MANY TO MANY Science and Spirituality

Science and Spirituality

The following excerpt is taken from a speech by Peter Russell delivered at the World Goodwill Seminar in London, December 1996, on Science and Spirituality, which appeared in the World Goodwill Newsletter, 1997 Number 2.

"People sometimes ask we why a physicist is so interested in spiritual things. What I’m interested in is truth: truth about the world, the universe, the cosmos. Science has looked at deep space, deep time and deep structure. It has reached almost the limits in each direction and has very confidently found that there is no place for God, nor any need for God. The mechanical universe seems to function perfectly well without an old man up in the sky needed to control it. Yet it strikes me that no religion ever suggested that God was an old man in the sky looking after things. If God is to be found anywhere, it’s within human consciousness, in the realm of what I call deep mind”.

“A lot of the questions in spiritual areas are about how spirit, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, gives rise to the physical universe. How does God create matter? Science asks: ‘How does matter create consciousness?’ And spirituality asks: ‘How does consciousness create matter?’ These are two completely different approaches. Yet I think they are asking, ultimately, the same sort of fundamental questions.”

“The real problem for the current scientific paradigm is consciousness. Nothing in the contemporary scientific model predicts that living systems will be conscious. ... Yet, the one thing of which we’re absolutely certain is that there is consciousness. It’s the one thing none of us can deny in our own lives. We are experiencing beings.”

“I know I am having inner subjective experience and I have every reason to believe that all are too. So that is the one thing that is 100% certain – that consciousness exists. This anomaly has led to what some philosophers today are calling the hard question: ‘How does something as unconscious as matter give rise to something as immaterial as consciousness?’ The two couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.”

“Science isn’t getting anywhere in trying to understand or explain consciousness. I think the reason for this is that we are still stuck in a paradigm which has eventually got to crash. And that is the paradigm that the material reality that we observe is the fundamental reality. I think the new paradigm which will emerge isn’t here yet. But I think where we are heading is towards a very different point of view, one that says that it’s not space, time, matter and energy which are the fundamental reality; instead it is consciousness which is the fundamental reality, out of which space, time, matter and energy emerge.”

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