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Herman Wouk on Science & Religion

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Herman Wouk

Author, ‘The Winds of War’ and ‘War and Remembrance’

The Language God Talks: The Back Story

Henrik Ibsen once wrote of the “life-lie” of authors, the resolve to create some day an enduring masterwork, the Big One that never gets written. For decades I harbored a title, A Child’s Garden of God, for a book telling of my religious faith in a frame of modern science, not necessarily a Big One, but a work I felt born to give the world. Not being a scientist at all, I was a fool to dream of accomplishing this, but novelists are fools whose dreams every now and then take form, see the light, and last.

My notes on A Child’s Garden of God go back to the 1960s. As they piled up I would comfort myself by recalling what Einstein said when asked how he worked: “How do I work? Igrope.” If that was really true, I thought, there might yet be a shred of hope for an aging storyteller getting nowhere, year by accelerating year, with his dream of writing A Child’s Garden of God. At last I decided either to do something about it, or give it up as my life-lie. I first intruded on Professor I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard, who taught the History of Science for 60 years, and told him, in an ad lib farrago lasting perhaps 20 minutes, what I had in mind. “Wow, big,” he commented. “I don’t agree, of course, I think it’s all stochastic, but I’d like to see how you do it.” Years later, still haunted byGarden, I intruded on the famed theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson at Princeton, and harangued him about the project. He heard me out and soberly nodded, saying, “It can work.”

More years passed, more notes piled up. At last I met the man who got me to start writing the book — do or die — Maarten Schmidt of Caltech, who discovered the quasars. At a lunch with him and another Caltech astronomer I knew well, Jewish and utterly secular, I poured out the still-unwritten Garden. My Jewish friend appeared indulgently amused by the idea. Maarten Schmidt listened with an intense far-off look. When I fell silent he said, “It can be done, but it is very, very hard.”

Those words became my mantra. I set out to write something brief, truthful, and readable on this gravest of themes. It took me four years and 40,000 words, based on notes running to some 30 file folders. The book starts with three chapters on science, followed by five on my faith. The science took most of the time, as I battled my ignorance all the way, making spectacular detours and blind alleys. One was a “thought experiment” in which Edwin Hubble himself appeared in my workshop and conducted me, a little like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, outward into space among the stars, horizon by receding horizon, to the misty margins of the universe. I thought this was pretty good stuff. My almost infallible wife read a draft of this first part. “Well, it’s all right,” she said, “but you’d better get rid of that spook.” Half a year shot.

Two epigraphs frame The Language God Talks. In one Richard Feynman declares that in the view of religion, God created the universe so as to watch us struggle for good and evil, and “the stage is too big for the drama.” In the second the Israeli author S. Y. Agnon cautions, “Remember, Herman Wouk, we are storytellers. Stories, pictures, people! No thoughts!” So it is that I devote three chapters to Feynman’s Stage, five to his Drama, and try to do it all with Agnon’s stories, pictures, and people. If a thought or two drifted in, I couldn’t help it. The task totally engaged me. I never tired, never once thought of giving it up. The masses of discarded pages are in my archives, there to remain as silent evidence that it was very, very hard. With some trepidation I sent the finished manuscript to Freeman Dyson and Maartin Schmidt, among others. I. Bernard Cohen had long since left the Stage. For Dyson, whose critique was bruising and bracing, the book had worked in its fashion. Schmidt’s response started with two words in boldface: “You succeeded.” I will remember those words while I last.

But what of A Child’s Garden of God, the title I cherished for so long? Well, when my almost infallible wife read the second part, she said, “Fine, but I don’t like your title. The book is about science and religion, and the title should say so.” I bethought me of my first meeting with Feynman, when he asked me if I knew calculus, and I admitted I didn’t. “You’d better learn it,” he said. “It’s the language God talks.” This casual remark by a towering scientist, an aggressively secular Jew, strikes the modern note with a resounding agnostic clang. The Language God Talks acknowledges my lack and offers something of what I have learned of His other language, which I know pretty well: the Bible.

Herman Wouk’s new book, The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, was published in April 2010 by Little, Brown & Company.

Gregg Braden on Science & Spirituality

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Deep Wisdom: The Marriage of Science and Spirituality

by Gregg Braden on May 30, 2011

During the last years of the Cold War, I had a front row seat as a senior systems designer in the defense industry to one of the most frightening times in the history of the world, and the thinking that led to it. During the last years of the most potentially lethal, yet undeclared, war in human history, the superpowers of the United States and the former Soviet Union did something that seems unthinkable to any rationally minded person today. They spent the time, energy, and human resources to develop and stockpile somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 nuclear weapons—a combined arsenal with the power to microwave the Earth, and everything on it, many times over.

The rationale for such an extreme effort stems from a way of thinking that has dominated much of the modern world for the last 300 years or so, since the beginning of the scientific era. It’s based in the false assumptions of scientific thinking that suggest we’re somehow separate from the Earth, separate from one another, and that the nature that gives us life is based upon relentless struggle and survival of the strongest. Fortunately, new discoveries have revealed that each of these assumptions is absolutely false. Unfortunately, however, there is a reluctance to reflect such new discoveries in mainstream media, traditional classrooms and conventional textbooks. In other words, we’re still teaching our young people the false assumptions of an obsolete way of thinking based on struggle, competition, and war.

While we no longer face the nuclear threat that we did in the 1980s, the thinking that made the Cold War possible is still in place. This fact is vital to us all right now for one simple reason: For the first time in human history the future of our entire species rests upon the choices of a single generation—us—and the choices are being made within a small window of time—now. The best minds of our time are telling us that we must act quickly to avert the clear and present danger of a host of new crises that are converging in a “bottleneck” of time covering the first years of the 21st Century.

The journal Scientific American released a special edition (vol. 293, no. 3, September 2005) to bring the world up to speed on the critical situation we find ourselves in today. The title, Crossroads for Planet Earth, says it all. The way we solve the simultaneous crises—such as our response to climate change, the unsustainable and growing levels of extreme poverty, the emergence of new diseases, the growing shortages of food and fresh drinking water, the growing chasm between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the unsustainable demand for energy—will chart the destiny, or seal the fate of our global family that is estimated to reach a staggering 8 billion by 2025.

The key here is that the way we address the greatest crises of human history is based on the way we think of ourselves and the world. Clearly, the thinking that led to the war and suffering of the 20th century is not the thinking that we want the delicate choices of our survival based upon!

Developing a new level of thinking is precisely what we need to do today, and the magnitude of crises that face us may prove to be the catalyst for doing just that! The emerging bridge between the sciences that tell us how the universe works, and the spiritual traditions that give such knowledge meaning in our lives, plays a vital role in the new thinking that heads off the darkest possibilities of our future. But while the crises of the moment may be the catalyst for such a shift in thinking, something even deeper is emerging.

The new shift in thinking is the gateway to human transformation. And because of the sheer number of people involved in the shift, and the growing magnitude of the crises that are driving us to change the way we think, we are standing on the threshold of human transformation at a level unlike anything ever before known on Earth.

The spiritual traditions that I’m describing are the core principles of ancient and time-tested understandings—principles now confirmed by 20th century science that include the interconnected nature of all things, the power of the human heart to positively influence the magnetic fields of the earth and all life, and the cyclic nature of life, climate, civilization and change. The spiritual traditions of our ancestors got these principles right and embodied them at the core of their lives in their time. It’s the marriage of these holistic principles with the best science of today that helps us to tip the scales of life, balance, and peace in our favor.

While the specifics of spiritual principles may vary from tradition to tradition, the essence of their message does not. It’s simple, direct and states that we live in a world where everything has meaning, and is meaningful to everything else. What happens in the oceans has meaning for the climate of the mountains. What happens in a river has meaning for the life that depends upon the river. The choices that you and I make as we express our beliefs in our living rooms and around family dinner tables have meaning for the people in our immediate lives, as well as for those connected through the coherence fields of the human heart living halfway around the Earth.

