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The Pleromatics Project
2. Religion of the Whole
Physics and the Whole
Philosophy and the Whole
Psychology and the Whole
Notes
A dream:
It is a bright clear night, warm. I am standing at the edge of a large deep lake. To my right is a dock, extending out over the deep, but only for a short distance. I hold a flashlight, but it is small, only a bright penlight. I wonder whether it is waterproof. I am looking for something. I vacillate, but instead of walking onto the dock I wade into the water, waving the pitifully small beam to search the bottom near the shore.
I have not found anything. I am not even sure what it is that I seek. I wade further toward the deep, then have to swim. The tiny beam is bright, but illuminates nothing in the water. I bobble a while, enjoying the water, the dark, the sky. I dive. The water becomes as sky, illumined with many stars in their familiar constellations. I am still in the water, but I am swimming among the stars.
----
In his essay "Pantheism and Christianity," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote:
This feeling of the importance of the Whole has its roots in the furthest and most secret depths of our being. As a matter of intellectual necessity -- as an affective need -- and, maybe, by the direct impact made on us by the universe, we are constantly and essentially brought back to a consideration of the world, apprehended in its totality.
He continues that religion must open to us a basic truth of our being:
Fundamentally, we have but one passion: to become one with the world which envelops us ... Ultimately, our thought cannot comprehend anything but the Whole, nor, when it really comes to the point, can our dreams entertain anything but the Whole. Should we go further and say that there are times when the Whole makes itself directly manifest to us -- when it almost intuitively forces itself upon us? It may well be so.
In that essay from 1923, Teilhard wrote further that the "persistent for an evolving understanding within Christianity of its true universality. Christianity "must directly confront the spellbinding grandeur that is revealing itself -- overcome it, take possession of it, and assimilate it."
Teilhard is one of several proponents in this century of an evolving cosmic theology. Within Christianity he certainly must be the most forceful and eloquent in calling us to reexamine ourselves and our faith in relation to Creator and Creation. There are many recent discoveries which require us to do that. This has been a century of digesting the widening implications for philosophy of the last century's discovery of biological evolution, and for refining the understandings of life's mechanisms.
That the challenge to traditional religion is stark became apparent immediately upon publication of Darwin's theory, and is epitomized in T. H. Huxley's defense of Darwin in the renowned debate with Bishop Wilberforce. However, the arguments against design in creation have been based on a mechanistic worldview which paradoxically holds that creative process is linear and deterministic, yet also random and accidental. There is little evidence within biology itself that life process follows a pre-ordained grand design. To such biological traditionalists, if there were any sort of design, the Designer must be blind to results.
The great debate has not been contained in the biologist's lecture hall with its displays of fossils and charts of origins of species; now it has spread down the corridors and even out the windows to encompass the questions of Cosmos itself. In the process, the mechanistic deterministic worldview has itself faced a challenge.
During this century, our ability to examine the very small and the very large has been remarkably expanded. Einstein's theories of relativity, quantum theory, the acceptance of Bell's Theorem of a non-temporal reality, increasingly strong support for an inflationary Big Bang explanation for cosmic origins, and the finding of a "bubbled" galactic anatomy are totally changing mankind's understanding of cosmos. Even the most secular among us are being forced by science itself to think in terms of a multidimensional cosmology which transcends space and time. Since Darwin's day, the gap between physics and metaphysics has been substantially narrowed.
Einstein framed the newer debate succinctly, almost flippantly, in his profound and cogent "most important question ... Is the universe a friendly place or not?" As the ideas of modern physics are integrated into a new view of the Whole, the distinctions between life and non-life seem to be dissolving. There is reason now to consider, from scientific arguments alone, that the cosmos itself is a Life which is evolutionary, unitive, organic, and purposeful.
The "impact made on us by the universe" (Teilhard) is such that we have been required (as physicist Stephen Hawking writes) to move from questions of what and how to questions of why. Such questions, whether we construe them as scientific or philosophical, are inextricably tied into the view of the Whole. Hawking speaks of the mathematical descriptions of the elemental physical laws, and continues:
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?
