Beyond The Elegant Universe: Beyond Science and Religion (Live Within Reason Book 27) (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Imagine a group of doctors in a hospital surrounding an old man, whose family, children, grand-children, great-grandchildren are playing and laughing around him. They probe and mutter and engage in learned debate while the old man and the family chat and converse. There is only one anomaly: the doctors can neither see nor hear the old man or his family. There is a background murmur that they are at a loss to explain, but apart from that, they probe the mysterious lump, coming to some astonishingly accurate conclusions, but it never occurs to them that the lump they are probing is aware. Or that it would happily answer their questions, should they choose to ask. Science has progressed to the extraordinary state of accurately, or almost accurately, modelling reality with an elegance and completeness that is enormously to its credit. It has actually achieved something far greater than it imagines, taking us to the threshold of resolving a millennia old conundrum, and there it has balked, limited by an age old war that is not entirely of its own making. Indeed, it was this war that gave birth to science, the refusal of religion to countenance clear thinking that contradicted its own position, and which threatened its power base. The consequences are unfortunate, but only to us as humans. To the awareness that is beyond, the conflict is inconsequential. If two children squabble, the parent looks on benignly and understands, that’s just children. Scientists are fond of relating to their struggle as that of moutaineers, scaling the mountain of nature. There was one, whose quote sadly I cannot find to acknowledge properly, who said something along the lines of ‘I feel I have scaled a mountain to find monks eating a picnic there’. Just so. The war between science and religion is a distraction, and attempts to recognise scientific achievement by New Age thinkers such as Deepak Chopra are dismissed and brushed off as the unwanted intrusion of the unwashed and ignorant, which is somewhat discourteous, and also somewhat ironic. Being arrogant isn’t the same as being right. I would like to imagine a slightly different scenario, akin to my own experience as a glider pilot, soaring effortlessly over the mountain peaks in France. At one point, I spotted two or three climbers who would have spent the day at least climbing to the top of that peak, whereas I had been launched within the hour and was simply enjoying the flight and the view. They waved. I waved back, and felt a great sense of companionship with them, as we shared the serenity and sublime experience of being ‘alone’ yet together. As a mathematician, I can barely claim to have made it to base camp, and can only look on with binoculars as those far more gifted than myself scale heights of the mountain. But as a pilot, I have the leisure of operating in a realm somewhat above them, not in skill, not in endurance, not in intellect, but merely because I chose a different path, one that was not tied to their self-imposed rules and regulations. That is in no way to decry science, but to applaud it, with a slight hint of chastisement. We are equals, all of us, all humans, and our experiences may be different, but they are not less so for being so. If we applaud the achievement of science and point to its relevance in a wider realm, we take nothing away from their extraordinary achievement, but merely highlight an as yet broadly unrecognised higher achievement, the integration of three realms of human thought that have to date been somewhat separate: the realm of religion, with its early approximation of the nature of all that is, including the invention of the god concept; the realm that is loosely termed the new age or metaphysics, with its experience of a reality beyond physical reality; and the realm that can be probed, tested and explained, the physical realm, as it may seem, or perhaps more accurately, the realm of all that is testable: aka science.