Chapter One
Where Have the Gods
All Gone?
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand
And Eternity in an Hour.
—William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost everymoment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the worldabout us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around usare the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves. In orderto put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for whatthey are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.
Although we know that our common-sense understanding of the world ismerely fiction, the illusions stay with us. Science has entirely overturned what weknow about the structure of the world. But rather than revising our picture ofwhat reality is, we cling to a collage of incongruent shards. We preserve a false assemblageof images, one pasted upon another, so that we can keep unchanged themental portrait of ourselves and of the world to which we are accustomed. We goabout our business despite the fact that the world on which we base our lives is somuch in question, so much a mystery.
Even when we have searched out some knowledge, and when we have penetratedinto the jitterbug world of Mr. Zukav's Wu Li Masters or of Carl Sagan's billionsand billions of everything, we are left with only so many more unansweredquestions about reality. We want to know. We ask. We search for answers, and weare given a box with little pebbles inside. Is that what the world is? Little pebbles,big pebbles, pebbles in a vast box shimmering and shaking about. Have we ouranswer? Is reality only a box filled with pebbles? Is that it? Is it all just a little boxof rocks that holds infinity inside and stretches to the edge forever?
We want to ask, "Is there a God? Does my life have meaning and purpose?" Science,we are told, says that even to ask about God is beyond its scope. But this isnot true. Either there is no such thing as God, or science—which embodies ourability to reason—must be able to frame the question and provide us with answers.
We know that science has proved capable of giving us dependable, solid, objectiveanswers. It is the one path that yields answers about the machinery of realityand shows that these answers are valid. When such questions are asked, sciencemust answer.
To many scientists, however, God is only a memory from childhood: a put-offto questions they once asked themselves. "Where do I come from?" was left unansweredwith, "From God." Yet perhaps, the great shortcoming of such questions isthat the concept of God is so conventional that it too is apt to be as empty as thatbox scientists give us—that box filled with the universe and yet empty of meaningto what we have asked: "What is reality, really?"
THE OLD GODS
Let us go back to mankind's earliest times. Think of Homo habilis looking outinto the cosmos, gazing into the blackness of a fearful night with sparkling wonderspread across the vaulting sky. Think of such a man alone in the night's stillness,looking at the stars. He blinks his eyes and wonders. His mind transcendsthe immediate hazards of the day, and he sees things in the sky that he cannotreach. He sees for the first time the edge of his own being and looks beyond, perhapsforming the first thoughts of some new understanding, the first thoughts ofsome new knowledge, and then he falls asleep. Somewhere in that early time, in apattern of stars seen overhead, in the stirrings of an image in the bush, in a lifelessform that did not move from its forest bier, the first troubled, questioningthoughts came to early man and passed into oblivion.
But I can see another, later time, a time when another early man lay more shelteredin a cave sleeping. As the moon rolled in its changing orbit, its full face appearedin the entrance to the cave, its light filling the doorway and jolting theprimitive being into a frightened awakening. Such an experience would deepenthe mystery of the sky, perhaps forming a memory that would last until the experiencerecurred months later. Its appearance would spark a need to know whatwas happening in that subtle other world. Perhaps, wanting somehow to markwhat had happened, he picked up a bone and a rock and scratched the first writtenrecord.
Ten thousand years later, archaeologists searching the ancient ruins at Gohtziin the Ukraine found the record he left. There in the ivory of a mammoth's tusklay etched the incised marks he cut, charting the passing phases and movement ofthe moon.
I can remember awakening suddenly in the middle of the night to see theshimmering face of the moon on just such a far excursion into the northern latitudes.It peered through the branches and around the corner of my bedroomwindow as if it had some intent to watch me. Had I not known better, I mighthave set markers to test the mind of this celestial voyeur. I might have repeatedthe same observations that my ancient forebears made at Clava, at Kintraw, atBallachroy, at Avebury, and on the plain at Stonehenge.
Five thousand years ago, our ancestors used small stones and wooden postsstuck in the ground to record the moon's excursions and the constancy of the celestialbodies. These stones and posts, like modern marks on paper, described celestiallaws of motion, measured out man's course in the world, and marked hiswoman's cycles.
These posts, the markers of one age, repeated through a thousand years, havebecome the tools of ritual and the talismans of the old gods our ancestors worshiped.These were gods in the sky—regular, dependable, knowable. They wereworshiped, but they were always out of reach.
The moon has wanderings. More than the sun, it has features, subtleties thatsuggest the mystical nature of imagination. But having recognized the moon as agoddess of the night, who then could fail to recognize the true carrier of powerover life? Who then could fail to see the powerful eye of God?
Think of that earliest time, the time of the Old Ones. This was a religionwherein people paid homage to a god who reigned over them and gave themwarmth and life, a god they could see, who stood over them, looking at them withhis one gleaming bright eye—the sun.
But others in other times created other gods and other pictures of their idea ofreality. Others in treacherous forest worlds saw gods frozen in wood awaiting theknife to carve them free. Stones awaited the chisel to liberate their power—apower over the mind, a power to throw terror back into the forest, a power ofdeath. They created images, gods cut from their own imaginings. They made godsof wood and stone. They made images drawn of lines and paint upon the walls ofcaves. And the lines became words.
What images flashed in the minds of those who painted the Lascaux caves athousand generations ago? What thoughts beyond mere existence flickered in theminds of those of species Homo habilis who left their footprints in the soil atOlduvai five million years ago? Whatever structured the reality they imagined beyondwhat they could immediately see, those thoughts were the beginnings ofwhat we are today. Those thoughts were the new trials offered in the struggle forsurvival.
This clash between early man and nature has woven a pattern of fact and illusion.Evolution and the pressure of survival have endowed us with an ability tounderstand and to reason, and this has filled us with questions about meaningsand values in life. In our search, we have carved stone god answers. Our carvedgods have failed us and have been replaced. The worship of Og, Bodb, Llaw;Njord, Woden, Ing, or Sif; and of Horus, Osiris, Amen-Ra, Min, or Thoth hasgone. Adad, Ashur, Baal, and Gibil are gone, as are Nintoo, Nusku, Shala, and Sin.Zeuses and Aphrodites have rotted into the soil, and the Jupiters and Venuses arescattered, broken marble busts and torsos that line vacant halls as epitaphs to aworld that is now gone. Our fathers struggled against these gods and found theirvictory.
It was the genius of Abraham, I believe, to have met and triumphed over thesuperstition of a hundred ages, over the false demands of false gods' priests. Abrahamput down his knife. No Baal would take this man's son Isaac. In his act of defianceagainst religious superstition, he became the father of a new way of faith ina God that spoke more rationally and lovingly to His people. He created a new visionof God: that God, to be worshiped, must have greater love for His subjectsthan even a father for his son. Somewhere in Abraham's mind or in his heart,some voice did say, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad." Tribes, nations, and peopleshave come to follow this Abraham, who was the seed of the three great religionsthat worship the unseen God—God of the burning bush, God of thePassover, God who parted the sea, God who felled the walls of Jericho—this Godwho made man in His own image.
Abraham created a new view of the world, a view in which the world of ourdaily concerns is the creation of a power, a mind, and a spirit that governs ourlives, just as God governs the universe. It is a view of reality divided into twoparts: God and His creation. It is a view of God who leads His special people, thepeople of the nation of Israel and ultimately the peoples of all the nations ofearth. But what can we believe of this God who would not save His own peoplefrom the Holocaust. If there is a God, how distant is He? If there is a God of creationgoverning the incredible expanse of this universe, what care has He for me?Where is He now for me this moment as I search, hoping to find that whisper ofher still-living mind somewhere? Where is this God?
The questions are ancient. The Israelite nation answered with their faith. TheGreeks answered with their mind. The Greeks, who with the philosophies of theirtime could hardly hope to explain the workings even of this world's machinery,certainly could not argue against the existence of some power that would havecreated the world. But what of it? For the Greeks, there was little to show thatwhatever God or gods existed had any concern for people and their problems.One might seek after some favor with offerings to some lesser divinity, but to theanalytical Greek mind, a supreme God was beyond appellations.
It was into this learned and skeptical Greek world that Christianity appeared asan answer to the question of the relationship between people and God. Christ, theonly begotten Son of God, was born into this world to give testimony to His lovefor each individual person. How incredible is the idea that God could be so infinitein dimension that He could create the universe and yet know the personalneeds of an ordinary individual. Jesus came into this world, as an answer to theprophecies of Isaiah, to give wondrous signs, to suffer the death of crucifixion,and then to rise from the dead—showing at once the personal love and infinitesovereignty of God. Paul carried the message to the Greeks and throughout theRoman world: Virgin birth, the lame made to walk, the sightless to see, the deadto rise, and on the third day His own resurrection. This is the faith and the realitythat have guided the Christian world for nearly two thousand years.
Now all that has changed. Demons do not cry in the winter wind. Baal does notlook down from the sky with one bright eye and take the first-born child. And thewalls of our modern Jericho can be brought down by better means than the godsof old ever possessed.
The stone gods did not protect the ancients and were discarded, and the God ofthe Jews did not protect Jews either. With the advance of science, our knowledgeof physics, and an understanding of evolution, we find our explanations elsewhere.The God of Abraham no Monger suffices in the secular city.
The story of Jesus is surely inspiring. He surely lived, and he certainly sacrificedHis own life for some cause. But what of the rest of His story can we believe in?When we look into the laws of physics, the mechanisms of biology, or the facts ofmedical practice, where is there any reason to believe that Jesus could make ablind man see or miraculously cure a beggar lame from birth? Do you believe thismyth of a virgin birth? Do you believe that some god came down to earth to fatheranyone? Do you really believe that Lazarus, dead until his body stank fromdecay, was raised from the dead by anyone? Can anyone who claims to be rationaltoday—when religion no longer serves as an explanation of where we come fromor how we got this way—believe that anyone was raised from the dead?