By crossing the traditional boundaries that define the science, religion, and the history of our past, we are shown the power of a larger, integrated, and holistic worldview. I cannot help but believe that our destiny and fate as a species are intimately entwined with our willingness to accept the Deep Wisdom of a spiritually based science. It’s all about the way we think of ourselves, our relationship to the Earth and to one another. When the facts become clear, our choices become obvious.

from:    http://ervinlaszlo.com/forum/2011/05/30/deep-wisdom-marriage-of-science-spirituality/

News of Higgs Boson Soon?

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Could a Higgs boson announcement be imminent from the LHC?

05 December 11

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider could be getting an early Christmas present: the Higgs boson. According to the latest rumours, scientists at the LHC are seeing a signal that could correspond to a Higgs particle with a mass of 125 GeV (a proton is slightly less than 1 GeV).

Public talks are scheduled to discuss the latest results from Atlas and CMS, two of the main LHC experiments, on 13 December. This follows one day after a closed-door Cern council meeting where officials will get a short preview of the findings, whatever they may be.

“Chances are high (but not strictly 100%) that the talks will either announce a (de facto or de iure) discovery or some far-reaching exclusion that will be really qualitative and unexpected,” wrote theoretical physicist Lubos Motl on his blog.

Motl also mentioned that an internal email sent to the Cern community suggests that results on the elusive Higgs — which is required under the Standard Model of particle physics to provide mass to different particles — will be inconclusive. This could mean that the finding is below the five-sigma threshold needed to definitively declare a discovery in physics.

But if the rumours are true, and the Higgs has been seen at 125 GeV, it could bolster the idea that there is physics beyond the Standard Model that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. A 125 GeV Higgs is lighter than predicted under the simplest models and would likely require more complex theories, such as supersymmetry, which posits the existence of a heavier partner to all known particle

from:   http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/05/higgs-boson-imminent

Cloning Mammoths

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Mammoth cloning project given boost by bone marrrow find

05 December 11

After a well preserved mammoth thigh bone was found in Siberia this summer, a joint research group from Japan and Russia has made plans to start cloning the long-extinct mammal from next year, Japan’s Kyodo News has reported.

The gigantic leg bone was discovered in permafrost soil in Siberia this August.Kyodo News‘ report suggests that climate change has led to frozen ground in eastern Russia thawing out, potentially heralding a coming boom in mammoth discoveries.

The thigh bone is special because it contains bone marrow that has been preserved in the ice. The nuclei of the marrow cells could potentially be extracted and put inside egg cells from an elephant — which are close genetic cousins of the mammoth — to create embryos with mammoth DNA.

The researchers — from the Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University — would then plant the embryos into elephant wombs and then deliver a baby mammoth.

The iconic woolly mammoth, which went extinct some five to ten thousand years ago, has been a candidate for cloning for many years and researchers have worked tirelessly to find DNA that’s preserved well-enough to clone.

The complete body of a one-month-old female woolly mammoth calf was discovered in 2007, and seemed promising. However, Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute dismissed suggestions that the mammoth could be cloned and used to breed a live mammoth.

If this joint Japanese and Russian team is successful, it won’t be the first time that an extinct animal has been resurrected by cloning. In January 2009, the recently extinct Pyrenean ibex was brought back to life. DNA from the ibex’s skin samples were used to replace genetic material in eggs from domestic goats. Sadly, the newborn cloned ibex died within minutes of its birth due to breathing difficulties

from:    http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/05/mammoth-clone

Energy Healing and Science

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Scientific Support for Energy Medicine

Healing_Touchbiglarge.jpgThe following is excerpted from Healing Touch: Essential Energy Medicine for Yourself and Others, available from Sounds True.

 

“Happiness is what we feel when our biochemicals of emotion, the neuropeptides and their receptors, are open and flowing freely. . . . It is a scientific fact that we can feel what others feel.The oneness of all life is based on this simple reality. Our molecules of emotion are all vibrating together.” –research biologist Candace Pert, author of the bestselling bookMolecules of Emotion.

