John O. Campbell
March 2016
This post is the concluding section of the book: Einstein's Enlightenment.
Although Albert Einstein was both a scientific genius and a
spiritual seer, his largely unappreciated virtuoso achievement may have been the unification of these two
visions, the unification of God and nature. He envisioned an essentially spiritual science; one, which progressively
reveals the nature of God.
In the more than 60 years since his death, few attempts have
been made to develop his vision. It is a testament to his foresight that he visualized
a science consistent with the spiritual revelations of the natural world and it may
only be now that scientific advances have caught up to this great insight and are able to facilitate a fuller explanation.
Richard Dawkins famously quipped that (1):
However
many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more
ways of being dead.
What he is alluding
to is the fact that being alive is dependent upon a unique form of genetic
knowledge. Most of the many possible ways of randomly varying genetic information
result in specifications for things that do not live, which do not exist.
Biological existence is a rare state and those rare states are entirely reliant
on the specifics of genetic knowledge.
As we have discussed in this book, this same
relationship between knowledge and existence is true not only in biology but
throughout nature. We may say:
Knowledge is the creator and sustainer of
all things.
Knowledge is a
component of inferential systems. It is inferred from evidence and accumulates
within memory stores. This single source of knowledge production underlies the many
forms of existence. We may say:
There
is but one universal source of knowledge.
A nested hierarchy of knowledge supports existence at many
levels. All existing forms achieve their existence by making use of knowledge available
at one or more levels in this hierarchy. Only human existence is dependent on
all levels of this knowledge hierarchy: physical, biological, neural and
cultural. This makes us unique in embodying a greater range of knowledge than
any other known existing entity. We may say:
Humans
were created by this universal source of knowledge and are the most advanced form of
knowledge yet found in the universe.
Einstein’s
Enlightenment is unique in offering a grand unification of science and
spirituality. Einstein summed up both the
necessity for unification and the inadequacy of either an insular science or
spirituality (2):
Science without religion is lame, religion
without science is blind.
Challenges to the
conclusions offered here will come from both these (often) hostile camps. Many
in the spiritual camp will argue for the necessity of the supernatural and many
in the scientific camp will argue for strict materialism.
The essential flaw
in supernatural belief is that it limits our view to mere trivialities. It is
not supported by evidence and hence is confined to the undisciplined bounds of
our narrow imaginations. If instead, we confront the growing body of scientific evidence,
we are forced to move beyond these confines and continually develop new
explanations that encompass the evidence; we are compelled to develop and explore
new spiritual vistas as God’s handiwork is revealed further.
The universe has
evolved to a sublime and wondrous state; all manner of intricate and
sophisticated entities has been brought into existence. Our untutored
imagination is not capable of directly grasping these wonders, rather they must
be pondered and our imaginations stretched to encompass them. We must puzzle
over the evidence and slowly come to infer the true marvels of nature. As the
philosopher Daniel Dennett writes (3):
There
is simply no denying the breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in
nature. Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile or
maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they
have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight
to be discovered in one of Mother Nature's creations.
It is not possible
to simply imagine such splendours. In fact, biologists have enshrined the
relative weakness of our imaginations as Orgel's Second Rule: ‘Evolution
is always cleverer than you are’.
The supernatural is
usually portrayed as ‘timeless’, having a static existence beyond the reach of
time, but this merely serves to limit its grandeur. It is not a vision capable
of evolving along with our growing knowledge.
As the supernatural
springs from our uniformed mind it tends to invent beings very much like our
mere selves. We have a particular fondness for Gods in the guise of stern
paternalistic bearded fellows who bear a strong resemblance to our
great-great-grandfathers.
These are paltry
Gods that bear little relation to the cosmic wonders revealed by science. In
contrast, the God of Einstein’s Enlightenment embraces these cosmic wonders and
provides deep spiritual insight into their nature. It is now possible to remediate our God as a
more sacred being which reconnects us with the ancient wisdom composing nature.
Indeed, through the window of science, we may view God as nature in all its awe
and splendour.
On the other hand, the essential problem
with strictly materialistic science is that it is dated; it ignores the
recently understood importance of information and knowledge. It is now clear, on all levels, that matter is orchestrated and animated by knowledge. But in Einstein's time mechanisms, without any cognitive abilities, were the prevailing metaphor for natural systems. Einstein had the insight to see beyond this to natural systems based on a deep intelligence:
rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an
intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly
insignificant reflection.
Much of the scientific theory supporting the spiritual principles of Einstein’s
Enlightenment is neither novel nor controversial. Much of it forms the
consensus of core fields of study such as biology, neural-based behaviour and
cultural evolution. It is my interpretation of these theories within a
spiritual context that may be more controversial.
For example, there
are many competing interpretations of quantum theory including the Copenhagen,
the Many World and the Quantum Darwinism interpretations. These are all
materialistic interpretations that lack a spiritual context. The interpretation
offered in Einstein’s Enlightenment is a variant of Quantum Darwinism but I
have stressed the importance of its Darwinian nature and the connection this
provides to a spiritual context involving a higher power that is the source of
existence.
It explains the
evidence equally as well as rival interpretations so we must look to other
criteria to judge its merit. When weighing these types of competing theories or
interpretations we should choose from among them based on Occam’s razor; we
should choose the simplest one, the explanation which is least complex, which
involves as few variables and assumptions as possible.
In comparison to
its rival scientific interpretations, Einstein’s Enlightenment is extremely
simple. Inferential systems, in many different guises, create all knowledge and
sustain all existence. This unified principle cuts across the many scientific disciplines
and replaces their fractured areas of study, each having its own specialist
jargon and unique concepts, with a common set of concepts and mechanisms.
The simplicity of
Einstein’s Enlightenment is almost complete. The internal model of an inferential
system predicts its existence, and the inferential system acts to minimize the
prediction error of its model. Thus, we are close to a tautology; only those
entities that act to ensure their existence may exist.
When we are faced
with competing interpretations we have some personal freedom in those we adopt.
We should be scrupulous in selecting those that explain the evidence and we
should give some weight to choosing on the basis of simplicity. Beyond that, we
have freedom to choose based on the personal clarity they provide, on the basis
of the personal insights these choices bestow upon us.
Great clarity is
often achieved during spiritual experiences of cosmic religiosity. We can but second Einstein’s hope
that his Enlightenment will ‘awaken
this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive’ (4).
References
1. Dawkins, Richard. The
Blind Watchmaker. s.l. : Norton & Company, Inc, 1986.
2. Einstein, Albert. Science and Religion. Science,
Philosophy and Religion, A Symposium. New York : the Conference on
Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of
Life, Inc., 1941.
3. Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. New
York : Touchstone Publishing, 1995.
4. Einstein, Albert. Religion and Science. 1930. New York Times magazine, http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