In his book God and the New Physics, Paul Davies surveys the necessity of theGod hypothesis to explain our existence and the nature of the universe in light ofrecent advances in physics. He points out that just as evolution theory removedthe need to assume God to explain the variety of life forms, physics has recentlybeen able to search back to the very moment of the beginning of time and give usan understanding of even the origin of the universe itself. The successes here havebrought science within reach of explaining everything that exists—and the existenceof everything—without God. Davies offers one central, telling argument.More than anything else, Davies attacks the idea that God must be assumed to existto explain the existence of the universe, of matter, of space, or indeed of time.Davies asks rhetorically, "Why this universe, this set of laws, this arrangement ofmatter and energy? Indeed, why anything at all?" Because physics now has beenable to trace the start of the universe back to the moment of the beginning ofspace and time, matter and energy in a singularity, and map out the course of thefuture to the far distant heat-death of the universe with no need to invoke God asits creator, where is there any need for God? Davies says, "There is no need to attributethe cosmic order ... to the activity of a Deity." Darwinism removed theneed of God to create the species, and it might seem that modern physics is removingany need to invoke God in order to explain any aspect of the universe.The role of God in the order of things is gone. If that is the answer, then that is theanswer. And what Davies describes is a good rendering of modern scientificthought.
* * *
I drive past an Episcopal church, much like many whose stained-glass windowslook out over the Maryland countryside, and think of the gentler, more certaintimes its congregations have witnessed. These times were troubled, surely, bycrises of life, crises of death, crises of depressions, and crises of wars. Yet they didnot suffer the crisis of meaning itself. That church, with its stained-glass windows,always stood there to remind those gentler ones that their struggles hadmeaning and their questions an answer. And now it is a part of the past.
A few years ago, vandals smashed one of those beautiful early nineteenth-centurystained-glass windows. Modern physics has no place for any deity, andthe message rings even in the ears of the vandal in the street: "There is no sacrilege—onlythe moment, only the event."
In The Seduction of the Spirit, Harvey Cox paints the change that has come oversociety. Cox tells us of his days growing up in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
Whenever I peeked in the half-open doors of St. Patrick's while on my way to Stackhouse's grocery store or the post office, I'd catch a glimpse of a mysterious darkness broken only by an even more mysterious flickering red lamp. Catholic playmates assured me in hushed tones that Jesus Christ Himself was up there on the altar. We didn't even have an altar, let alone one with Christ Himself on it. Many times I would like to have ventured into the dim recesses of St. Patrick's, but I was scared. It seemed so foreboding, so dark and awesome.
By high school it was a commonplace among the rest of us that it was just plain useless to argue with Catholics about religion, because no matter what you said, they knew they were right, or at least they seemed to know.
Today, decades later, when I talk honestly to Catholics, I get the feeling that, although they belong to the Catholic Church, they know now how I felt then. For now, even on the inside of their church, that serene assurance is gone. So is that secure conviction that it all goes back directly to God Himself.
Drive through Malvern today. St. Patrick's is aging. It has become an anachronismeven to its few parishioners who drag in their children. The world haspassed Malvern by and left St. Patrick's in its past. Believers still frequent theplace, but the old faith has lost its hold on their souls. And the children leave tosearch out the secular world's video stores in Philadelphia and beyond. St.Patrick's no longer gives its people quite that same sure faith that they need if theyare to believe today.
Today people need proof in order to believe, and they deserve that proof. Thedegeneration in the values of our society is not due to the waywardness of thepeople or to the affluence that permits a lax morality. It is not the secular city ordrugs or a rebellious youth that has caused society to drift away from God. It is,instead, the message of science borne on the wings of our fast technology. It is thethinking of intellectuals of a century ago that has come down to the streets. Theideas that are today a matter of academic speculation begin tomorrow to movearmies and topple empires.
It is the perceptions of our science, the tenets of modern physics so well summarizedby Davies, that now instruct our futures—into the streets. But it is all wrong.
* * *
I remember her. I remember Merilyn. I remember her so terribly much. I rememberher as she looked at me, asking me questions with her eyes. I remember her asshe looked quizzically at me, asking with one eyebrow raised, asking. And I answeredwith my eyes, answering her question of love. I put my arms around her; Ikissed her, I felt her body in my hands. I pressed her against me. "I love you," I said."I love you." And she answered, her words sparkling, "That's funny, I love you, too!"
That had been a year earlier. That had been before she was about to die.
* * *
Harvey Cox writes "I have tried to make clear that metaphysical operations cannotbe muted by the secular age, but that metaphysical systems will neither again integratewhole societies nor still men's persistent questions as once they did." But Coxis dreadfully wrong. There are answers. The truth does exist, and when the truth ishonestly sought, with a mind that is ready to accept the truth, whatever the truthturns out to be, then the answers do come, and the answers change people.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Physics of Consciousnessby Evan Harris Walker Copyright © 2001 by Evan Harris Walker. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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