The implications of this new knowlege for formal theology and for individual religion are profound, but the intellectual and spiritual turmoil so characteristic of life today is both challenge and threat. For many, this is a period of excitement, for they find the Zeitgeist (a puckish ghost, that spirit of these times) to license exploration of many varieties old and new of spiritual expression. Yet for innumerable others (that Spirit is peevish, too), these questions unresolved have led to a sense of meaninglessness. Psychiatrist Erich Fromm wrote:
A new question has arisen in modern man's mind, namely, whether life is worth living. ... No sensible answer can be given to the question because ... the question does not make any sense.
Can mankind begin to see, in a newly revived "religion of the Whole", some hope of an answer to its malaise and to the paresis of its ethical will? The stripping of life's meaningfulness for so many people lies in the disempowerment of the historical figures of the ancient religions. It is the claim of religion that the respective beliefs describe ultimate reality. Since the particulars of historical belief systems are only rarely interpreted in the light of the new knowlege, there is no longer a link between life experience and reality, and life has become so complex as to appear chaotic.
The task of theology in the next century, if indeed theology is to survive as an interesting and relevant discipline, will be to reestablish that link between life experience and reality. In other words, we must collectively recapture a sense of the meaning of life.
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Physics and the Whole
One of the tools for that task is handed us in the new science of chaos. But first, let us consider the idea that reality is abstract. In the mechanistic deterministic view, the only reality is the tangible and tactile world of matter, and that seems to lead some to an association between the word abstract and the realm of the imaginary or fanciful.
However, the physical laws which govern matter are not themselves tangible. Neither are the mathematical descriptions of them tangible, for they exist in the mind. Their representation on paper or as charged states in a computer or calculator is only secondary and derivative, and is not their primary reality. To be adequate, a description of reality must rest on the understanding that physical phenomena derive from a reality which is not physical but entirely abstract. Physical states are best considered as controlled by the abstract reality described by the elemental laws.
That may be illustrated by running James Gleick's Chaos: The Software, a widely available personal computer program which illustrates the order inherent in complex systems previously deemed chaotic. The program's menus offer a variety of functions to explore, but they all illustrate a central idea.
A printout of the numbers resulting from any of the computer's calculations would seem to most people complex, chaotic, and random. Yet when taken as coordinates and plotted on a computer screen, in time an image appears which is orderly, intricate, colorful, beautiful. Often the figures are recognizable as patterns embodied in the natural forms of creation itself. Some of the functions give one the impression of watching the creation of clouds or galaxies. One may even feel the awe of being present at creation, as indeed we are! The stained glass of future worship spaces might well display such images.
The images may be changed by "tweaking" the starting numbers, the "initial conditions", ever so slightly. Yet the operator does not design or control the images; the reality of the formulas does that. Such an image is a phenomenon based entirely on an abstract reality, the reality of the formulas. The reality is such as to have the power to draw human consciousness into a sense of meaning, but I would submit that the meaning is in the formulas themselves.
The unconscious formula is drawn into consciousness, as it were, in its interaction with our human experience, and we then interpret the outlines (for example, "fern", "cloud", etc.) according to familiar natural forms, and express them in a familiar language. Humans give an interpretation to the meaning of the particular formula, but in another sense, the meaning also draws us into participation with itself. It is the representation in consciousness which gives expression to the meaning, but the meaning exists even though I am not now running that program.
The phenomena of material creation also rest on an ultimate nonlocal reality with which we must deal entirely in the abstract. We will come back to that point later, and find in our discussion of the Chaos computer program a model for the operation of "Meaning" in the universe.
Another of the tools of understanding handed to theology by physics is the recently renewed investigation into the relationship of the physical laws to purpose. Most scientific thought of this century has sought to discredit any idea that there is a goal, purpose, or ethical end in view for the natural order. In such a climate, Hawking's question above -- "Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?" -- is quite startling, for a Why question implies the existence of a teleological answer.
Teleology (from the Greek tele, meaning end) is the study and search for evidence of purpose in nature. In a landmark work, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), cosmologist J. D. Barrow and mathematician-physicist F. J. Tipler have set forth a great deal of evidence for a universe ("a melioristic cosmos") which is developing purposefully toward its final end. In doing so, they have provided a review of the history of teleology in twentieth century philosophy.
Unquestionably there have been distortions in the use of teleological ideas in describing the details of ordinary phenomena, and particularly in the discussion of the development of the human species. When such predictions (hypotheses) are untestable, as they so often are at that scale, the scientific method cannot deal with them. However, as Barrow and Tipler write, "When teleology was restricted to global arguments -- its true domain, according to Kant and according to T. H. Huxley ... -- its predictions have ... been by and large correct." In other words, it s only in the context of the Whole that the Why questions can be addressed.
The anthropic principle of which Barrow and Tipler write expresses the relationship between the physical laws and the development of conscious life in the universe. Hawking has stated that conscious life could not have developed had the gravitational constant been different by more than one part in one million million. That is, life as we know it could have developed only within a universe whose precise "initial conditions" would permit it; the chance that such precise conditions would be met by accident is exceedingly small; thus the chance that life should develop unpurposefully is exceedingly small.
Barrow and Tipler's study is highly technical and mathematical, and difficult to summarize adequately here, but they assert and support a number of arguments which bear on the question of a purposeful universe. The bracketed numbers refer to their page numbers:
(a) The existence of intelligent life requires a large number of stars in the correct stage of development to create the types of elements needed for life; [246]
(b) The universe must be of enormous size and com-plexity to generate conditions for even one planet to support life; [247]
(c) Life is dependent on a proper balance among the elements (e.g. between carbon and oxygen); that depends in turn on a very remarkable series of coincidences in the chemical properties which sustain the nuclear reactions of stars; if those properties were slightly different, those nuclear reactions would not be self-sustaining, and stars would collapse; [252-254]
(d) Life is possible only in a universe of three spatial dimensions; that there is a close relationship between the laws of gravitation and three-dimensional space has been recognized since Immanuel Kant; [260]
(e) "Remarkably it transpires that the gross properties of all atomic and molecular systems are controlled by only two dimensionless physical parameters ..."; [their italics] [295]
(f) The size range of planets is determined by the balance between gravitational forces and the quantum mechanical forces; [328] there is a narrow range of planetary sizes which can support life; a planet which is too small will not be able to retain an suitable atmosphere, [309] while planets only a bit larger than Jupiter are at risk for nuclear ignition to become stars; [307]
(g) If the balance between the electromagnetic force and the strong nuclear force were slightly different, carbon (on which all life is based) could not exist in nature; [326]
(h) "Water is actually one of the strangest substances known to science. This may seem a rather odd thing to say about a substance as familiar but it is surely true. Its specific heat, its surface tension, and most of its other physical properties have values anomalously higher or lower than those of any other known material. The fact that its solid phase is less dense than its liquid phase (ice floats) is virtually a unique property. spontaneously evolve from non-self-replicating collections of atoms to the complexity of living cells and yet is not based in an essential way on water." [524]
These are only a few of the examples detailed there, but they suffice to give a sense of the very special relationship between ourselves and cosmos which nurtures us. Barrow and Tipler also take a position which is quite surprising to those who have heard only the arguments of Carl Sagan and Hollywood for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. They offer three powerful arguments that life on Earth is unique:
(1) "[For many reasons] there has developed a general consensus among [biological] evolutionists that the evolution of intelligent life, comparable in information-processing ability to homo sapiens, is so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred on any other planet in the entire visible universe;" 133 (they cite Dobzhansky, Simpson, Francois, Ayala et al, and Mayr as major proponents of that view);
(2) The number of crucial steps in the (improbable) development of intelligent life must occur within a narrow "window" of time, that is, between the time the planet becomes habitable, and the time at which it becomes no longer habitable because of the evolution of the parent star; [556-570] [of course, that means that the intelligent life of a particular planet has a much more narrow window in which to fulfil any destiny it might have in the universe];
(3) If intelligent life existed elsewhere in our galaxy, we would, for a variety of reasons, probably have evidence of that fact; [576] those authors also find, using a statistical formula, that it is improbable that there is more than one civilization in the galaxy capable of supporting interstellar communications. [586-588]
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Philosophy and the Whole
If human life does have a purposeful role in the universe (and if so, perhaps uniquely), what might that be? Since a distinguishing characteristic of our species is an intelligent level of information processing ("mind"), and our history is so conspiciously characterized by a collective accumulation of knowlege (especially accelerated in this century), we might surmise that our destiny most likely involves further expansion of awareness (consciousness; knowledge) of our universe. Further, that expansion must encompass awareness of ourselves in relation to the Cosmos as a whole.
