In the Middle Ages, theology was queen, and all disciplines obeyed her. The spheres in heaven must be round because Aristotle had said that the circle was perfect, and heaven must be perfect. Then Galileo looked through his telescope. He endorsed the theory for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake: that the earth moves around the sun. Under threat from the Inquisition, Galileo recanted and was placed under house arrest. But the tide was turning. The new scientific instruments of the seventeenth century were revealing a world not described in Genesis. For awhile seventeenth-century scientists like Sir Francis Bacon reconciled the split between the two world views with the theory of the “double truth”: there was one truth for science and another, for theology.
But by the time of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment, Reason became the standard of proof, and skeptics like Voltaire and Thomas Paine were attacking what they called the “superstitions” in the Bible. The Enlightenment philosophes could still believe in a God, but He was a clockmaker who had started the universe in motion and then disappeared to let it run by itself. This belief, Deism, held sway among intellectuals for awhile, but then in the nineteenth century, Darwin’s Origin of Species seemed to imply that humanity was not a special creation of God but a mammal descended from apes, and Lyell’s Principles of Geology showed that the earth was far older than the Bible intimated. The split between science and religion was complete. Though some top scientists such as Einstein believed in some sort of Creator, the scientific establishment became agnostic, if not atheistic.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are we discovering a science that proves a spiritual universe?
Cosmologists are discussing string theory, the idea that the universe is composed of vibrating strings. Professor Sean Carroll (Teaching Company Course The Higgs Boson and Beyond, 2015) says that the universe is made of fields that are composed of vibrations: a view that sounds like what the ancient Hindus called “Indra’s Net”:
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the Great God Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.”
—Phil Servedio, “The Indra’s Net: What is it?”
If true, this new theory could illuminate many ideas about how the universe acts in synergy with the individual will . . . how we’re all connected in a membrane of strings, in Indra’s net: what Edgar Cayce calls “the Law of One” (1497-1). Each of us is part of the whole, but each of us has a separate vibration. In Edgar Cayce on Vibration (2007), Kevin Todeschi (p. 5) quotes reading 121-1: “‘for, as we find, the body–each body–[is]made up of vibratory force and of cellular conditions within the physical forces, that are as small worlds or universes within themselves'” (qtd. on p. 5).
String theory operates on the macro level, but quantum physics acts on the micro-level; and here, too, are suggestions that the universe is composed of fields of consciousness. With the discovery of the Higgs Boson, “the God particle,” we may have found the glue of universal consciousness. For a simple explanation of what the Higgs Boson is and does, click here.
In Creative Synergy (2015) Bunny Paine-Clemes says,
“In quantum physics, particles become ‘entangled’ and communicate with one another even when they are separated in space, a phenomenon known as non-locality. In ancient Indian philosophy, ‘monistic idealism’ says that everything in the universe is based on the same interconnected consciousness. . . . It is possible that we may soon integrate diverse fields such as science, mysticism, and art in a “Unified Field theory” that explains phenomena of nature and art and the connection of universal patterns with individual efforts.”
There is still debate about the meaning of these new theories. Ken Wilber, for instance, does not believe that quantum physics proves a universe of consciousness; Amit Goswami believes that it does. You will need to make up your own mind on this issue
