I also took a step I had not considered in a decade. Christian Scientists, I have noticed, are strangely adept at finding lost things, possibly because they focus on God as “infinite Mind,” the all-knowing and all-seeing. I called a Christian Science “practitioner” to pray for me.
“Hello, darling,” she greeted me, with a warmth that almost reduced me to a puddle of tears. “How can I help?”
I explained the situation and then heard the familiar, steely resolve of a Christian Scientist in action. There followed a brief conversation, in which she made a series of declarative statements. Among them: “Nothing that belongs to you can be separated from you. Feel your oneness with the Source of intelligence.” And: “You think you have covered a lot of ground in searching for this? God has already covered all the ground there is. Nothing passes His notice.” And: “It’s like the law of mathematics. It is always operating, and everyone is responding to this law. It’s like gravity. You don’t have to understand it but you obey it. Everyone is responding to this law of order, including the mailmen, the mail processors, the person on the street—everyone is under God’s law of order.”
You get the idea. At base, of course, this is not so far from the idea of non-local mind suggested by quantum physics—namely, that everything is connected in a fabric of intelligence, and we have access to this larger “mind” that is not limited by time or space.
The days stretched on and my disks made no appearance. Every moment that passed shaved down the chances of finding the minidisks before they were sent to a warehouse in Atlanta (the size of two football fields), or, more likely, thrown out as trash. But I stubbornly clung to this image of an intelligence that keeps an eye on everything; I had hit the “search” function and was now waiting for the results.
Nearly three weeks after the minidisks disappeared into a black hole at the U.S. Postal Service, I received a call from Dennis Panich, the manager of one of the distribution centers in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve got good news,” he said. “One of my guys found your tapes.”
I was struck dumb.
“Where were they?” I finally asked.
“They were in the bottom of a large orange container, along with a few other things.” He laughed. “You know, I wrote a book myself, and I know how much work goes into it. So every day I showed my folks the photo of the minidisks and told them we were going to find those tapes. And we did.”
When I visited the Institute of Noetic Sciences about a month later, I related my story to Dean Radin. Radin does not believe in a traditional God, but he does believe we can access information by tapping into a larger, non-local mind. I asked him to explain the happy outcome from his perspective. I waited for the low, appreciative whistle of amazement that would make such a lovely scene in my book. No whistle came.
“Your story is mind-boggling in one way,” Radin observed,“but I’m a little blasé about it now because I’ve seen it happen so many times.”
I was both miffed and intrigued. How did the recovery work, according to his theory of entanglement? Remember, entanglement suggests that reality is like a fabric in which everything is woven together. Or, to continue with the Jell-O analogy: if you touch one side, the other side jiggles.
“Things appear to be separate,” Radin said, “but with the right way of focusing your attention, they’re not so separate. My suspicion is that you sort of imagined in your mind’s eye that the universe is connected, and there was one piece of the universe—where the tapes were—that you really needed. And you created a network of attention, a lot of people’s attention dedicated to finding this particular thing. There was an army of people out there who wanted to please you, they wanted to find those tapes, and so it’s almost as if a momentary network was created that had a little bit higher valence to it, it shined a little bit brighter for you and all the other people, and this group attention became focused on finding the thing which is there.”
Radin paused.“Everything is there,” he said.“Nothing can be lost in a holistic medium.”
I nodded, thinking silently that this “holistic medium” sounded an awful lot like “God.”
My experience with the minidisks proves nothing, of course. To those who believe in miracles, God intervened to return my precious items. To those who think of the universe as a fabric of reality in which all is connected by a vast intelligence, I had tapped into information that was waiting for me all along. And to many others, I had caught a lucky break, nothing more. But let’s be clear: Which way you view the universe and “God” is a matter of choice, not hard evidence. Hard science does not mean petrified science. And in this moment, science may be in the middle of a paradigm shift.
CHAPTER 12
Paradigm Shifts
THE MORNING OF JUNE 15, 2005, arrived way too early. For two weeks, my friends and I had been thinking hard all day and bantering long into the wee hours in pubs around Cambridge University—a gru eling regimen for a forty-something crowd. But nothing could delay us from the morning’s event, and so we marched from our hotel, past the famed Mathematical Bridge, to the Divinity School. Once inside the sleek building, we sat down at a long table of expensive blond wood and waited eagerly.We were anticipating the Fight of the Century.
It was a pointy-headed fight, to be sure, but we were a pointy-headed crowd: ten seasoned journalists1 invited by the Templeton Foundation and Cambridge University to observe as celebrities in the world of science unspooled their ideas about biology, string theory, and multiverses. What tagged these presentations as unusual was the question underlying them: Could God retain a place in the intelligent man’s world? Or, in this scientific age: Had God been reduced to a superstitious belief lacking any rational basis?
