Secrets of The Lost Symbol

by Daniel Burstein

  Science and Religion Face the Beyond

  by Marcelo Gleiser

  Were Robert Langdon an actual person, he would certainly know Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and a likely soul mate. Gleiser, too, has an appreciation of the Ancient Mysteries and, as is clear from his essay that follows, seeks to give new life to a time before the matter-spirit duality was broken in the wake of the rise of modern science.

  Gleiser is concerned primarily with the interface between the universe as a whole and particle physics as well as the origins of life on earth and the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. In his first book, the award-winning The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang, Gleiser addressed two fundamental questions: Where does the universe and everything in it come from? And how do religion and science explain the riddle of creation? His current book is A Tear at the Edge of the Universe: Searching for the Meaning of Life in an Imperfect Cosmos.

  Gleiser, who is active in the science-religion debate, enthusiastically took up our request to comment on The Lost Symbol. He starts with a thought-provocation: TLS, he says, was for him a sad book, in the sense that page after page of it was all about loss. It is a loss, he then explains, that came with the Enlightenment’s drive “toward the complete rationalization of knowledge, the eradication of anything mystic.” Gleiser also discusses the novel’s hoped-for reawakening of humankind’s inner divinity, and the proposition that scientists could become “the prophets of a new age of enlightenment.”

  If there is nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

  —Carl Sagan

  We spend our lives torn between light and darkness, between the bliss of love and the pain of loss. Herein lies the great drama of being human, to have an awareness of the passage of time, to know that our existence is bracketed between a beginning and an end. We know that we will die; we know that our loved ones will die. The pain of seeing someone you hold dearly in your heart depart from this world never heals. I lost my mother when I was six, and I can honestly say that the loss doesn’t go away. It transforms, it takes on different meanings as time passes. But the void remains, in one way or another. And it must be filled somehow. Much of human creativity, of our art, our faith, our science, is an attempt to deal with our bracketed existence.

  “We are builders,” Dan Brown’s protaganist Robert Langdon thinks in The Lost Symbol. “We are creators.” And so, as Langdon suggests, if we can’t live forever, maybe our deeds can. Or, perhaps, we do live forever, just not with our mortal material shells.

  As I read The Lost Symbol, the same thought kept coming back to me, page after page: this is a book about loss, about the often-desperate human struggle to cope with it. There is heart-wrenching human drama brought about by the loss of loved ones and by the harsh antagonisms of family life. There is the loss of religious faith brought about by modern science, and the resulting spiritual void that haunts so many. There is the loss of trust in our institutions and fellow human beings, resulting in the widespread belief in all sorts of secret conspiracies. At the core of Brown’s narrative lies the split between science and religion and his hope that a possible compromise can be forged through a new kind of mystical science called “noetic science”: scientists turned into the prophets of a new age of enlightenment.

  Before the advent of modern science, things were simpler. Most people in the world believed in life after death. For Christians and Muslims, there was the day of judgment and the promise of resurrection and eternal life; for Jews, the eternity of the soul; for Hindus, there were the cycles of reincarnation, or “atma,” that continue on until the soul matures and tires of material pleasures, finally joining spiritual eternity with “Brahman,” the One. Different creeds would state it differently, but most would uphold the theory that our few decades of mortal life, anchored to a frail shell of flesh and bone, are not the whole story. Most would also claim that the soul, being a part of God, is eternal. So, if we are carriers of a part of God, we are all gods, at least potentially. “It’s not our physical bodies that resemble God, it’s our minds,” says Peter Solomon, the man of wisdom in TLS. When our bodies die, our drop of divinity remains. Until the end of the Renaissance, immortality was a simple matter of faith: for the believer, existence was not bracketed between a beginning and an end. Religion freed man from the chains of time. For many, it still does.

  During the mid-seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes brought this mind-body dualism to the heart of philosophy. He saw the body as having extension (that is, occupying a volume in space) and being material, and the mind as having no extension and being immaterial. This split, although pleasing from a theological perspective (the mind could then easily be equated with a divine-like soul), caused a problem: how would something immaterial (the mind) interact with something material (the brain)?

  Remarkably, the same mystery would reappear at the foundation of one of the greatest physical theories of all time, Isaac Newton’s universal theory of gravity, proposed in 1687. The theory describes quantitatively how gravity works as an attractive force between any two chunks of matter, which weakens with the square of the distance between them. Newton, whom the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes called “not the first of the age of reason [but] the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians,” puzzled over the nature of this force. How could the influence of one mass upon another—the sun upon the earth, for example—be felt across the vastness of space? When asked about the nature of gravity by Oxford theologian Richard Bentley, Newton replied:

  It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact. . . . That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter . . . without the mediation of anything else . . . is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.

  And so, according to Newton, gravity, the engine that propels the cosmos forward in time, also carries within it the mystery of the matter-spirit duality. Science could go only so far in explaining nature through the actions of matter upon matter. John Maynard Keynes was indeed correct in calling Newton the “last of the magicians,” and Brown explores this notion brilliantly in his exciting book. Newton did believe in the wisdom of the ages, in the existence of secrets too precious to be revealed to the common man. “The event of things predicted many ages before will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by Providence,” he wrote.

  The science-religion split that characterizes the modern world happened after Newton, the unintended consequence of the success of his physical theories. During the eighteenth century the rational approach to the study of Nature became the only accepted game in town. “Enlightenment” was seen as the complete rationalization of knowledge, the eradication of anything mystic. A “man of science” became synonymous with someone who would consider only material explanations for natural phenomena. The joining of natural and supernatural causes, that to men like Descartes and Newton was a given, became anathema to the enlightened man. The “wisdom of the ancients” became a historical curiosity, ridiculed by the new scientific way of thinking. As a result, people of faith became disoriented and felt threatened. Some joined secret societies where the ancient mystical practices were still celebrated. Others retreated into blind orthodoxy, negating scientific advances. Science was “stealing God from them,” as someone, to my horror, once accused me of doing during a live interview in Brazil. This angry attitude toward science is easy to understand: if God is gone, so is the promise of immortality. What can science offer in return?

  Not immortality. Of course, there is medicine and the ever-increasing life expectancy. There are the comforts and gadgets of modern technology.
There are wondrous revelations of worlds too small and too far to be seen with the naked eye, atoms and subatomic particles, black holes, the Big Bang, realities that no one could have dreamed of. But the natural course of science is to drive an ever-deepening wedge between the natural and the supernatural, leaving modern man in a state of deep confusion. Where does love fit in all this? Where does loss fit? Are we all going to end as we began, as stardust dispersed through the cold, interstellar void? If that’s the case, science doesn’t offer a very redeeming view of the end of life. . . .

  Brown offers a solution: mind, the last frontier. We know so little of how the brain works, of how a (huge) collection of neurons is able to create and sustain our awareness, our notion of self. So many mystical traditions have tapped into the human mind and found tremendous powers. Could Descartes’ and Newton’s ideas of an immaterial substance be right? There are so many accounts of visions, of miracles, of reaching nirvana, of mind-expanding drugs, of near-death experiences, all pointing toward new realms of existence not yet known to science. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, indeed, we were all, much more than we are, capable of tremendous feats? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were all gods?

  This urge for divinity is found in every culture throughout history and even at an individual level. As an example, I tell a tale from my own youth, a striking illustration of how life imitates fiction. When I was an undergraduate in physics, I wanted to prove—scientifically—that we have an immortal soul. To this end, I devised an experiment to measure its weight; the experiment was simple, a system of scales to measure weight loss and devices to measure electromagnetic activity. To my amazement, Katherine Solomon, the scientist heroine in Brown’s book, does the same. With the aid of fiction, she succeeds. I, of course, did not.

  The main message of The Lost Symbol is that we humans are godlike; we have untapped powers, hidden in our minds. Brown creates a hopeful vision of the future, where God is only “a symbol of our limitless human potential,” and that this symbol, lost over time, is about to be rediscovered: the wisdom of the ages. To realize this potential requires the ultimate meeting of the minds. As Katherine argues, each mind has the ability to interact with matter. However, the power within each individual is small and is revealed only after much training. (Readers who practice yoga or play an instrument know how hard it is to achieve mastery.) But when it is, and more and more minds come together, “the many will become one,” and positive change could happen in the world.

  Brown’s book is itself a symbol, a symbol of his (very noble) belief in our ability to change the course of history, to change the world. Hopefully, the book will inspire millions to do their best. I am sure that was Brown’s intention in writing it, although he points out, through Robert Langdon’s concerned voice, that any new scientific discovery can be used for either good or evil. As explained in TLS, during the Cold War, both the CIA and the Soviet KGB had a keen interest in exploring the possibility that the human mind could interact with matter. For my part, I hope that the book will not rekindle a revival of crooks claiming to have telekinetic powers, as Uri Geller and countless others have done in the past. I should make it quite clear that there isn’t an inkling of hard evidence in support of any such claims. If the human mind can physically affect matter, it is through our thoughtful actions to improve (and, sadly, sometimes destroy) our lives and those of others.

  There is another, more realistic way to see how modern science can inspire us to do our best. Although it falls within the same symbolic category as Brown’s “all minds as one,” it is based on a more concrete proposal that I detail in A Tear at the Edge of Creation: Searching for the Meaning of Life in an Imperfect Cosmos. During the past decades, we have learned a tremendous amount about the origin of life on earth and the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Eager to find companionship, we have traveled to our neighboring worlds in the solar system, only to find them to be barren, hostile lands. If there is life in the Martian underground, or in the subterranean oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, it will certainly be very primitive. The more we explore the cosmos, the more we understand that simple life-forms may possibly exist in distant worlds out there. However, we also learn that the complexity of life found on earth makes it a rare jewel, an oasis floating precariously in the emptiness of space.

  The study of earth’s past history points to a startling fact: we are the products of a sequence of environmental accidents that greatly affected the evolution of life. If this sequence had been different, we wouldn’t be here. As a consequence, to have evolved from simple unicellular organisms to complex multicellular ones and, ultimately, to thinking beings, was a real fluke. Furthermore, even if there are other thinking beings in the cosmos, they are so very far away from us as to be nonexistent in any practical sense. Contrary to UFO reports, aliens haven’t been here and were certainly not the originators of the wisdom of the ages; we built the pyramids ourselves, through our wonderful inventiveness. We are precious because we are rare: in this way, as the lone creatures capable of self-awareness and of amazing technological feats, we are indeed godlike.

  Our cosmic loneliness dictates a new directive for humankind: to preserve life and protect the world we have. Our awareness of life and death, of love and loss, is our strongest weapon against collective oblivion. Modern science has confirmed that we have a chance only if we fight as one to save our planetary home. Only then will the many become one, and we will realize our true human potential: to rejoice in our knowledge of the world and, through it, become one with the cosmos.

  And Never the Twain Shall Meet?[³]

  commentary by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins

  At the core of Dan Brown’s narrative lies the effort to reunite the earthly with the divine through the embracing of a new science. The novelist puts forth a worldview in which science (pseudoscience, if you prefer), mysticism, and mythology unite to link past to present and to advance human understanding. But can such a bridge be built? Reading Karen Armstrong, whose latest book is The Case for God, and then Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and, most recently, The Greatest Show on Earth, sows the kind of doubt even the noetically informed Katherine Solomon, the scientist in the novel, might find daunting.

  Karen Armstrong argues here that our historic objectification of God exposes Him to potential demise at the hands of evolutionary theory. Instead, in a thesis Robert Langdon would no doubt accept, she encourages us to move toward a God who is beyond reason—a symbol or a metaphor for something greater than man can put into words, something that can be reached only through myths and rituals: As Rabbi Irwin Kula tells us in this chapter, Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, despite the obvious differences between a scholarly nonfiction book and a pop-culture potboiler, are, essentially, the same book in terms of their efforts to redress modern society’s lost sense of wonder and to stimulate the search inward to find divinity.

  To which Richard Dawkins might respond, “Why even try to cross a bridge when there is nothing on the other side with which to connect?” He scoffs at a divine presence of any sort, arguing here and elsewhere that science, through evolution, has eliminated the possibility of a supernatural creator. Some might argue that this kind of zealousness for the material world—and nothing but the material world—robs us of our sense of wonder and connectedness to the universe. Yet Dawkins told us as far back as 2005, when he was interviewed for our Secrets of Angels & Demons book, “The suggestion that science robs us of wonder is utterly preposterous.” He added that he hoped that someone in a Dan Brown novel would make that point. After TLS, he is probably still waiting. . . .

  We Need God to Grasp the Wonder of Our Existence

  by Karen Armstrong

  Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian, and Mu
slim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

  But by the end of the seventeenth century, instead of looking through the symbol to “the God beyond God,” Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond a doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient, and omnipotent creator who was obviously “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.” Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically based theology that eventually made Newton’s Mechanick and, later, William Paley’s Intelligent Designer, essential to Western Christianity.

  But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof of God’s existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resources. . . .

  Throughout history, most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and Logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but were complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that had no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity. . . .