What can philosophy presently say of such a destiny? Three philosophers whose lifespans bridged the Darwinian century and the Einsteinian one have had major influence in establishing the view of cosmos as a life which is evolutionary, unitive, organic and purposeful, which leads to a rethinking of the nature of the divine. Two were born in the year of publication of the first edition of Origin of Species: Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and Samuel Alexander (1859-1938). The third was younger by two years: Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Bergson and Alexander had also made important contributions in the field of psychology; Whitehead, in mathematics.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who stands in the same tradition, is more often categorized as theologian than philosopher, but such distinctions are mooted by the cosmic view. However, Teilhard's influence seems much more recent, for his works were published only posthumously. Bergson especially seems to have had substantial influence on his thought.
Bergson presents evolution in terms of duration and flux, as creative, not mechanistic. "Duration" is not merely the measure of the elongation of a moment or event, or a granular series of discrete events, but is the lifespan of time itself, as essence of the creative whole. Within this durational continuum, evolution as a whole is impelled by a creative force (the "elan vital" which influences both instinctual and intellectual development.
For Bergson, reality is not expressed by the static concept of Being, but as a Becoming. That reality is purposeful, but it is not mechanistic. He rejects a "finalism" (teleology; purpose) of "a programme previously arranged" in which "all is given", for that is only an "inversion" of the mechanistic view of reality. In a letter, he asserted "the reality of the spirit", and contemplated "the notion of a God both creating and free."
Whitehead describes reality as Process, a term which signifies both duration and flux, and calls his metaphysics "a philosophy of organism." He emphasizes the "society" of all things in the universe. That is, from the interaction of things there emerges an organic whole. Changes in the whole are oriented by "eternal objects" which act as a "lure", as Whitehead expressed it. In that he seems close to Bergson's elan vital, but he sees cosmos as an organism developing freely, but not necessarily towards a specific goal.
That leads to a theology of the whole in which Creator is both Creature and Creation, freely expressing itself. Charles Hartshorne, a major interpreter of Whitehead, writes that in Whitehead's thought:
The creator has to create creators, for nothing can exist which is wholly uncreative, unfree. ... The Consequent Nature of God is "flux", progressively enriched by his knowledge of the progessively created and in part self-created creatures. It is God as inheriting the world, or as the ultimate posterity, the only everlasting and adequate heir of all achievements, and thus the final measure or judge of their importance. It is really God as supreme Creature, not just supreme Creator. ... We are as cells to the cosmos. Whitehead once called his view, a "cell-theory of reality."
Tillich says, "God is Being Itself;" Whitehead could say, God is Process Itself, in its various aspects.
Alexander considered reality to be a single cosmic process based on the "matrix" of spacetime, within which emerges mind (awareness) and the quality of deity:
God is not the already perfect being who for the benefit of imperfect man takes human shape, but is himself in the making, and his divine quality or deity a stage in time beyond the human quality. And as the root and leaves and sap of the plant feed its flower, so the whole world, as so far unrolled in the process of time, flowers into deity. ... As our human existence with its prerogatives is nurtured by everything beneath it, for we are a part of nature, so God's deity is nurtured by all that it transcends. And since this nutriment of deity is infinite, being the whole world, God's distinctive deity is infinite, since it is the expression and consummation and representative of all that conspires to its production. God's deity is thus the new quality of the universe which emerges in its forward movement in time.