After eight days of lectures—and our polite but lethal grilling of the scientists—it seemed to me that God was losing.While many of the scientists claimed some sort of faith, generally Christian, they kept their spiritual beliefs in a sealed container where they would not contaminate the “real” work of understanding human consciousness and the universe we live in. I was witnessing a blitzkrieg of scientific materialism overrunning the quaint but untestable claims of God.
This irked me, especially when I realized that God could not win under the rules of twenty-first-century science. This was not Ali versus Frazier. This was the World Wrestling Federation. The decks were stacked, the outcome certain, the smack-down inevitable. The rules of this game—the paradigm of modern science—revolve around certain core beliefs. One of them dictates that scientists can study only what they can measure: the physical world and observable behavior. Try to investigate something that cannot be precisely measured—such as a spiritual experience that transforms a person’s life—well, that’s cause for immediate disqualification.
Another rule is the mind-brain paradigm: everything we are, see, feel, do, or think is a physical state, the electrical and chemical activity in three pounds of tissue called the brain. Mind, consciousness—forget about the soul—must be reduced to matter. It is a closed loop, excluding any notion of God or a spiritual realm.
But on that rainy morning in Cambridge I witnessed something extraordinary, akin to Dorothy spotting the little bald man pulling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. For only a moment, the curtain pulled back and we saw the fight for what it was: two belief systems duking it out.
John Barrow, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, was speed-walking us through the hypothesis of a “fine-tuned” universe that is exquisitely and astonishingly calibrated to allow for life. He explained the concept of “multiverses,” which posits that we live in one of 10,500 universes. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I’m quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe.”
He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkins’s foot. Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and possibly the world’s most famous atheist, certainly one of the most militant. Two days earlier, Dawkins had delivered a talk that he believed
would prove the impossibility of God, and which would later be published as a book called The God Delusion.2 He had remained in Cambridge to hear the lectures of other researchers, particularly the world-class John Barrow. When Barrow, who turned out to be an Anglican, mentioned his belief in God, Dawkins began roiling with frustration like a teakettle about to blow.
“Why on earth do you believe in God?” Dawkins blurted.
All heads turned to Barrow. “If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world.”
“Yes, but why do you want to look for divine action?” Dawkins demanded.
“For the same reason that someone might not want to,” Barrow responded with a little smile, as all of us erupted in laughter—except for Dawkins.
So there you have it. The paradigm is not a law, it is a choice: a choice to look for—or exclude—the action of a divine intelligence. The paradigm to exclude a divine intelligence, or “Other,” or “God,” to reduce all things to matter, has reigned triumphant for some four hundred years, since the dawn of the Age of Reason. Today, a small yet growing number of scientists are trying to chip away at the paradigm, suspecting that its feet are made of clay.
Some of them have patiently guided me through my own quest to understand the nature of God and my instinct that something does indeed exist beyond the reach of our physical senses. I have come to think of them fondly as “my” scientists: they are brave and passionate in their conviction that the materialist assumptions of modern science are not as sturdy as they look.
These scientists repeatedly invoked Thomas Kuhn’s name. Kuhn, a historian of science at MIT, changed the world with his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.3 Aside from popularizing the phrase “paradigm shift,” he presented a new model for scientific progress. He argued that science proceeds not by steady accumulation of knowledge but (as one writer put it) by “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.”4 Those revolutions are “tradition-shattering complements to the tradition bound activity of normal science.”5
Kuhn argued that scientists are not the skeptical, freethinking, and objective investigators they fancy themselves. Rather, they tend to assimilate what they have been taught and work on solving problems within an accepted framework. Normal science, Kuhn observed,“often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”6 If some iconoclastic scientists produce results that challenge the prevailing consensus, the research is often dismissed as simply wrong—not as legitimate findings that point to a different sort of paradigm. Eventually, though, the pressure builds to the breaking point and, overnight, the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by a new one.
For example, Ptolemy’s theory that the sun revolves around the earth was overthrown by Copernicus’s evidence that the planets orbit the sun.When Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation could not explain the motion of light, his paradigm gave way to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Darwin’s theory of natural selection threw out the paradigm of man made in God’s image with one scoop of dust. Generally, for this shift to happen, the old scientists have to die off before a revolutionary who has no stake in the system—say, a twenty-six-year-old patent examiner named Albert Einstein—comes along and throws all the cards up in the air. He sweeps away the old paradigm, ushering in a new one. A revolution occurs.
