2020: Day two
The Physical and the Metaphysical; the Natural and the Supernatural