----
We have already mentioned the contributions of physics and mathematics to the understanding of order and purpose operating in the cosmos. A number of physicists have also written on the nature of the deep reality, for quantum physics has profoundly changed our understanding of the nature of nature. They have used arguments which are independent of natural theology and classical metaphysics, and must be acknowledged as important contributors to twentieth-century philosophy and the emerging worldview of wholeness.
Of course, we may infer a "wholeness" of the universe from the connectedness of the ordinary phenomena of matter, and that was the approach of my own Emerging From Chaos: Wholeness, Ethic, and New World Order. For example, all life on earth is connected by a complex "web" of interdependencies, seeking its balance at all levels; further, gravity connects all things in the universe. However, the wholeness of the universe ultimately derives from a much more profound level of reality.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) mathematically defined the uncertainty principle, that we cannot know precisely both the momentum and position of a particle. That uncertainty itself derives from the uncertainty about whether a "particle" is an object or a wave. Heisenberg expressed the nonlocal reality in terms of potentia, or possibilities, which become actual only in the act of observation. The result of any particle interaction may be predicted only in statistical (probability) terms. He recalls the difficulties for him and his colleagues in trying (unsuccessfully) to convince Einstein, that "on the atomic scale, this objective world of time and space did not even exist and that the mathematical symbols of theoretical physics referred to possibilities rather than to facts."
Heisenberg's theory was stimulated in large measure by debates with Erwin Schroedinger, the author of quantum wave theory. Schroedinger (1887-1961), who wavered between physics and philosophy as a career, later produced philosophical works expressing a metaphysics of unity. His work in physics expressed the behavior of electrons in atomic orbit, not in terms of a particle's mechanical "jumps", but as wave interferences. "There are no discrete electrons, only electron waves or waves of matter." These waves (later characterized by Max Born as "probability waves") give rise to Schroedinger's famous "cat paradox" discussed in chapter five. Leon Lederman writes, "The Born interpretation of the Schroedinger equation is the single most dramatic and major change in our world view since Newton."
David Bohm has inquired even more deeply into the concept of order in the nonlocal reality. This requires abandoning the classical mechanistic ideas of order, and seeing reality as "an undivided wholeness", much as is a hologram. There, a film plate records the interference patterns which occur when waves of light received directly from a laser source are mixed with those reflected from the object to be photographed. When the process is reversed to project the film, a three-dimensional image of the object is formed. However, the whole image may be reconstructed (although not as brightly) from the information on only a small portion of the film. Astoundingly, each part of film contains the whole image.
Bohm summarizes, "We proposed that a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning "to enfold" or "to fold inward"). In terms of the implicate order, one may say that everything is enfolded into everything. This contrasts with the explicate order now domininant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things".
Bohm calls "the totality of movement of enfoldment and unfoldment" the holomovement which applies to electromagnetic and all other fields, and "may go immensely beyond what has revealed itself to our observations thus far." He sees consciousness itself as an activity of unfoldment. For example, sequential musical notes "resonate" within memory to evoke various bodily sensations and emotional responses unfolded from many levels. Thus music (or other perception) is more than mere immediate experience, but involves one in "active transformations" which "give rise to an immediate and primary feeling of movement." He writes, "In listening to music, one is therefore directly perceiving an implicate order." (his italics)
Amit Goswami of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Oregon has recently integrated the many levels of evidence from physics and psychological experience into a presentation of the worldview of monistic idealism. Heretofore, science has been based on a monistic materialism, denying any non-material reality. As Goswami shows, the totality of the current evidence from science itself speaks for a new foundation for the practice of science. Further, this evidence has profound implications for the living of human life, influencing our ethics and religious practice. As we shall see, it has profound implications for western theology as well.
