My Page

Random posting of book recommendations, general thoughts about life, vacations and travels, philosophy and business experiences-

My Photo
Name:
Location: Old Hickory, Tennessee, United States

Sunday, July 29, 2007

The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder

The world of physics is complex and small beyond imagination (or immense in reverse) and so is the complexity of molecular biology. For the universe and life to have arisen purely by chance compels one to accept millions of sequential lucky draws- this book is a compelling case against evolution as the explanation of our existence. Even Darwin himself admitted to a ghost in the system at the cellular level. Even more this book is a structured argument for wisdom as the underlying essence of creation and all that is - both physical and metaphysical.

"From the traditional view of classical physics, the universe seemed so logically constructed. Principles of determinism taught the obvious fact that identical causes produce identical results. There were the distant and separate natures of particles and waves, and of energy and mass. All this fit well within our human psyche's opinion of how a world should work. And then came Einstein and Planck and de Broglie and Heisenberg, and the assumed logic underlying existence tumbled into an exotic, unpredictable fantasy that turned out to be true. Their discoveries revealed relativity, quantum physics, uncertainty, particles with fuzzy extended edges, particles that aren't ping-pong-ball like entities but are actually waves. And then most bizarre all of all that these waves might actually be representations of something as intangible as information, as wisdom.

Enlightenment is far easier when we have no preconceived notions of what must be true. The social and professional pressure to conform to accepted ideas can be monumental even whenever mounting data contradict their validity. It's called cognitive dissonance. As great a mind as Einstein's bowed to convention when his cosmological equation of the universe showed that the universe might be in a state of violent expansion that the galaxies might be flying out from some moment of creation. Rather than publish this astonishing prediction, he changed his data to match the popular, though erroneous idea that our universe was static. In doing so he missed the opportunity to predict the most important discovery science can ever make relative to the essence of our existence: Our universe has a beginning; there was a time before which there was neither time nor space nor matter.

Unless the vast amounts of scientific data and conclusions drawn by atheistic as well as devout scientists are in extreme error, our universe has a metaphysical beginning. The existence- if the word existence applies to that which precedes our universe- of the eternal metaphysical is a scientific reality. That single exotic fact changes the rules of game. In fact, it establishes the rules of the game. the metaphysical has at least once interacted with the physical. Our universe is not a close system. But does that which created the universe still interact with the creation. That's a question each person must confront.

We've surveyed the science and discovered a complexly ordered wisdom expressed in the molecular functioning of life nowhere evident in the structures from which life is built or in the laws of nature that govern the interactions of those structures. That wisdom in life is the imprint of the metaphysical.

Organization separates living matter form what we perceive as inert, lifeless matter. But there is no innate physical difference between the atoms before and after they organize, learn to take energy from their surrounding environment and become as a group, alive. However there is what appears to be a qualitative transition between the awesome biochemistry by which the brain physically records the incoming data and the consciousness by which we become aware of that stored information. In that passage from brain to mind we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist."

Labels: