Before I share my theistic Story of Creation, I wanted to share more thoughts I regard as essential.
My next post will focus on the main questions that confront each of us regarding “Ultimate Reality” — about Deity and the Divine and the soul and metaphysics — in light of the New Science. And how I’ve answered them for myself.
By matching up our scientific views with our metaphysical views, each of us can customize our own Creation Story in the 2020s and beyond. I hope I’m helping you do so.
In this post, I’ll share a few thoughts around the theme of What’s Taking So Long? Why do so few of the world’s several billion theists have an integrated Narrative of the Divine and the spiritual dimensions of reality that includes the natural dimensions of reality? This post will be my lament about this problem.
First, I’m amazed how slowly the New Science has moved. Tens of millions of people around the world have heard pieces of it. But far too few people have heard about the Zero Point Field or the 1994 breakthroughs in thinking regarding the brain and consciousness. So Scientism still reigns and fragmented worldviews remain almost universal.
Academia moves slowly, especially K-12. But there is slow and there is glacially slow. Ignoring the New Science completely is educational malpractice.
(True, our K-12 public schools must avoid metaphysics, but there’s no justification for leaving out the Zero Point Field. Or neuroscience. And our colleges have no excuses at all.)
Yes, it’s early. The new scientific picture has really only been available to us since 1994.
And yes, things are more and more specialized. Almost no one does synthesis across disciplines anymore.
Even so, despite these understandable factors favoring slowness, the pace is glacial.
One reason thoughtful, science-based discussion of consciousness has moved slowly seems clear enough, and let’s be frank about it: A lot of the people who were into thinking about consciousness in the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and the Consciousness Movement of the 1970s and the New Age Movement of 1980s were a bit eccentric. Many, many exceptions. Many exemplary people. But plenty of weirdness, and so the whole bunch were dismissed as nothing but hippies by folks who didn’t much like hippies.
Equally problematic, the science wasn’t really there until 1994. Before then, most “New Agers” who got into quantum physics went down some laughable but seriously troublesome rabbit holes.
No wonder an exasperated Werner Heisenberg had posted a sign on his office wall: “No Philosophy!”
And yet it was his fellow cofounder of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, who gave us the ultimate rabbit hole: the “Copenhagen Interpretation”.
It became fashionable among “New Agers” in the 1980s to think that particles exist only when we observe them. And to assume that the universe’s main underlying physical reality is both unstable and strange.
Since the 1990s, we’ve known that the weird anomalies of quantum physics are not reality itself but just side-effects that seem to occur as matter interacts with the Zero Point Field.
So the Copenhagen Interpretation has been overturned, but not before it had scrambled the marbles of a few million people.
Sensible people watched their New Age friends go down these rabbit holes and assumed there was no reason to take a look at the New Science.
During these same decades, tens of millions of Christians who cared about consciousness and science left Christianity for pure mysticism or for the occult or for Eastern religions.
The shift to the East is understandable. The Zero Point Field sounds just like the Tao. Eastern faiths are all about the development and growth of consciousness. And David Bohm’s dialogues with J. Krishnamurti are among the most fascinating conversations of all time.
But the result was that an unnecessary gulf opened up between people in Western faith traditions and science-based views that include consciousness and the Field.
The neglect of the New Science by my fellow Christians has been, to me, especially unfortunate.
Ultimately, though, we have to inquire as to the lack of curiosity about science and consciousness in the Western faith traditions.
There is the tendency of religion to look backward instead of forward. At times this seems to be an intractable problem. As if every great thought was thought thousands of years ago and more recent thoughts have no merit. Religion tends to be static rather than dynamic.
This is a problem in the even-more important area of human development, where Ken Wilber is right: religion should be focused on the full personal and social development of the human being across the lifespan. And it’s not.
Christianity the past few decades has been making some good progress in integrating the best of psychology into its view of the soul. But integrating the pursuit of the full development of the human being across the lifespan? Looks like Christianity may take another century or two.
My fellow theists, in my view, should also care about an integrated view of the Divine, the spiritual, and the natural levels of reality.
And this is dynamic. Our view of science is rich now, but it will be much richer a century from now. Our Creation Story should not only be customized by people according to their metaphysical views. It should be updated by each generation.
Here we are in 2023, and no Christian theologian or thinker that I’m aware of has done any intellectual work worthy of our faith tradition. This has astonished me for a third of a century now and it never ceases to amaze me.
Hundreds of millions of Christians around the world believe in Deity and the Divine and respect science. We understand that we live in a cosmos that’s been developing for 14 billion years, and we understand that trillions of bits of carbon-dated evidence from the past 1.2 billion years show us the trajectory of developing life on Earth. Whether we accept the Darwinian paradigm or not (and I do not), we take for granted the reality of evolution.
But no Christian thinker I know of has made an effort to synthesize our contemporary views of nature into our views of the Divine and the spiritual.
I’m completely baffled by this. Why does no major Christian thinker see a reason to update to get a clear view of all three levels of reality: the Divine, the spiritual, and the natural?
But here we are. A fragmented view of reality remains the widespread norm among my fellow Christians. A most unfortunate state of affairs.
Christian thinkers are not alone. The transpersonal and “Integral” philosopher Ken Wilber is arguably the most important living thinker in the world today, and one of the most important who’s ever lived.
And yet Wilber’s “all-inclusive” and “Integral” super-paradigm doesn’t include the New Science. Wilber studied quantum physics off and on for many years and finally concluded it has nothing to say about our spiritual development — the growth of our consciousness.
I suspect that this is because Wilber developed most of his paradigm before the 1994 breakthrough paradigm was offered by Penrose, Hameroff, Pribram, and other scientists. Wilber was probably frustrated by millions of his fellow transpersonal travelers in the 1980s falling down those “Copenhagen Interpretation” rabbit holes.
Now, Ken Wilber is a very challenging thinker — no living thinker has challenged me more — so when I disagree with Wilber I always have to figure out why I disagree with him. And I couldn’t disagree with him more on this.
My short answer to Wilber is this: We live our daily lives differently if we know that we live in an open, creative universe — and that underlying our visible universe is a dynamic moving wholeness. And if we know, deep in our bones, that this wholeness is primary.
So, Mister Wilber, it seems fitting to quote back to you the man you’ve dismissed as “a lightweight”, the transdisciplinary scientist Ervin Laszlo: “This is an evolving, instantly and enduringly interconnected, fundamentally integral universe, embedded in a dynamically and physically real cosmic medium. All things are intrinsically connected by subtle yet effective information connected by a fundamental energy field.”
And knowing this to be true, Mister Wilber, clearly affects the quality of our consciousness.
Oddly enough, the Creation Story that I most respect is the one written by Wilber’s protege, Corey deVos, who’s from my own generation, a fellow Xer. And I’ve pulled a few ideas from deVos.
More about that in the next post.
I am a big fan of Laszlo; I'm reading his newest book right now. Such incredible and practical insight. Wilber is definitely harder for me to get into, as you know. I recognize there is genius there but I also usually leave uninspired (maybe because I'm overwhelmed by the grandiosity of his concepts).
I've enjoyed this series. Thanks for publishing it.
Looking forward to the next post