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Psychology and the Whole
Another impact of modern knowledge on theology is that being made by depth psychology. We generally associate the word religion with a defined set of cognitive beliefs, and affirm that religion is about supernatural truth. But if, based on our knowledge of the whole, we acknowledge that Cosmos is evolving, and that the Creator is to be construed as both Creature and Creation, and that Creation is (at least in part) Creator, where does the boundary between natural and supernatural really lie?
That question confronts us with the dynamics of human personality and religious experience, for theology must take into account the relationship of consciousness (the realm of cognitive beliefs) to that aspect of Cosmos which is unconscious psyche (the realm of the divine). Religion, in its formal sense, is the set of cognitive beliefs which interpret mystical insights about the reality of the psyche. However, a religion of the Whole must understand that religion is also, and principally, about relationship to the spirit of the cosmos, that is, to the divine mystery. Both aspects of religion are important. In an evolving cosmos, our concept of truth and our relation to the cosmos must both evolve harmoniously.
Again we have dared speak of a "spirit of the cosmos"! We are justified in thinking in terms of a spirit of the cosmos, for psyche cannot be a property of mwankind [sic] without also being a property of cosmos. We also see that such spirit of the cosmos is evolving, for Cosmos in its material aspect is evolving, and if a part evolves, so does the whole.
Further, the expansion of human knowledge is itself an aspect of that evolving spirit: The evolution of the cosmos involves an exchange of "data" and information between the unconscious (the unrealized potentia of spirit) and the conscious (the potential made actual in matter, and gradually in human experience and memory).
In Jung's empirical model of the psyche, an individual is known to others as a persona (mask), but to the individual as I (ego), as in Figure 2. Throughout the text, we will use such highly simplified "cosmograms", designed not to show detail, but correlations between different systems of thought.
The unconscious domain of an individual person is a real (but abstract) realm in which the collective unconscious, expressing itself instinctually through the dynamics of archetypal symbols (internally in dreams, and externally emerging in art and ritual), seeks recognition by consciousness (ego). That expression of itself is purposeful: It is directed toward the internal balance (homeostasis) of the individual, and of the individual with other humans and ultimately the rest of creation. That the archetypal realm is real is amply apparent in the analysis of individual behaviors, as well as in the consistency of its expression in various cultures across the globe and throughout history.
Thus, there is a sense in which an individual, in the physical-psychological totality of the person, mirrors the reality of the cosmos. The cosmos too must be defined both in terms of matter and spirit. Mwankind provides at least one aspect of the spirit of the cosmos, for psyche cannot be a property of humankind without also being a property of cosmos.
The immediate problem for an evolving spirit of the cosmos is for humans to find ways to think about spirit without relying entirely on the mythic language of the past, for that has the dual power to paralyse many under the spell of its superstitious overtones, or drive others to fury defending competing belief systems. We must find a vision of the whole which understands that the formal religions are not in competition but are complementary in the spiritual development of mwankind, each contributing to the whole.
Such is the key to harmonizing religion and science, and to evolving among ourselves a religious understanding which heals, not cleaves, the human being, and which leads us toward a level of consciousness in which humankind works together as one. For Christians, the religion of the Whole confronts us with a new understanding of the Great Commission: We are called to be Witnesses to the absorbing of all spirituality and all knowledge into the Meaning of Creator/Sustainer/Cosmos-evolving.
That is not a call to detachment or mystical withdrawal. It is a call to learning. The Mystery calls us to creative participation in the affirmation and integration of both spiritual and intellectual knowledge, and to involvement in the creation of the conditions in society and on the globe most conducive to that quest.
I recall my dream. Had I searched for understanding only by walking on the already constructed "dock-trine" extending out above the reality of the lake, my search would have been in vain. Psyche says the search for understanding must immerse us in the religion of the Whole. We must dive into the lake of reality itself, there to unify consciousness with unconsciousness, intellect with spirit. It is there we swim among the stars. Perhaps that is the Dream which the Spirit of the Cosmos now unfolds before us.
