McGill Daily
11 November 2004

Bookshelf: Jesus + Nietzsche = String Theory
Matthew Eckel

How exactly does one mold the pantheon of Eastern and Western theological and philosophical thought into a coherent and unified world view? For those of you who've stayed up at night pondering this question (I know I have), Robert Lewis, in his ambitious work Gaj: The End of Religion , provides an unlikely unifying thread: quantum physics. Combining loose strands of thought from a myriad different eras and traditions, Lewis tries to make a case for a new kind of rational pantheism.

He starts by analyzing some fundamental theological dilemmas from a pantheist perspective, positing that our Western religious traditions have been hijacked by people who don't understand their prophets' fundamental teaching: that God (or as Lewis puts it, Gaj [God, Allah, Jehovah] is in everything, everywhere, and that the universe is fundamentally unified.

For example, Lewis makes a case for Jesus' pantheism, imagining the Holy Spirit as Christ's best attempt at a metaphor for a Gaj in which we all participate and through which we are all connected. For support he draws on the thought of Spinoza and Coleridge, Sartre and Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu and Mohammad, to name but a few.

Lewis attacks the monotheistic conception of a creative God that is external and separate from us. Such a conception necessarily creates barriers, Lewis argues, not only between people and their deity, but the rest
of the universe as well. Citing recent advances in theoretical physics that subsume the mechanistic Newtonian worldview, namely quantum theory, Lewis believes that our scientific conception of the universe is changing from one of division to one of connection. He calls on us to change our paradigms, to view ourselves as part
of a whole not in the sense of contractually unified individuals, but in the sense of a truly holistic and
connected universe.

If all of this sounds a bit confusing, that's because it is. Though Lewis's arguments are persuasive and at times fascinating, his prose is a bit dense and his specific points (often by necessity) are somewhat esoteric. I found myself having to wade through some parts of the book, particularly the sections in which he explains quantum physics and string theory, and at one point actually called up a friend with some physics background to help
sort things out.

In retrospect, this isn't as bad a thing as it might seem. The beauty of Lewis's work is that it forces the reader to question the basics and explore new avenues of philosophical thought. Gaj is not a book to be inhaled, but one to be slowly digested, perhaps connecting us with an inner Gaj-hood in the process.

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