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“God vs. Science” In response to the debate on the existence of God between evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and geneticist Francis Collins, as presented by David Van Biema, “God vs. Science,” Time, 13 November 2006, www.time.com
There is a voice missing from the debate between Dawkins the atheist and Collins the Christian believer in miracles and supernatural happenings. It is the voice of what Carl Jung called Eastern mind, a voice that conceives of “God” as something markedly different from the “God” of monotheism, the individual separate from “His” creation that Dawkins rejects and Collins defends. Although quantum physics is given passing mention in the debate between Dawkins and Collins, it is as though the past century's quantum discoveries have not yet begun to resonate at the level of the spiritual imagination in the West, as though Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) had never been published, nor Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979). Both of these books suggest that because quantum physics reveals the universe to be nondivisible, a pantheistic idea of God – the idea that there is nothing but God, that God and universe are synonymous – would be more consistent with reality. From this perspective, the universe is a single entity in which we all partake. We are “God” self-experiencing. Collins's insistence on the monotheistic notion that “God” exists “outside of nature” ignores this potentially paradigm-shifting revelation and leaves him mired in the world of superstition, believing in a “God” who occasionally works magic by “choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous.” For his part, Dawkins disregards the discovery by quantum physics that the entire existence of God/universe – past, present, and future – unfolds in a single instant, in what Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, in their book The Non-Local Universe (1999), refer to as “no time.” Only at the scale of human experience does life appear to unfold in the manner described by Dawkins, who ponders why “God,” as a means of creation, “should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings.” As a pantheist, I also suggest to Dawkins that God/universe, being organic and thus subject to the same laws that govern our lives, does not so much choose the form of its existence as simply exist in its natural, rather than supernatural or miraculous, form. Via the Big Bang, this “God” evolves from the one into the many, thereby affording itself contexts for self-experience. Collins comes close to allowing for this understanding of “God” when he says that the story of creation in the Book of Genesis “is very consistent with the Big Bang.” (One assumes that he means that it is reasonable to read the seven days of creation in the Bible as an allegorical reference to the processes of evolution.) If Collins were to let a little of Eastern mind into his thinking about the nature of “God,” he might also recognize that the creation story in Genesis is strikingly consistent with a pantheistic idea of “God.” In the beginning, God/universe was unified, an extremely dense point of matter, just as Adam and Eve were united with God in the Garden of Eden. As a result of the Big Bang, God/universe creates the illusion that it is not one entity but many entities (among them, us), resulting in the experience that we have of being separate from what we truly are – “God” – just as Adam and Eve were separated from God upon their banishment from Eden. If one regards religion as an attempt to talk about the universe before the advent of science, then the many ways in which religion and science are compatible become evident. But our unwillingness in the West to reimagine “God” in terms of Eastern mind, despite every indication from the field of quantum physics that this would be a logical progression, continues to saddle us with the Victorian-era debate between Darwinists and Christians in which Dawkins and Collins are engaged. 13 November 2006
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