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Notes: Religion of the Whole
"This feeling of the importance of" -- Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. "Pantheism and Christianity" in Christianity and Evolution. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. p 57.
"Fundamentally, we have but one passion" -- ibid. p 58.
"persistent ... rise of the religion" -- ibid. p 65.
Designer must be blind to results -- For that point of view, see Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, 1987.
During this century, our ability -- EFC and RCS
"What is it that breathes fire" -- Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam, 1988. p 174.
"A new question has arisen" -- Fromm, Erich. Taken from Peter, Lawrence J. Peter's Quotations: Ideas for our Time. New York: Bantam, 1979. p 309.
James Gleick's Chaos: The Software -- Sausalito CA: Autodesk, Inc., 1991.
In a landmark work -- Barrow J. D. and Tipler F. J. op. cit.
"When teleology was restricted to global arguments" -- ibid. p 127. This is virtually a complete quotation, omitting only cross-references to other chapters in their book.
"Hawking has stated that the universe" -- Hawking, Stephen. op. cit. p 121. To argue against such odds (as some still do) that life is accidental, requires postulating millions and millions of universes, of which this one "just happens" to have physical laws hospitable to intelligent life. Such an argument tends only to make human life more special: Not only does it take millions and millions of stars to support us, but millions and millions of universes of stars. Our awe at our situation is thus magnified, not diminished.
What can twentieth century philosophy -- Important precursors for the philosophical point of view presented here include Anaxagoras, Plato, and Plotinus. K.C.F. Krause (1781-1832) defined panentheism and presented the universe as an organic whole contained within that essence which is God. Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), a mathematician and physicist who pioneered in relating physics to psyche, held that the universe is animated by God, who is its soul. Mind and body (matter and spirit) are the same reality, only apparently different, just as a circle looks either concave or convex, depending on whether one views it from inside or outside.
Bergson presents evolution -- Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution (1911). New York: Henry Holt, 1923.
"a programme previously arranged" -- Bergson, quoted by Barrow and Tipler, op. cit. p. 189.
In a letter, [Bergson] asserted -- Quoted in Encyclopedia Britannica 15th Edition, 2:130
He sees cosmos as an organism developing -- See Barrow and Tipler, op. cit, p 194 on Whiteheadian views on teleology.
"The creator has to create creators" -- Hartshorne, Charles. Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. pp 133-134.
"Tillich says" -- ibid. p 138.
"God is not the already perfect" -- Alexander, Samuel. "Theism and Pantheism" (1927) in Philosophical and Literary Pieces. Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. p 330.
"on the atomic scale, this objective world" -- Heisenberg, Werner: Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. NY: Harper and Row, 1971, p 80-81 ]
"There are no discrete electrons" -- Schroedinger's statement as recalled or reconstructed by Heisenberg, op. cit. p.74.
"The Born interpretation of the Schroedinger equation" -- Lederman, Leon: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?. New York: Bantam Doubleday/Delta, 1993. p 171.
"We proposed that a new notion of order" -- Bohm, David: Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980). NY: Ark Paperbacks, 1983 p.177. italics in original.
the holomovement "may go immensely beyond" -- ibid, p 178.
"active transformations ... give rise to an immediate" -- ibid, p 199.
"In listening to music" -- ibid, p.200, italics in original.
worldview of monistic idealism -- Goswami, Amit with Richard E. Reed and Maggie Goswami: The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1993.
a property of mwankind -- I have experimented with mwan as a gender-inclusive variation, for it is particularly important here to emphasize that psyche expresses a balance between masculine and feminine aspects of cosmos. The term is of course a contraction of "man-and-woman-kind". Elsewhere, I use man and mankind in this same inclusive sense.
Jung's empirical model of the psyche -- I have described Jung's model in Emerging From Chaos chapters 9,10 and more succinctly (with diagrams) in Religion Confronting Science, chapter 6.
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