Science, Religion, and the Consciousness Within

By Tim King

“One of the strands of integral theory is particularly concerned with the reintegration of spirituality and science—or science and religion/theology. The beginnings of the reuniting of science and spirit are a reflection of the new consciousness movement and point towards increasingly integrated future cultural developments.” Jennifer Gidley

Introduction:

For all our advancements, many questions persist—we wonder, for instance, what makes us who we are, both individually and as humans. Finding the answer to such a question, and living accordingly, may determine the success or failure of our species at large. For this reason I hold great hope for the unfolding discipline of integral theory and its potential to unify the best of scientific and religious thought and theory to promote a greater understanding of both the internal and external universe at large.

One of the challenges we face in such an endeavor is that as with competitive siblings, the battle for supremacy between science and religion is often contentious and currently shows little sign of waning. In the quest for supremacy, science and religion seem to be speaking past each other as they claim exclusive rights to the domains of truth and meaning.

It is illustrative of our quandary that when physics has done its work in the quantum world and biology has carefully parsed the DNA of the human genome, when neuroscience has provided us with its best theories on how brain cells function and our brightest theologians have put forth their best insights (all-too-often apart from science), many of the same deep—but at the same time elementary—questions persist.

Deepak Chopra reminds us that:

…viewed together, [science and religion] fall short of a common factor that guides every moment of daily life: consciousness. The future of spirituality will converge with the future of science when we actually know how and why we think, what makes us alive to the outer and inner world, and how we came to be so rich in creativity. Being alive is inconceivable without being conscious. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is fundamentally true, but Descartes’ maxim should be expanded to include feeling, intuition, a sense of self, and our drive to understand who we are.

For some, science alone offers the way forward. Somewhere in our cells, or at the subatomic level, or in stellar nurseries of deep space, lies the answer we seek. Philosopher Ken Wilber feels such an approach is too limited. “In that extraordinary journey from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit,” he writes,

“scientific materialism halted the journey at the very first stage, and proclaimed all subsequent developments to be nothing but arrangements of frisky dirt. Why this dirt would get right up and eventually start writing poetry was not explained.”

How then, do we approach the issue of consciousness and its place in our world and in ourselves? Should one of these, science or religion, win out? Do they constitute what Stephen Jay Gould calls “overlapping magisteria,” in which there is no clear winner and each claims its own truth? Is there some way to combine the two? What is the history of this great debate between these two competing siblings; why such animosity? How did we arrive at the place we find ourselves today: a seemingly hostile impasse between science and religion in the continuing search for truth and meaning?

The Way Things Were

In his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Wilber makes a compelling case for why (and how) science and religion should be re-integrated for the good of the planet. Wilber does so by tracing important movements within history.

Following Huston Smith’s work in comparative religion, Wilber notes that prior to the Enlightenment virtually all of the great wisdom traditions honored what is known as The Great Chain of Being (see fig. 1)

Without obsessing over the particulars, the basic concept (of this oversimplified and somewhat clumsy model) is that reality as we know it comes to us on many different levels—levels extending from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. As such, we might see it as a nested chain wherein, as Wilber puts it, “each senior level ‘envelops’ or ‘enfolds’ its junior dimensions…so that every thing and event in the world is interwoven with every other, and all are ultimately enveloped and enfolded by Spirit, by God….”

Wilber calls this dialectic “transcend and include.” While each level retains the stuff of the previous level, it adds to it, but the result is more than the sum of its parts, so to speak. The bodies of living things are made of matter, but they are more than matter. The mind is more than the body but does not exist apart from the body. The mind adds additional qualities such as thought, feeling and emotion. Likewise, beyond the mind is the level of the soul—inclusive of the mind, but with added faculties beyond the rational mind, and so on.

Subsequently, because each level has a different architecture, each also has its own particular discipline of study: physics studies matter, biology studies life-forms, psychology the mind, theology the soul, etc. And with this way of looking at the world, all things seemed relatively settled—that is, until a major shift of thinking took place in the West, giving birth to the Modern world as we know it. Things have never been the same since.

But, as with so many other developments, the birth of the Modern world was a mixed bag—not all bad, not all good…

The Quid Pro Quo of Power Games

There was a time when, in the West, the Church dominated the disciplines of theology, philosophy and science. While there were areas in which this three-fold oversight functioned harmoniously – the development of hospitals and Western medical ethics, for instance –  this hegemony of thought also led to some unfortunate occurrences, not the least of which was forcing Galileo to recant his newfound stance repositing the position of the Earth within the solar system, revolving around the sun —understandings any middle school student today now takes for granted.

Prior to the Copernican Revolution, Ptolemaic cosmology, long the dominant view in the West, placed our planet at the center of the solar system and the universe itself. We were the stationary, fixed focal point of the cosmos. Copernicus had suggested a different model, one in which the Earth moved around the sun, and Galileo’s observations bore this out, but it meant the unthinkable: the Earth moves.

To accede to the movement of the Earth would change everything, and threatened the very social order of their day. If we step back into their life-setting, we can understand why. At the time, the universe was seen as a collection of concentric crystal spheres that moved according to Pythagorean musical intervals (attuning the cosmos to the “music of the spheres”) and society and Church matched this perceived divine framework in a comprehensive hierarchy from serfs and altar boys to the King and the Pope. To accept Galileo’s findings would be to entertain the idea that their entire way of life was suspect. As Brian McLaren once remarked at a conference, “You have to hear the sound of breaking glass.”

Predictably, when these new scientific ideas began to encroach upon their story, the Church faced Galileo with a fairly easy decision: recant or die.

And so what had been the dignity of a Church seeking the integration of the world via religion, science and philosophy, became the disaster of an all-too-powerful, all-too-persuasive religious monarchy through its rebuttal of a promising new scientific advancement. And once religion opted to suppress science for the sake of its own story and tradition, the battle between science and religion had begun in earnest.

In time, as life and society—church and state—evolved, science gained the necessary freedom to do its job without any pressure from above, so to speak. But with a long memory and a sizeable chip on its shoulder, science was only too happy to return the favor by severing itself from the authority of the church.

The scientific process was able to deliver a lot in terms of our collective knowledge, and the modern world came to be characterized by scientific materialism and an obsession with technology and technological systems. Overstepping its bounds, science began dislodging ideas about the truth of value spheres—previously the domain of religion—and all-too-quickly jettisoned the ideas of God and Spirit, of morals and art along with the transcendent ideals of Aristotle’s “the good, the beautiful and the true.” These were all collapsed into scientism’s prejudicial eye for reducing the search for truth to the confines of matter itself without remorse for the denial of any reality beyond.

Jean Gebser (1905-73), who coined the phrase “integral consciousness” to describe ways of thinking that might move us beyond modern rationalism, calls this move on the part of science a flatland approach: for the first time in history, the idea of stuffing everything into the singular subject of matter had ‘flattened’ a world previously nuanced in its search for what it perceived as the higher values of “the good, the beautiful, and the true.”

And so it was, writes Wilber, that “According to scientific materialism, the Great Nest of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit could be thoroughly and rudely reduced to systems of matter alone; and matter–whether in the material brain or material process systems—would account for all of reality, without remainder. Gone was mind and gone was soul and gone was Spirit—gone, in fact, was the entire Great Chain, except for its pitiful bottom rung [matter].”

If religion once overstepped its bounds in a disastrous attempt to rule over science, science has since overstepped its bounds in a disastrous attempt to rule over or even obliterate religion. Nevertheless, this has not been altogether successful inasmuch as science is left with its own set of quandaries. As integral theorist Steve McIntosh observes, “Consciousness doesn’t fit into the conventional scientific worldview because it is nonphysical, and thus the fact that its ‘reality’ can’t be adequately explained by science has been somewhat of an embarrassment.” Additionally, it seems, the idea that all phenomena can be reduced to various laws of physics is, in itself, a metaphysical claim, requiring its own step of faith.

Back on the other side, however, this affords little reason for religion to gloat, for if those of us who follow the Christ story choose the religious path of faith alone, we do so at our own peril; we cannot simply ignore the findings of science. Quantum physics and neurobiology are taking us deeper into the reality of our existence, even including the role consciousness would/could/might play in how we not only perceive the world, but actually help to create it.

For religion to close its eyes to science and its awe-inspiring discoveries would be tantamount to opting for a faith void of many of the facts that could (and should) be used to bolster such a faith. Alternately, for science to insist on collapsing the entire range of human experience into a flatland materialism, closing itself off to anything other than matter alone with nothing at work beyond it, would be to turn a deaf ear to a world bent on a never-ending search for meaning—one that refuses to settle for less than its indefatigable sense that ‘there is more’ than meets the eye.

Perhaps it is again time to embrace the roles of both science and religion, and we can do so by finding ways to bracket each within their particular domains of expertise in the hope of bringing forward the best each has to offer.

