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…
