Sunday, January 01, 2006

The disconnected mechanics of connection...

Perhaps it reflects my own intellectual limitations, but I have be come convinced that, at some level, physical reality must be more complex than our conscious minds are able to comprehend. Is it not possible that most (or perhaps all!) of the currently fashionable cosmological constructs, such as “superstrings”, “folded dimensions”, “wormholes”, “pocket universes”, and so on, might be just as fanciful as the cosmology of medieval scholasticism, with its angels, crystal spheres, and primum mobile?

To say that certain phenomena lie beyond our comprehension might be regarded as a statement of despair from a scientist; on the contrary, I find it to be a source of reassurance, and even inspiration. For in this complexity may lie the potential for a deeper “connectivity” of physical objects, including our organic selves, than the mechanical models of our current worldview may comprehend. Since, according to the standard inflationary model, or the somewhat inelegantly named “Big Bang” theory, all of physical reality appears to have developed from a single, uniform, homogeneous entity, could there not be interactions among disparate physical objects which transcend the force laws and the space-time dimensions that our minds seem to be capable of analyzing?
[...]
The spiritual impulses that characterize us as human beings may be, in some way, an attempt to recognize these underlying connections, even though our minds are incapable of comprehending them.
(Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo sapiens
Edited by Henry Margenau and Roy Varghese :212)

I think there is a University of Delaware professor who wrote a book on physics and religion who points out that notions like the multiverse or Light as a fundamental standard are not so different from older views as well.

It would be interesting to ask one writing about such multiple "verses" where different laws of physics are said to govern what is written if they have a problem with calling such a place heaven. Heaven is a place where souls once written in bodies here can be saved after the verse that brings their hearse.

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