The Creative Power of Observation

If we take from science a constellation of methodologies that offer knowledge about the external domain of things, and from  religion/spirituality/mysticism practices that offer us purchase on the internal domain of things, we might recognize the large—and common—role that observation plays in each. In integral theory, it is axiomatic that higher consciousness affords the subject higher levels of observation—a key element of both science and religion.

On the religious side of the equation, Jesus said, “As a person thinks in their heart, so they are.” This is no mere Sunday homiletic. It is a mysterious affirmation of a creative Presence within—one capable of giving birth to an evolving, Self-created internal universe largely based upon conscious observation. But can and should this spiritual (metaphysical) principle also be coupled with the best of scientific findings?

As an example of scientific conscious observation, Max Bohn (1926) demonstrated that unobserved particles exist only as waves of probability; until they’re observed they have no real existence. In this light it would seem that science, too, has much to gain in making room for a type of internal consciousness that observes… the very sort of observation wisdom teachers such as Jesus would claim lay at the base of all interior evolution. If so, we’re left to wonder and debate whether such an observing consciousness goes beyond mere matter.

Dr. Robert Lanza, speaking as a scientist and a person of faith, writes:

…after studying neurobiology…objects, even our own bodies, are nothing but representations in our mind—we can’t see anything through the bone surrounding the brain. We assume there’s a universe ‘out there’ separate from what we are, and that we play no role in its appearance. Yet since the 1920’s, experiments have shown just the opposite; results do depend on whether anyone is observing [and that] quantum reality extends into the macroscopic world we live in [however, an underlying problem persists because] we’ve ignored a critical component of the universe, shunted it out of the way because we didn’t know what to do with it. This component is consciousness—us, the great observer.

What Dr. Lanza privileges is a ‘perceptual’ consciousness that stands over-and-against current neurobiological models in which consciousness is primarily dependent on the brain (e.g., matter alone) for its existence.

This is an important issue and one that certainly warrants additional attention. As Gidley remarks, “The evolution discourse [has] remained dominated by a physicalist form of biology, such that significant pioneering works on the evolution of consciousness, that were inclusive of spiritual dimensions, were ignored, dismissed or marginalized by the science of the day (Aurobindo, 2000; Bergson, 1911/1944; Gebser, 1970/2005; Neumann,, 1954/1995; Steiner, 1926/1996…Teilhard de Chardin, 1959/2002, 1959/2004).”

When it comes to the issue of human consciousness and its role in both the evolution of the internal and external domains, is it possible that religion and science are edging closer toward one another in a somewhat parallel pursuit of truth and a greater understanding of the basis or origin of life?

As science leads to greater discovery and the religious provides us with more and more robust philosophical models, we become ever more hopeful that the answer to that question is ‘yes.’

A Stable Brain—An Evolving Mind

A funny thing happened on the way to the Modern world… while in the past ten thousand years the human brain has undergone imperceptible change, the mind has experienced inordinate growth, expansion, added insight and increased awareness. Scientifically, we could call this the mind/body problem; it presents the flatlanders with a significant hurdle: Clearly something greater than the base firing of neurons in a material brain is at work.

Each of us is aware of a one-of-a-kind inner life or interior world that makes us uniquely who we are.  And it is this sense of self-awareness that creates the breadth, depth and expansiveness of our experiences—of our own human subjectivity. According to McIntosh, this is what human consciousness is, it is “our experiential awareness, consisting of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and our personal sense of identity.”

The struggle between religion and science occurs because consciousness is clearly not a substance; it is neither material nor purely biological. And yet it is also not an empty vacuum. As well, while consciousness resides within the physicality of the human body, it appears also to be interconnected (or at least highly influenced by) with society at large. In other words, we seem to evolve both personally and culturally.

Moreover, science is now discovering that some kind of consciousness (no matter how primitive) seems to pervade the entire universe—even to the extent that some string theorists suggest that quarks themselves may demonstrate some sort of will or volition, as if they actually feel all the known forces of nature.

Consciousness, it seems, is an all-pervasive force or presence within our universe. Wondrously, human consciousness stands above all other forms of consciousness in its ability to evolve apart from any on-going change or development of its biological host. Why might this be?

British biologist Rupert Sheldrake describes the seemingly miraculous evolution of nature through what he terms “morphic resonance,” an idea that not only holds great promise for understanding the interior evolution of the individual, but also the global development (evolution) of cultures and societies as a whole.