 

Because we human beings are so interrelated from an energetic perspec­tive, there is a refreshing optimism in energy-medicine approaches and in the practice of Healing Touch. In essence, the presence of a focused, intentional practitioner facilitates healing and movement toward well-being for someone who is in distress. The work offers a beacon of hope in relieving physical and/or emotional pain. It serves as a fine complement to conventional medical interventions and is an essential component for preventive and integrative healing practices.

Current science does not yet fully understand all the dynamics involved in achieving the effects noted in energy medicine, but relief from human suffering abounds in the clinical reports of HT practitioners. Even though the exact mechanisms are not yet fully known, use of this well-recognized practice is sought out and welcomed.

Take, for example, people who are very anxious about diagnostic tests or specific medical procedures. It’s common knowledge that anxiety and worry by themselves can increase pain symptoms and block the flow of biochemicals essential for a procedure to be effective. Psychological concerns and expec­tations, either positive or negative, decidedly help to shape outcomes. The presence of a caring HT practitioner can help promote much-needed relaxation as patients think of new ways to anticipate a procedure and focus on positive outcomes.

In this chapter, we’ll consider the growing scientific evidence for seeing the human body as a series of vibrating electromagnetic fields that can be positively influenced without the invasion of foreign substances such as chemicals or drugs. We begin with the realities of current medical practices that point to the vibrational nature of the body for diagnosis and treatment. We’ll continue with a brief discussion of modern physics with its views toward unlimited, open-ended possibilities as opposed to ideas of direct cause and effect. Emerging concepts in neurosciences such as neuroplasticity will be explored with an eye to the vast capabilities of the human mind to influence health and wholeness. And, perhaps most exciting of all, we’ll look at the new biology that demonstrates the direct effect of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors on cellular messaging and expression of genetic material.

Scientists describe their understanding of the world through theoretical models. The concept of human energies as a vibratory matrix of nonmaterial structures, such as those described in the previous chapter, gives a useful starting place. These vibratory structures seem to interact with identified physical structures such as cells, fluids, and organs to facilitate the flow of information throughout the body. We might think of this informational system as a flowing river that can be impeded where there are blocks to its flow pathways. Such impeded areas can cause disturbance, congestion, and subsequent illness in our bodies. The concept of energy-flow patterns is thus a useful model for understanding human illness and how we might alleviate further suffering. For example, determining how energy flows in a given part of the body is already a part of conventional medical diagnostics. As we shall learn, medicine is becom­ing more and more energetic in practice, even though the mechanisms for its effects are not yet fully explainable. Other more effective models, theories, and inferences will undoubtedly emerge as science evolves.

 

Vibrational Medicine

Practitoners of Western medicine are becoming more interested in understanding how energy moves in the body as medical science considers the electrical and magnetic qualities of the human organism. For diagnosis, a variety of non­invasive scanners can now give feedback about molecular exchanges within soft tissue. Sophisticated scans such as CT (computerized tomography), PET (positron emission tomography), and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), show areas of constriction or obstruction that interfere with healthy flow patterns within cells and organ tissue.

The EKG (electrocardiogram) and the EEG (electroencephalogram) measure the electrical outputs of the heart and brain and then compare those outputs to normal electrical outputs in healthy persons. Newer tools, such as the EMC (electromagnetic cardiogram) and EMEG (electromagnetic encephalogram), additionally measure the magnetic outputs of heart and brain, which give even more accurate details of deviations from normal function in these vital organs. Technology using SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) allows scientists to measure the human biofield and evaluate relative bodily strengths.

Medical treatments are also becoming less invasive as comprehension of the electromagnetic nature of the body increases. Orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker began to explore the electrical circuitry of the human body to treat complex bone fractures that did not heal with known methods in the late 1960s. He identified numerous direct currents of electricity that flowed throughout the body and found they reversed their flow pattern or direction at the site of an injury. When this “current of injury” was supported with a small amount of electrical stimulation, bone healing occurred.

