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| The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci circa 1487 |
Part Two
(Continued.)
How would you define yourself religiously?
The short answer is, I really don't.
I have dedicated an entire blog to faith and belief. I use terms very familiar to the religious. I speak of the spirit, priesthood power, resurrection, life after death, perfection, and even God. As unsettling as this may sound to some of you, I probably have more in common with an atheist than the emotion driven spiritualist. Faith allows me to conceptualize mysteries I struggle to understand. I sense the profound correlation between "faith" and the tightly bound mysteries of the universe.
There are principles of quantum physics being explored to explain the mysteries revealed in the Global Consciousness Project that I find easier to contemplate if encapsulated in philosophical terms like "soul" or "spirit." The concepts of complimentarity, quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, and mass-energy equivalence likewise, can take on spiritual connotations when discussing the nature of "reality." I don't have the scientific vocabulary for that. To contemplate consciousness, existence, immortality, and purpose, I turn to philosophy... but the various fields in physics also explore these very same concepts. I see a faith-science equivalence where contrasting reasoning and vocabularies are applied in the exploration of analogous issues.
This brings us to the million dollar question;
Who, do you believe, is God?
The short answer is, I don't know.
My god is not the Mormon god. In fact, he's not even the Christian god. He's not just some bigger better version of me. He is something profoundly different. I guess a more important question would be; "What is God?" To me, God is a philosophical construct of something yet to be identified in physics. Maybe it is something so far beyond our abilities to comprehend in a scientific context. he will always remain firmly within the protective bounds of philosophy.
Mathematics is the language used to describe the laws of physics. The divine beauty and symmetry are evident. I wonder if God is not author of mathematics and if the very laws of physics themselves are God. On my plane of existence, sentience is the natural result of ever increasing complexity in a biological system. I reason God to be a sentient derived from a similar process of increasing complexity but on a scale that transcends the multiverse. Gnostic thinkers postulate we are but minuscule manifestations of God's own consciousness and that, in reality, the whole of the universe is God.
I really don't know if I am any closer to being right... but I find much more comfort in not knowing than in the vision of reality postulated by religious absolutists. Their concepts seem uncomfortably small in my understanding and estimation.
Again, I hope I haven't troubled any of you. My beliefs are my own. I'm not here to correct or even influence your own spiritual path. I believe, in the spirit of mutual respect, we can learn from one another and appreciate our differences.
"The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural constants were off even slightly. You see, even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life - almost contrived - you might say a put-up job."
~ Paul Davies, The Mind of God
