Adjusting the viewpoint

The following is an excerpt from an essay I am writing as an introduction to kabbalah and other wisdom traditions. This part deals with pysicalism - the belief that only the material is real- and scientism - the belief that material science can explain everything.

"The theory of evolution, and the identification by Darwin and others of the mechanisms by which evolution happens, resulted in a huge leap forward in our understanding of ourselves and our fellow creatures. We now understand that changes in an animal or plant that make it better-suited to its environment make that creature more likely to survive, mate and produce offspring who inherit its parents’ successful, though accidental, adaptation.

To a physicalist mind-set, those changes cannot be anything other than accidental. A creature doesn’t change to fit in better with its environment; a whole species changes because the ones who happened to fit in better with the environment were the ones to survive and reproduce. We casually talk about an animal evolving “to better blend with its surroundings” for example, but of course in a physicalist universe there is no intention, purpose or will initiating the change. It is just as likely that an animal changes in such a way as to stand out in its surroundings, perishes as a result, and never goes on to produce offspring.

But as the American philosopher Ken Wilber says “although natural selection can account quite well for 'microevolution' (or variation within a given range of possibilities), it can account not at all for macroevolution (or the emergence of new ranges of possibility).” Some of those ‘new ranges of possibility’ have been quite radical, and some of them, judging by the fossil records, relatively sudden.

For some of us this more importantly draws attention to the fact that the universe and all the creatures in it spontaneously change, and do so all the time, from when the first hydrogen atom mutated to produce helium , up to the changes going on in humans as I write. One might ask ‘why’ and the reply from a physicalist would be “it just does”. There may well be other universes where nothing ever changes. We just happen to be living in one that does. The question of ‘why’ is irrelevant. Why was there a ‘big bang’ at all? There just was. Why is the universe changing in such a way as to produce greater and greater complexity? It just does.

This cannot be disproved, but no more can it be proved. For some of us “it just does” has never been a satisfactory answer. And to paraphrase the 13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, all physical things have to have a cause, something that precedes them in time and makes them ‘happen’, (time being a very real element of the physical world, usually proceeding from past to present and on to the future) so it must have been something non- physical that needed no prior ‘cause’ itself, to produce the first physical energy/matter.

Nevertheless, one of the world’s leading physicists - and physicalists - Stephen Hawking, has famously said that there is no need for a non-physical explanation for how the physical universe came into being. In his lecture at the California Institute for Technology in 2013, he stated, 'General relativity on its own cannot answer the central question in cosmology: Why is the universe the way it is? However, if general relativity is combined with quantum theory, it may be possible to predict how the universe would start. Small fluctuations in the initial state of the Universe would lead to the formation of 'galaxies, stars, and all the other structure in the universe.'

His theory, he says, could be tested when science develops the ability to detect gravitational waves by accurately measuring the distance between spacecraft. These waves originated in the earliest times of the universe and have not been altered by their interactions by 'intervening material'. He was also of the opinion that we would get to know more about the start of the universe as we discovered more about the vast amount of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ that we now know exists in the universe. He suggested that the idea of time running in only one direction 'like a model railway track' was misconceived and that combining of general relativity and quantum theory can allow time to act just like another direction in space. But his main argument rests on his view that before the physical universe was created there was no time, so nothing could have happened.

Again, this cannot be disproved any more than it can be proved at the moment, but it rather misses the point, (which is something that philosophers and physicists frequently accuse each other of!) I wouldn’t disagree for one moment with the physics put forward by such a formidable brain as Stephen Hawking’s, and I can see no reason as to why he should be wrong about how the physical universe came into existence, in as far as what the process entailed.

But what does it all mean?  Why is there any physical universe at all? Again we come back to the physicalists’ main response: there just is, there doesn’t need to be a reason or meaning.

The explanations I have heard from physicalists about how matter and energy came into existence without something prior (that, unlike matter, needs no cause) have always sounded to me more illogical, to say nothing of mentally messier and convoluted, than assuming that something of a different order to physicality brought them into existence. Better minds than mine have challenged the physicalists on their own terms – my favourite being a book by Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge University biologist, called ‘The Science Delusion’. (See also Malcolm Hollick’s ‘The Science of Oneness’ and Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s ‘The Embodied Mind’.)

Furthermore science cannot help us to decide how to live our lives; in fact many atheistic scientists seem, from their writings, to have no knowledge of either wisdom traditions or anything but some of the most infantile concepts of ‘God’. Ironically this also applies to religious fundamentalists. Sometimes one would think, from articles appearing in the popular press, that there is only atheistic physicalism on the one hand and creationism on the other to choose from.

Possibly one of the main dangers of ‘scientism’- the belief that science explains everything, that there is nothing more to existence than matter/energy- is the fact that scientists are trying to do the job of mystics. Having not studied physics beyond GCSE level, I would never presume to question those who have studied physics for years about their conclusions concerning the physical universe. Yet some physicists claim to have as much knowledge about the non-physical world as metaphysical experts who have studied and carried out experiments as mystics for decades.

But back to Stephen Hawking’s view that time could not exist before the material universe did. From their own experiences and application of logic, kabbalists and other mystics disagree. Before the physical universe existed there was time (and ‘why shouldn’t there have been?' to use the physicalists’ own most common retort), albeit time that followed slightly different rules. (The only analogy I’ll draw here is to say that physical time is like standing on the Earth watching the sun rise, ‘travel ‘ overhead and then set. If you were in fact standing outside our galaxy you wouldn’t be able to see the Sun doing any such thing – you’d only be aware of its movements in relation to other stars. Yet the Sun itself is moving in exactly the same way, it’s simply your perspective on it that has changed. Thanks to Eckhart Tolle for that analogy)

So to return to the main point, the wisdom traditions part company with physicalists by teaching that there is another universe causal to the physical universe.It is necessary to point out that, while some of us, like Thomas Aquinas, have reasoned that there is something prior to and causal of the physical universe,the cosmologies of many wisdom traditions come out of the personal experience of some very devoted people, as a result of their using techniques developed and refined over millennia, and as the result of spontaneous revelation. Studying the wisdom traditions consists of reading about their experiences and explorations, and of developing techniques to follow in their footsteps, as and when one is ready. Devotion, concentration and absolute integrity are needed in spades.

It is difficult to find the language to describe how one universe can produce another of a different order, but then it is also difficult to imagine a hydrogen atom spontaneously producing all the other types of matter that evolved from it, or matter somehow evolving into living things. At this point I can only liken it to an artist transforming existing materials into something completely new with the use of imagination and manipulation.

To quote Brian L. Lancaster: “These worlds are not worlds separated in space, but realms of reality underpinning our everyday world of experience.” "