Unifying Science and Religion

A Guest Post from Philip Comella

(this is an excerpt from The Collapse of Materialism: Visions of Science, Dreams of God, by Philip Comella)

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All scientific theories originate in the mind. The challenge of science is to align a theory with what really happens out in the world. Thus, scientific theory attempts to correlate a mental picture, created in the mind, with an external world presumed to exist outside of the mind.

Trying to Prove More than they Have to

Material scientists break one of their own fundamental precepts when devising a theory: They seek to prove more than they have to. Occam’s razor judges scientific theories according to how much they explain rather than assume. The best scientific theory would therefore rely upon no assumptions but explain the world with what we can know. Such a theory may be said to be more conservative than other theories because it explains events without recourse to unprovable beliefs and assumptions. Thus, if we can explain the world without taking for granted the independent existence of matter, space, and natural laws, we will have found a better theory than the one on which science now relies.

Standing before us is an appearance of a natural, independent world. Nothing in this appearance alone tells us that this world actually does exist independently of the mind. Scientists, however, in the big bang and related theories attempt to explain how this hypothetical independent world created itself from nothing. Thus, they create a more difficult problem than actually confronts them. They imagine an independent, material universe, freeze this thought in their minds, and then try to come up with a theory explaining how this incredible, imagined mass appeared out of nowhere. It might be easier if scientists did not make the independent-universe assumption in the first place, as this would relieve them from the impossible task of explaining how a mindless, material world arose from nothing and organized itself to the limits of mathematical order.

As all theories begin in the mind, the first step in evaluating their truth is whether the theory speaks of a world standing apart from the mind, or whether the theory speaks only of a world that the mind created. Perhaps, before believing that a theory tells us about a world independent of the mind, we should first decide which type of world more likely exists: a dream or a self-created machine.

If the mind is limited to knowing itself and, in fact, dreams the world, then the testing of scientific theories must occur within a framework in which the unconscious mind first creates physical reality (from atoms to galaxies), and then the conscious mind theorizes about its makeup.

In this new framework, we adopt a much different standpoint than material science. Forces of nature join at the core of the mind, not in the fiery blast of the big bang. Harmony found in the external world is the harmony that the mind put there. Constants of nature, such as the speed of light or the gravitational force, can be explained as functions of the mind’s infinite need for regularity, not as mere coincidences resulting from the random shuffling of mindless particles or as a peculiar feature of one special universe out of an infinite number actually created.

The Real Dream does not naïvely separate the mind from the physical world when seeking to explain it. Rather, this new science first seeks to understand the degree to which unifying the thoughts, emotions, and goals of people can improve the physical world, including their bodies, because controlling internal states is how a dreamer controls one’s dream.

In a dream, we know we can explain the source of the physical world. Material scientists, in contrast, avoid questions about how this flowing, three-dimensional movement outside of us can possibly exist. They simply take an independent world for granted and then go about their theorizing.

Materialists, in fact, demand an independent world without stop-ping to wonder whether the mind of God has already answered this wish. But once separating the mind from its hypothetical independent world—or God from its creation—material science must pay the price: physical reality left to itself has no mind, no purpose, and no means to organize itself into the mathematical harmonies that constitute nature.

In cosmology, for example, material scientists attempt to explain how the entire universe, from the farthest galaxy to your closest friend, all arose from a big bang of matter, energy, and space-time—but no mind. Likewise, in the theory of evolution, scientists tell us how all life, and therefore the mind itself, sprang out of lifeless matter through a mindless process called natural selection. In the material science worldview, the mind, whether of God or humanity, plays no part in forming the physical world. The Real Dream worldview concludes exactly the opposite: The mind of God is the origin of both the material world and the scientific theories that seek to explain the world’s operation. Scientific theorizing thus becomes much simpler in the Real Dream.

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Philip Comella is a lawyer, visionary futurist, and host of the popular radio show Conversations Beyond Science and Religion, podcast at www.webtalkradio.net. His book, The Collapse of Materialism: Visions of Science, Dreams of God, is a culmination of decades of work committed to developing a new and credible scientific paradigm to unify the physical world of science with the metaphysics of religion. He lives with his wife and daughter in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.