A Tangled Hierarchy

	Book review on God is Not Dead by Goswami, Amit (2008) Reviewed by John Kapp, 2009 published in Network Review No 99
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With The God Delusion and his adverts on buses 'There is probably no God'  Richard Dawkins has been goading scientists to prove him wrong. He has now succeeded. In 'God Is Not Dead' Amit Goswami takes up Dawkins' challenge, and provides the answer that the world needs. 'SCIENCE PROVES GOD' should be tomorrow's headlines, but not the straw God of popular Christianity, nor creationism. This book therefore deserves to sell many more copies than Dawkins' book, but it should not just be read, but acted upon to transform and save ourselves, science, the world from our present self destructive course. 

The book's purpose is to get science out of the straitjacket of meaningless materialism, which has only one level of reality - material - and only one source of causation - upwards.  It has given us wonderful technology but also the nightmares of terrorism, energy crisis, global warming and nuclear weapons. The shackles of materialist science and scientism are now jeopardising democracy, capitalism and liberal education, setting limits to freedom that are no better than the church and feudal domination of the past. Materialist thinking has created a wound in the collective psyche of humanity, yet instead applying itself to healing, science is still calculating the modern equivalent of  how many angels can dance on the point of a pin.

Amit seeks to heal this wound.  His book is a rallying call for quantum activism to shift the paradigm from materialism to monistic idealism (holism without the weakness of dualism) and from postmodernism philosophy transformed to transmodernism. (motto 'I choose, therefore I am.') This releases the God potency of the creative mind within us, and a new age of ethical living can emerge. 

Amit wants to bring back the modernist spirit of mental exploration without its dark side, its attitudes of human-over-nature, and reason-over-feeling, and without its dependence on simple hierarchies and the ego isolation of the lone individual. The new era of transmodernism and the new science begins with a quantum leap in our attitudes - to human within nature, to reason integrated with feeling, to tangled hierarchies, to the integration of the ego and quantum consciousness/God. 

Amit has given us a banner under which we can unite to storm science's Bastille (which has stood impregnable for four centuries) and reclaim it from usurping scientism.  Previous assailants have failed because they have sought to substitute dualism. This is fatally flawed as there is no mechanism by which separate spirit and matter can interact.  Amit avoids this flaw by adopting a monistic belief (as materialism does) but confirming the mystic belief that the ground of all being is not matter but consciousness.

We are so steeped in the linear, continuous, upward causation of materialist thinking that Amit's new paradigm is difficult to understand.  Life, mind, ethics, creativity,  transcendence, interconnectedness, healing,  and even matter  are all emergent properties of quantum consciousness (alias God) by downward causation.  The mechanism for this can only be understood with the use of  concepts of quantum physics, such as quantum leaps, entanglement, (coupled)  non-linear, discontinuous, nonlocality (outside space time), tangled hierarchies, (top down and bottom up at the same time) 

In quantum theory there are no manifest material objects independent of subjects - the observers. Light and all quantum objects are both waves and particles. As waves they are transcendent potential information - possibilities.  As particles they are immanent events of actuality in a body or on a screen. Objects remain as waves until they are brought into manifestation by observation. Consciousness does this by collapsing waves into particles of objects that are seen, (such as letters on this page)  and splitting itself into a subject that sees (such as you reading them).  

Quantum thinking allows us to treat mind and matter, (which are respectively internal and external experience) on an equal footing.  We are all connected because we are all manifestations of the same consciousness. The connection is signal-less nonlocality, transcending space and time. The role of matter is to make manifestation possible as representation of the subtle. Every cell in our body knows where it is and what it has to do because its blueprint is in the morphogenetic fields of our aura.  The in-form-ation creates form when quantum consciousness (alias God) collapses it into actuality.  'Let there be life and there was life'  But this is not the literal Bible creationists' ideas.  Amit says yes to intelligent design, yes to evolutionism, but no to creationism. Life is here and we are here because of the universe. But the universe is also here because of us, the observers, in a tangled hierarchy.

This book gives scientific explanations for phenomena such as altruistic behaviour, subtle bodies, soul, ESP, fossil gaps, telepathy, clairvoyance, reincarnation. The controversy created by multicultural pluralistic thinking can now give way to a new integrated science incorporating spirituality, and a great leap forward for humanity.

 

John Kapp is a scientist and writer, as was his father, Prof Reginald Kapp (1885-1966) who wrote 3 books about life and cosmology - see www.reginaldkapp.org

 

 

 

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