Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Can Science and Religion be Integrated?

Can science and religion be integrated? What comes to mind immediately is that religions themselves cannot agree with one another whereas science is basically monolithic. How can there even be trade between the two, let alone integration?

First, it is only a perception that religions are pluralistic and science is not. Science is monolithic only so far as science of matter–physics and chemistry–is concerned. Psychology, the science of the psyche, has three different paradigms–behavioral-cognitive consisting of hard science orientation, depth psychology consisting of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology and their derivatives with psychotherapy orientation, and humanistic-transpersonal-yoga psychology with positive mental health orientation. Both the later paradigms of psychology acknowledge downward causation and subtle bodies in some form or other. Medicine has the conventional allopathic medicine and also alternative medicine practices that complement it. A prominent part of alternative medicine is Eastern medicine that emphasizes subtle energies called variously as prana, chi, and ki. And biology is in transition right now. The materialist biology is highly developed but with some unsolved (maybe unsolvable) problems. Alternative biology is biology that sees life as the handiwork of a purposive designer with the power of downward causation; but at present it is so poorly developed that hardly anyone can call it a genuine alternative biology. Continue reading…

The Signatures of the Divine

Jesus lamented, The kingdom of God is everywhere, but people don’t see it. Well, the evidence is subtle; it is easy for ordinary people to miss it. But scientists are special people; they are experts in deciphering subtleties of evidence. Why have they been missing the signatures of the divine? The Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman expressed this myopia of the scientists of recent times when he offered this admonishment against unbridled imagination. Said he, “Scientific imagination is imagination within a straightjacket.” The straightjacket Feynman and others of the materialist ilk wear is the straightjacket of the belief system called scientific materialism. And the doctrine that binds the most is the exclusive reductionist doctrine of upward causation–everything is the movement of elementary particles and their interactions.

This entire paper is an exercise in how to take the straightjacket of materialism off our back. I argue that quantum physics is showing us the way by giving us back downward causation and its agent—Quantum consciousness (popularly called God) acting through the observer. In Newtonian physics, objects are determined things. But in quantum physics, objects are possibilities for consciousness to choose from. When an observer looks, the observer’s consciousness chooses among the quantum possibilities to collapse an actuality of experience. Quantum collapse is downward causation. Continue reading…

Kennedy Gave Us the Moon, Can you take us farther, Mr. President?

Dear President Obama, Just a few months ago you ran on a platform of change; real change you said, change in which we can believe. Well, how many changes have you made which can be considered real? Something so real that it can be believed in ? Something so real that it might inspire us to make a few changes ourselves?

Oh, yes, Mr. President, everybody in a position of leadership knows that we Americans need to change. Without making changes in our cynical, wasteful and extravagant lifestyle, the problems we face today in America and the world cannot be solved. But you can help by showing us your resolve to make changes.

We have become cynical, Mr. President. Today, we have hardly any ideas, philosophy, or principles to believe in; no convictions to guide our lives and enable us to make real changes. How did it get this way? There have always been materialist among us with their hedonism and epicurean philosophy of eat, drink, and be merry, but their influence was limited. Then starting in the nineteen fifties, there came the scientific materialists, and with the discovery of the DNA’s double helix structure scientists became emboldened to challenge faith in unprecedented ways. First came the assertion that we can understand life itself starting from molecules. We will synthesize life in the laboratory, they said, and show that no vital force is necessary, and certainly no God to make little green apples.

Then came high energy physics and their extravagnt claim of, “Show us the money for high energy machines, and we will show you the elementary particles that are the building blocks of all things. And knowing that, we will investigate biology and psychology from first principles. Nothing will be out of reach of our mathematical savvy.” Continue reading…