The Science of God
Deepak Chopra invited me to write a blog after we both got a good laugh on his radio show at the increasingly more vocal men (yeah, no women in this crowd!) who think all human experience can be reduced to the sequence of a strand of DNA with no place for a Higher Intelligence. As a practicing scientist of some renown and the author of Everything You Need to know to Feel Go(o)d, I am proud to be thinking about the scientific proof of God which involves the odds-defying occurrences of synchronicities. Richard Dawkins and his ilk of high level technicians, who are claiming the idea of God is unscientific are arrogant and appear to lack life experience as well as the imagination to ask big questions. They are only rebels against the dogma of religion and are uninformed about consciousness and spirituality.
In this debate about the existence of God it is argued (by a few scientists) that “Science”, is the correct belief system for discernment of knowledge, and reductive materialism is its guiding principal. I have been interested in the role of the emotions in the psychobiology of health and wellness for quite a few years now and have watched with some amusement over the past years as neuroscientists, using the tools of brain imaging, have published their pictures showing the loci of various emotions, like fear, anger, even spiritual consciousness, as residing in, or having generative origin in, rather specific brain areas. The conclusions derive from enhanced metabolic activity, blood flow or glucose utilization, associated with these regions. Reminds me of the claim that Peter Jennings exists inside the TV tube, or circuit board, or transistor, or electron- lets just keep following this reductionist path.
In fact, the expression of the emotions is more correctly viewed, at least to my thinking, as extending throughout the body-mind, in a continuum, not localized to a discrete site, certainly not the exclusive province of the brain. This is a more systems-like approach for regulating what “we” (not just our ‘body’) pays attention to. The better to live, love, and experience happiness. In this way “mind” is not simply an emanation of the serotinergic nerve processes of the midbrain and the body doesn't exist merely to carry the head around!
Emotions are clearly felt throughout the bodymind, and they integrate us with our fellow creatures, humans and animals. Biochemically they are identical across eons of evolution. Darwin himself commented on the shared expression of emotions in humans and animals in his book of that title, and emotions draw us into larger communities. It seems the essential question concerns the ability to choose, which is a product of our expanding capacity for self-reflection. You had to be at least a bony fish to experience anxiety, the ability to hold two or more conflicting ideas at one time. So decide already, and free yourself from fear and stress.
If mind, and its emanation “consciousness”, suffuse the body, and in fact extend beyond it, we may consider the role of our personal choices in the creation of our reality for it is the physicists we have informed us of the primacy of the observer.
I don’t see that this leads to a “reduced”, scientifically verified, “objective” reality.
Thought, and the emotions, are co-created, in a process that uniquely defines our bodyminds, and in fact our reality. And as all our consciousnesses intermingle, we, at least the sentient among us, are continually co-creating our reality, our evolutions, and our destinies. This is the fundamental free choice we are called upon to exercise. And as information seems to be transduced in “non-local”, ways, that is not bounded by space and time, “creation” seems instantaneous. By the way, where is information stored? In our books, genes, computers, etc?, and where does it go, when we die? Could this relentless expansion of the noosphere (Telihard), the filed of our consciousness, be the Living God? Not the old guy on the throne, on Judgement Day, but the field of all our collective hopes, emotions, and thoughts? I’m not making this up, I’m just interpreting what the laws of physics, such as we understand them today, seem to be telling us.
In this debate about the existence of God it is argued (by a few scientists) that “Science”, is the correct belief system for discernment of knowledge, and reductive materialism is its guiding principal. I have been interested in the role of the emotions in the psychobiology of health and wellness for quite a few years now and have watched with some amusement over the past years as neuroscientists, using the tools of brain imaging, have published their pictures showing the loci of various emotions, like fear, anger, even spiritual consciousness, as residing in, or having generative origin in, rather specific brain areas. The conclusions derive from enhanced metabolic activity, blood flow or glucose utilization, associated with these regions. Reminds me of the claim that Peter Jennings exists inside the TV tube, or circuit board, or transistor, or electron- lets just keep following this reductionist path.
In fact, the expression of the emotions is more correctly viewed, at least to my thinking, as extending throughout the body-mind, in a continuum, not localized to a discrete site, certainly not the exclusive province of the brain. This is a more systems-like approach for regulating what “we” (not just our ‘body’) pays attention to. The better to live, love, and experience happiness. In this way “mind” is not simply an emanation of the serotinergic nerve processes of the midbrain and the body doesn't exist merely to carry the head around!
Emotions are clearly felt throughout the bodymind, and they integrate us with our fellow creatures, humans and animals. Biochemically they are identical across eons of evolution. Darwin himself commented on the shared expression of emotions in humans and animals in his book of that title, and emotions draw us into larger communities. It seems the essential question concerns the ability to choose, which is a product of our expanding capacity for self-reflection. You had to be at least a bony fish to experience anxiety, the ability to hold two or more conflicting ideas at one time. So decide already, and free yourself from fear and stress.
If mind, and its emanation “consciousness”, suffuse the body, and in fact extend beyond it, we may consider the role of our personal choices in the creation of our reality for it is the physicists we have informed us of the primacy of the observer.
I don’t see that this leads to a “reduced”, scientifically verified, “objective” reality.
Thought, and the emotions, are co-created, in a process that uniquely defines our bodyminds, and in fact our reality. And as all our consciousnesses intermingle, we, at least the sentient among us, are continually co-creating our reality, our evolutions, and our destinies. This is the fundamental free choice we are called upon to exercise. And as information seems to be transduced in “non-local”, ways, that is not bounded by space and time, “creation” seems instantaneous. By the way, where is information stored? In our books, genes, computers, etc?, and where does it go, when we die? Could this relentless expansion of the noosphere (Telihard), the filed of our consciousness, be the Living God? Not the old guy on the throne, on Judgement Day, but the field of all our collective hopes, emotions, and thoughts? I’m not making this up, I’m just interpreting what the laws of physics, such as we understand them today, seem to be telling us.