Sheldrake developed the idea of morphic resonance through the observation of training experiments performed with rats. Sheldrake noted that when a group of rats was taught to perform a specific task, their siblings learned it in half the time. Additionally, subsequent generations learned in half the time as well, even if their parents did not learn the skill in the first place.

From this, Sheldrake began to develop a theory that knowledge may be stored outside of our space-time existence in what he calls “morphic fields.” In Sheldrake’s theory, our brains basically act as satellite receptors tuning into the universal resonance of a collective knowledge surrounding us. Could such a theory help to explain the seemingly rapid development of human consciousness?

As Jim Marion observes, our earliest human ancestors (we’ll say 300,000 years ago) had an ‘archaic’ consciousness; 30,000 years ago humans exhibited a ‘magical’ consciousness; 3,000 years ago humankind operated at the level of a ‘mythical’ consciousness and by 300 years ago a ‘rational’ consciousness had emerged. Today in the West, if properly educated, a child of 15 years of age will possess a fully developed ‘rational’ consciousness.

The evolutionary development of consciousness seems evident. Here is the journey to the rational mind in the lifetime of our species: 300,000 years—30,000 years—3,000 years—300 years… 15 years!

Consciousness, it seems, is exploding. And not only could this be good news for the people and cultures of the present—it may be the only hope for the survival of our planet and tomorrow’s species at large!

The Importance of Integrating Interior and Exterior Domains

For years we at Presence International have spoken about the integral nature of all things and how the biblical story (the fulfilled biblical story) reveals that any perceived gap between us and God, self, culture or nature is a human construct and not a reflection of the reality of the completed story wherein God is known as “all in all” (1 Cor. 15).

These core interior and exterior domains are descriptive of the realms also known as the objective, subjective and the intersubjective or nature, self and culture. Again, while science may protest that the subjective and intersubjective domains deal with that which is beyond matter (e.g., the objective) and, therefore, are nonexistently metaphysical—as previously discussed, the claim of science that nothing beyond the material world exists (or is real) is, itself, a metaphysical claim as it also ultimately stands in the category of belief, apart from a concretion of scientific evidence.

Regardless of whether we are approaching the realms of the objective, subjective or intersubjective from the vantage point of science or religion, we are dealing with some degree of a metaphysical truth claim. However, once we look at what these categories reveal to us, at most it is what might be described as soft metaphysics (for it does not seem much of a stretch to acknowledge that not only matter, but clearly life, culture and human history all evolve as well).

In sum, what we hope to witness by employing various models of integral theory is the relational dynamics between the ongoing evolutionary stages of the interior and exterior domains of individuals, culture and consciousness. From this we will examine the basis of human thought, emotion, perspective and the potential cultural and evolutional impact that might proceed from such insights.

Something is happening in our day that is both intentional and consequential for our planet and we citizens depending upon it. There are signs within both science and religion that there is more (much more) at work among us than our present theologies and theories postulate. Something is revealing Itself in both the micro and macrocosmic domains; something that is whole, integrated, aware and beckoning us to see and possibly mimic.

The domains of the objective, subjective and intersubjective are not distinct and separate, but are whole and integrated. Cultures are advancing. Consciousness is expanding. But still the question of the hour remains: Can such an awakening keep pace with, and even advance beyond, the collective insanity of a world seemingly bent on disintegration and destruction?

Is the great upheaval of our day and the universal threat of terrorism in all its madness a sign of the end, or that we are about to experience an evolutionary leap that will forever set humankind on a course of peace, justice and abundance for all?

These are the great questions of our time. Through an ongoing discourse in integral theory and the planetary potential it holds, we are hopeful that abundance beyond belief is at hand… an abundance beyond the beliefs presently witnessed by either science or religion.

Consciousness is expanding. And with it, a new and fuller understanding of Presence is arising.

Sources:

Jim Marion, The Death of the Mythic God (Charlottesville, Hampton Roads Publishing Co., Inc., 2004).

Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (New York, Random House, Inc., 1998).

_________. A Theory of Everything (Boston, Shambala Publications, 2000).

Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and The Future of Evolution (St. Paul, Paragon House, 2007).

Jennifer Gidley, The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative: An Integration of Integral Views. Integral Review 5, 2007.

Deepak Chopra: Consciousness and the End of the War Between Science and Religion (6/26/10) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/consciousness-and-the-end_b_620133.html

Robert Lanza, MD.: What Are We? New Experiments Suggest We’re Not Purely Physical (6/30/10) http://huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/science-spirituality_b_624292.html.