Over the next several decades, Dr. Becker mapped out the energetic grids of the body and surmised that the energy system paralleled the nervous system in providing the communication of information to all parts of the organism.  Unlike the nervous system, however, this system is nonmaterial and electro­magnetic in nature. Thus, humans and higher life forms have dual information systems: 1) the nervous system with its many physical components such as nerve cells, dendrites, axons, and the spinal cord, and 2) the subtle energies that are electromagnetic in form, which I like to call the human vibrational matrix. These dual systems seem to augment each other to ensure optimal functioning. If a part of the body is diseased or surgically removed, other cells learn to take over missing functions as much as possible through our energetic information networks.

Almost every day, new concepts for stimulating electromagnetic areas within the body are being developed to treat illness. Current energy-related treatments include high-frequency sound waves to break up kidney stones, electricity to relieve pain and shrink tumors, focused radiation to pinpoint and destroy specific cancers, electromagnetic fields to accelerate bone healing, laser surgeries to minimize tissue damage, and magnetic fields to alleviate inflammation associated with arthritis. Further explorations in modern medicine continue to study the presence of differing electromagnetic frequencies within the body to find new and more effective treatments.

The energy resources of the body can also bring about balance within body and mind to prevent illness or further disability. Working with HT is known to bring about relaxation, relief from anxiety, a sense of well-being, and enhanced wound healing and immune system function. (These effects are confirmed by ongoing and extensive research cited in the next chapter.) Because of these effects, many physicians are now encouraging their patients to explore energy therapies as part of treatment planning.

 

Quantum Interrelationships

to read more, go to:   http://www.realitysandwich.com/scientific_support_energy_medicine

Science & Spirituality

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My Take: Science and spirituality should be friends

Editor’s Note: Deepak Chopra is founder of the Chopra Foundation and a senior scientist at the Gallup Organization. He has authored over 60 books, including The Soul of Leadership, which The Wall Street Journal called one of five best business books about careers.

By Deepak Chopra, Special to CNN

For most people, science deserves its reputation for being opposed to religion.

I’m not thinking of the rather noisy campaign by a handful of die-hard atheists to demote and ridicule faith.

I’m thinking instead of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution has proved victorious over the Book of Genesis and its story of God creating the universe in seven days. Since then, God has been found wanting when measured against facts and data. With no data to support the existence of God, there is also no reason for religion and science to close the gap between them.

Yet the gap has indeed been closing.

Religion and spirituality didn’t go away just because organized religion has been losing its hold, as suggested by showing decades of  declining church attendance in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge. One is the trend to seek God outside the church. This has given rise to a kind of spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one’s consciousness.

If God is to be found anywhere, it is inside the consciousness of each person. Even in the Christian West we have the assurance of Jesus that the kingdom of heaven is within, while the Old Testament declares, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The other trend is a growing interest by scientists in questions about consciousness

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/15/my-take-science-and-spirituality-should-be-friends/

Scientific Study adopts unrealistic stance on extraterrestrial contact

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From the article:

What “A Scenario Analysis” fails to do is to actively engage with the more than abundant evidence that humanity is currently being visited by extraterrestrial life. In the abstract, the authors categorically state: “humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence.” Yet there is an incredible amount of physical evidence concerning sightings of UFOs under intelligent control displaying flight characteristics far above what is known to be possible in conventional or even classified aerospace research. In addition, there are also numerous whistleblower reports concerning crashes of UFOs, and retrievals of extraterrestrial biological entities. Finally, there are also first hand witness reports of contacts, both voluntary and involuntary, with extraterrestrial entities. Rather than acknowledge the existence of such evidence, the scientific study chooses to dismiss it all together adopting the well known SETI perspective that no extraterrestrial contact has yet been made.

Read more at Exopolitics Institute

13 Year Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence to Increase Solar Power Output by 50%

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After studying how trees branch in a very specific way, Aidan Dwyer created a solar cell tree that produces 20-50% more power than a uniform array of photovoltaic panels. His impressive results show that using a specific formula for distributing solar cells can drastically improve energy generation. The study earned Aidan a provisional U.S patent – it’s a rare find in the field of technology and a fantastic example of how biomimicry can drastically improve design.

Read more: 13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence