THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF GOD IS ALREADY HERE, SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT? PART 6

The materialist view has dominated science for the past four hundred years, and it has given us technology and the answers to a great many problems until finally it seems to have run out of gas. Much of its present-day inquiries sound more like the medieval query—“How many angels can dance on a pin?” This old tired science cannot give us answers to today’s big problems: how do we deal with terrorism? What do we do about energy when we run out of fossil fuels? Now that global warming is fact, what can we do about it? How do we guarantee that nuclear warfare does not break out among nations? How do we teach values to our children when our science professes to be value free and our governments profess secularism? How do we transform capitalistic economics so that the gap between the rich and the poor becomes narrower instead of wider? How do we defend democracy against the power of money and the media? How do we curb the skyrocketing cost of health and healing in the developed countries?

Like the question of consciousness, these are hard, nay impossible, questions for the materialist worldview. But materialists won’t admit it. The answers are right around the corner; they try to assure us, an assertion that the philosopher Karl Popper called promissory materialism.

And of course, there are those age-old human questions, subjective questions, which materialist science leaves out from its agenda: What is the meaning of my life? How can I love? How do I become happy? What is the future of my evolution? These are also impossible questions for the materialist. But the new science-within-consciousness has already made a good beginning in finding answers for these questions.

A key to developing a science that can embrace the solution space for the questions above is to realize that what we experience as matter is but one important component of the many quantum possibilities of consciousness, the component that we experience through our senses. The psychologist Carl Jung intuited that there are three more components of conscious possibilities that we experience as feeling, meaning, and intuition respectively. Recent work of Rupert Sheldrake, of Roger Penrose, and of mine, has established that feeling, meaning, and intuition cannot be reduced to material movement; they really do belong to independent compartments of consciousness. These compartments are variously recognized as the vital energy body, the mental body, and the supra mental theme (archetype in Plato's language) body of consciousness. All these compartments are non-locally connected through consciousness.

The reason that the material compartment dominates our science is that the material makes quasi-permanent representations of the vital and the mental (and eventually will develop the capacity of even making representations of the supra mental—this is the direction of our future evolution). Once the representations (software) are made in the hardware, we forget the representation maker (consciousness) and the process (of using the blueprints--mind and the vital body). Read my book The Visionary Window, and The Quantum Doctor for further elaboration of these concepts.

Basically, what are emerging are two kinds of scientific evidence for God. One kind consists of recognizing the many mansions in which God's downward causation takes abode beyond the material mansion (as for example, feeling, thinking, and intuiting). Phenomena in these nonmaterial domains are all impossible problems for the materialist upward causation model.

The second kind of evidence I call the quantum signatures of the divine. Phenomena resulting from downward causation in our model come with specific quantum signatures that upward causation cannot generate. When caused by the latter, macroscopic phenomena are continuous, local, and hierarchically linear and one-way (such as in a patriarchy). The quantum signatures of downward causation are discontinuity (as in the creative aha experience), nonlocality (as in mental telepathy), and circular hierarchy, also called tangled hierarchy (as in love). Space does not permit me to go into details that can be found in my books mentioned above.