Of course, most mainstream scientists believe we are nowhere close to a Kuhnian-style revolution when it comes to spirituality. They point out that a true revolution requires more than merely trotting out unexplained phenomena and arguing that current explanations should be scrapped. A paradigm shift requires that the new idea make predictions and explain the world in a better way. You can point out that your mother prayed for you and subsequently your fever abated. But before we discard the aspirin, we need a hypothesis about how prayer works and a prediction of what it will cure. For example: reciting the Twenty-third Psalm cures fevers, while the Sermon on the Mount suppresses coughing. Skeptics say that today’s “revolutionaries” do not have a theory of “God,” much less hard evidence to back it up.
Researchers like neurologist Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal believe that they are developing such a theory, and that mainstream scientists remain stuck in the “normal science” mode of ignoring the evidence or dismissing it.
“Thomas Kuhn talked of paradigm revolution, and I think we’re in the middle of one right now,” Beauregard offered.“There are too many data coming from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, now spiritual neuroscience, quantum physics, and various lines of evidence, all pointing to major failures in the old materialist paradigm. So for me, it’s only a matter of time before there will be a major paradigm shift.”
He noted that whenever he presents scientific data suggesting we are not biological robots, totally determined by our genes and our neurons—that perhaps we have a spiritual side—the scientists fill the room and clamor to know more. He believes the challenge to the mind-brain problem is gaining followers as more scientists conduct studies on the sly or, more recently, with funding from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health. More important, Beauregard senses a generational shift, the kind that presages the collapse of an old paradigm. The young scientists are restless.
“Many young scientists come to me—not openly, but covertly—and they tell me they greatly admire the kind of work I’m doing,” he said. “They don’t dare go out publicly yet. But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before we see a true revolution in science because of that. And there will be a big clash, because science has been controlled for centuries by materialists, by atheists.”
Clearly, no one knows at this moment whether Mario Beauregard and the other guerrilla scientists are correct. But here’s a provocative idea: We will know. New technology that allows us to peer into the brain and record the path of subatomic particles points toward that end. The paradigm will fall or it won’t, the spiritual will be acknowledged or marginalized once and for all.
I am reminded of scientist Dean Radin’s comment that 96 percent of the universe is “dark matter” or “dark energy”—that is, cosmologists haven’t a clue as to what it is. That means that all our scientific theories are built on 4 percent of the observable universe.
“Science is a new enterprise,” Radin said.“We are monkeys just out of the trees. And for us to be so arrogant as to imagine we’re close to understanding the universe is just insane.”
How much more arrogant to proclaim we know all about “God.” But as the science proceeds, many scientists suspect that the days are numbered for a purely materialist paradigm. They believe that the evidence challenging the matter-only model is building, bolstered by research on meditation, the mechanisms for prayer, and more radical studies on the neurology of near-death experiences. And as the “anomalies” accumulate, these scientists predict the pressure on the dam will grow, and one day the wall of materialism will come crumbling down.
This is the dilemma that Saint Paul voiced in one of his (rare) flashes of intellectual humility.
“Now we see through a glass, darkly,” Paul told the Corinthians, “but then face to face: Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
A Personal Paradigm Shift
If I harbor only suspicions about paradigm shifts in science, I am more certain of my own. In the course of looking under the hood of spiritual experience, guided by some smart and very generous scientists, I experienced a series of personal epiphanies about, first, the existence and nature of “God,” and second, my own religious beliefs. Let me take these in order.
The question that launched me on this journey could not be more basic: Does God exist? Or, put another way: Is there more than this material reality? This question is at once too ambitious and too modest. Too ambitious because science can never prove that a supernatural being exists; if there is a
God, He or She or It operates outside of nature and beyond the reach of scientific measuring instruments. The question is also too modest: I am only reaffirming something that I have always felt to be true. It is difficult to be a Christian, after all, if you do not believe in God or a meaningful universe or an eternal purpose to life. Still, at the outset I worried that I would find a material explanation for every spiritual phenomenon and that my research would drain life of its magic and mystery.
What I have concluded is this:While science cannot prove the existence of God, neither can it disprove it. In fact, science is entirely consistent with a Being who organized the universe and created life. That may seem an unremarkable conclusion, until you consider that materialists have controlled the levers of science—and with it, a claim on verifiable truth—for centuries.
Materialists can say that this astonishing thing called life (including conscious human beings who are curious about their origins) emerged from a series of random acts, starting from the Big Bang and onward. They can posit that there are 10,500 other universes with no life in them, and we just happened to hit the jackpot by landing in the one universe friendly to life. But isn’t it just as plausible—indeed, simpler and more elegant—to postulate that a cosmic Mathematician created the universe to evolve and sustain life?
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