ARE WE GOD?
This idea of the participatory universe understandably fuels all manner of speculation. Perhaps, as humans observe more and more of the universe, both on a cosmic scale and at a quantum level, the relationship between our consciousness and the universe is becoming more and more interdependent. Perhaps, too, as Teilhard de Chardin thought, we, along with extraterrestrial races, are evolving into a cosmic consciousness. This was the plan all along: in the end, we will all be the universe. If this is the case then humans are or will be God, the creator of the universe in the first place.
Or maybe there is a hierarchy of observers, with more advanced beings already taking a more active role in shaping the cosmos. Barrow and Tipler describe a possible extrapolation of Wheeler’s vision:
That there is some Ultimate Observer who is in the end responsible for coordinating the separate observations of the lesser observers and is therefore responsible for bringing the entire Universe into existence.47
If so, they speculate, the unfolding of the universe is leading up to the Ultimate Observer’s Final Observation, when the cosmic plan will be complete.
Others still seek to keep a more-or-less traditional God in the picture. Keith Ward, British theologian, philosopher and born-again Anglican minister, takes Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle to a new, if predictable, extreme. Ward suggests that it is not humans and extraterrestrials doing the observing and creating: ‘God is the ultimate observer or consciousness which creates the reality.’48 However, he does accept that human consciousness makes a small contribution to the shaping of the universe. But even that small contribution represents a huge leap for a born-again Christian priest.
Despite being speculative, all three extrapolations agree that intelligent, conscious beings – such as humans – are in some way partly the creator.
As we have seen throughout this book, understanding God was one of the central inspirations for science. Isaac Newton, for example:
… strove for a unified solution that would encompass not only the mysteries of celestial and terrestrial physics, but also the perennial religious problem of the relation between the Creator and his creation.49
Echoing this, the man who is in many ways Newton’s modern equivalent, Stephen Hawking, writes in the memorable phrase that concludes A Brief History of Time (1988) that the ultimate goal of science is to ‘know the mind of God’.50
In fact, the quest for the mind of God may effectively be over. In the end, the journey was not a long one and the destination has proved much closer to home than anyone could have imagined. We all have a share in God’s mind simply by being human.
The Hermetic quest also sought primarily to understand the mind of God through knowledge of the cosmos, as can be seen from Treatise XI of the Corpus Hermeticum, in which Mind explains to Hermes:
So you must think of god in this way, as having everything – the cosmos, himself,
The Hermetic cosmos itself is also described as a thought of God’s, the product of his mind – in a sense, his mind itself.
Even if John Wheeler and other celebrated scientists such as Stephen Hawking are not aware of it, the universe they describe has such close parallels with the Hermetic vision – the solar child of the ancient Egyptian religion of Heliopolis – that they might as well be the two encircling strands around the same caduceus of wisdom.
In Wheeler’s participatory universe, the consciousness of observers is embedded in its structure and both mind and universe are therefore shaped by and shape each other. We are, or at least are part of, the creative force. If for creative force we read God – and the distinction is only a matter of semantics or personal taste – then essentially all humanity is divine or at least an integral part of the divine.
The creative force and the material universe are locked in an eternal embrace or endless creative waltz. Shifting the terminology again, God is the universe, and vice versa. Intelligent beings are part of God, and also, as their minds help shape the universe, they enjoy a special role in creation. Creator, created and creation are constantly circling in a dazzling dance of ultimate meaning and purpose, an endless jump of joy.
Yet as encapsulated in the Hermetica, this apparent welter of transcendentalism has not been the Holy Grail of many of the world’s most brilliant minds simply because they liked the mysticism and poetry – although that certainly has its own appeal. To the Hermeticist, pursuing any intellectual endeavour without including the idea of God would be simply absurd. Very succinctly Treatise XI describes the all-pervasive divine: ‘God makes eternity; eternity makes the cosmos; the cosmos makes time; time makes becoming.’52
Glenn Alexander Magee writes of the ‘Hermetic doctrine of the “circular” relationship between God and creation and the necessity of man for the completion of God’.53 According to the Hermetica then, humankind has a special place in God’s creation. God needs human beings to exist because we are part of God. And we also need God, we need worship, we need awe. The concept of ordinary, everyday humanity in some very real way actually completing God is anathema to, for example, Catholicism, with its fixation on sin, purgatory and subservience to priests and a deity whose separate being is always above and beyond us.
Wheeler says essentially the same thing as the Hermetica: the circular relationship between mind and the universe makes human consciousness necessary for the completion of the universe. The same idea is found in Neoplatonism, which is hardly surprising given the Egyptian roots it shares with Hermeticism, through its founder Plotinus, student of the mysterious Egyptian sage Ammonius Saccas. As Magee notes: ‘Like the Hermeticists, Plotinus holds that the cosmos is a circular process of emanation and return to the One’. 54
From the same basic reasoning as our own – which is based on the growing evidence of design and purpose being uncovered by all the sciences – Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued in the 1970s that the universe was ‘self-organizing’: ‘God is not the creator, but the mind of the universe.’55 Although Jantsch found this concept behind many of the great mystical religions, one lay behind them all. He explains that, ‘In the oldest recorded world view, Hermetic philosophy … this wholeness resting in itself is called the “all”.’56 Jantsch seems to here recognize the origins of Hermeticism in the religion of Heliopolis, whose Pyramid Texts are indeed the world’s oldest cosmological writings.
The same matrix of connections exists between the picture emerging from quantum physics and Heliopolitan thought. In Wheeler’s system, the laws of physics build the material universe, which eventually gives rise to living organisms, which eventually produce sentient beings able to observe and understand the cosmos. By discovering how the universe works, observers are actually creating it in the far distant past – even at the beginning of time. Wheeler saw this as a cycle or feedback loop whereby the universe creates sentient beings who then return the loop back to the beginning. He encapsulated this cycle in his famous diagram showing the eye of the observer looking back at the beginning of the universe (see illustrations) and in the words:
Beginning with the big bang, the universe expands and cools. After eons of dynamic development it gives rise to observership. Acts of observer-participancy … in turn give tangible ‘reality’ to the universe not only now but back to the beginning.57
Exciting though this may be, what Wheeler describes is by no means a new concept. It resoundingly echoes key ideas of the Pyramid Texts, which speak of how Atum created the big bang – very literally – giving rise to the expanding and ever-more complex universe that ultimately created people, who liv
e on the edge of manifestation, in what Karl Luckert calls the ‘turnaround realm’, the inner place where human consciousness begins its return journey to Atum. And it is not just to him that human consciousness returns, but to his very act of creation – in other words, back to the big bang.
In a deeply satisfying exchange, not only does the latest scientific thinking support the Hermetic cosmology but Hermeticism in turn makes sense of the discoveries of science … This is as it should be, for it was a brutal operation that severed the two. And now they seem to be calling to each other like separated twins, aching to be as one again.
Chapter Twelve
1 Popper, p. 173.
2 Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, p. 316.
3 In his sixth and final Gifford Lecture, ‘Towards an Eschatology of Evolution’, at the University of Edinburgh, 1 March 2007. Audio file available at the University of Edinburgh’s Humanities and Social Science’s website: www.hss.ed.ac.uk/giffordexemp/2000/details/ProfessorSimonConwayMorris.
4 Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, p. xv.
5 Ibid., p. xii.
6 Abstract to Conway Morris’ Gifford Lecture ‘Life’s Solution’, see Chapter 11, note 13.
7 Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, pp. 292–5.
8 In his fourth Gifford Lecture ‘Becoming Human: The Continuing Mystery’, given at the University of Edinburgh on 26 Feb 2007. Audio file available at the University of Edinburgh’s Humanities and Social Science’s website: www.hss.ed.ac.uk/giffordexemp/2000/details/ProfessorSimonConwayMorris.
9 Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, p. 328.
10 Shapiro, p. 807.
11 De Duve, Vital Dust, p. 297.
12 In his fourth Gifford Lecture – see note 8 above.
13 Polanyi, p. 47.
14 From the abstract of his fourth Gifford Lecture – see note 8 above.
15 ‘Who Speaks for the Earth?’, thirteenth and final episode of the TV series Cosmos, first broadcast 21 December 1980. DVD released by Freemantle Home Entertainment, 2009. Directed by David F. Oyster, written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter.
16 In the documentary movie A Brief History of Time, produced by David Hickman and directed by Errol Morris, Anglia Television/Gordon Freedman Productions, 1991.
17 The papers were published in Halliwell, Pérez-Mercader and Zurek.
18 Bierman, ‘A World With Retroactive Causation’, p. 1.
19 Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, p. 274.
20 George, p. 56.
21 Ibid.
22 Bierman and Houtkooper.
23 See Bierman, ‘Exploring Correlations Between Local Emotional and Global Emotional Events and the Behavior of a Random Number Generator’.
24 Hagel and Tschapke.
25 Radin, ‘Exploring Relationships Between Random Physical Events and Mass Human Attention’, p. 538
26 Radin, Entangled Minds, p. 206.
27 Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, p. 334.
28 Quoted in Jacques et al, p.1.
29 Interviewed for ‘The Anthropic Universe’, The Science Show, ABC National Radio, 18 February 2006, presented by Martin Redfern, produced by Pauline Newman. Transcript available at: www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1572643.
30 Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, p. 331.
31 Ibid., p. 333.
32 Gardner and Wheeler.
33 Jacques et al.
34 Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, p. 337.
35 Davies and Gribbin, p. 208.
36 Wheeler, from his foreword to Barrow and Tipler, p. 6.
37 John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Law Without Law’, in Wheeler and Zurek (eds.), p. 194.
38 On The Science Show, ABC National Radio. See note 29 above.
39 John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Genesis and Observership’, in Butts and Hintikka (eds.), p. 3.
40 B. J. Carr, ‘On the Origin, Evolution and Purpose of the Physical Universe’, in Leslie (ed.), p. 152.
41 John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Genesis and Observership’, in Butts and Hintikka (eds.), p. 21.
1 Ibid., p. 19.
43 Barrow and Tipler. p. 203.
44 John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Beyond the Edge of Time’, in Leslie (ed.), p. 214.
45 Hawking and Mlodinow, p. 140
46 Gefter, p. 30.
47 Barrow and Tipler, p. 470.
48 On The Science Show, ABC National Radio. See note 28 above.
49 P. M. Rattansi, ‘Newton’s Alchemical Studies’, in Debus (ed.) Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, p. 179.
50 Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 175.
51 Copenhaver, p. 41.
52 Ibid., p. 37.
53 Magee, p. 10.
54 Ibid.
55 Jantsch, p. 308.
56 Ibid., pp. 308–9.
57 Wheeler, ‘Law without Law’, in Wheeler and Zurek, p. 209.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ESCAPING FROM FLATLAND
The Hermetica should, at the very least, be given its due because of its truly towering influence over our culture and history since the fifteenth century, especially its powerful role in creating science – though today’s practitioners themselves are either unaware of or unwilling to accept this fact. As Richard Westfall writes in relation to Newton:
The Hermetic elements in Newton’s thought are not in the end antithetical to the scientific enterprise. Quite the contrary, by wedding the two traditions, the Hermetic and the mechanical, to each other, he established the family line that claims as its direct descendant the very science that sneers today uncomprehendingly at the occult ideas associated with Hermetic philosophy.1
This convergence of the mechanistic with the mystical is recognized, albeit apparently unconsciously, by the likes of Wheeler, who repeatedly related his work to Leibniz – in turn, at the very least a closet Hermeticist whose own hero was Giordano Bruno – writing, for example:
Inspect the interior of a particle of one type, and magnify it up enormously, and in that interior see one view of the whole universe (compare the concept of monad of Leibniz (1714), ‘The monads have no window through which anything can enter or depart’); and do likewise for another particle of the same type. Are particles of the same pattern identical in any one cycle of the universe because they give identically patterned views of the same universe? No acceptable explanation for the miraculous identity of particles of the same type has ever been put forward. That identity must be regarded, not as a triviality, but as a central mystery of physics.2
Westfall points out that the term ‘occult’ first took on its negative connotation when seventeenth-century mechanistic scientists began to use it as a putdown. And so the golden age of scientific mystics was brought down to the level of the sinister, illusory, cheap and nasty. But in fact, ‘occult’ was originally a synonym for ‘Hermetic’.3
After immersing ourselves over the years not only in the history of religions and heresies but also in the history of science, in talking to scientists, delving into the obvious and less obvious learned papers and attending lectures from the very abstruse and arcane to the most direct mechanistic science, we have concluded – along with many of those we quote in this book – that science still needs the Hermetic wisdom.
Science would have found it considerably easier to make sense of the data that it is now uncovering – the designer universe, life as a cosmic imperative, the directionality of evolution, the participatory universe – if it had never jettisoned the Hermetic framework. In fact, it would have predicted these discoveries. And although it is impossible to know for sure, we believe the signs are there in the texts themselves that a Hermeticized science would have already advanced far beyond the point that we have reached today. But all is not lost. David Fideler, editor of Alexandria: the Journal of Western Cosmological Tradition, argues that modern science is moving ever more in a Neoplatonic (for which read Hermetic) direction:
Over the last century the mechanistic view of the univ
erse has started to completely break down. Because the implications of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and the realization that we inhabit an evolutionary, self-organizing universe are starting to work themselves out, it is no exaggeration to say that we are truly living in the midst of a new Cosmological Revolution that will ultimately overthrow the Scientific Revolution of the Renaissance. And if the mechanistic world view left us stranded in Flatland – a two dimensional world of dead, atomistic matter in motion – the emerging cosmological picture is far more complex, multidimensional, and resonant with the traditional Neoplatonic metaphor of the living universe.4
Is the ‘living universe’ merely a metaphor? Was it ever? Hermeticists certainly meant it literally. Yet humanity is stranded in ‘Flatland’, shut off from the radiance of the Hermetic vision and all the vast benefits it bestows. This, however, is not inevitably humanity’s end. We can – and must – escape from Flatland.
Fideler refers to the holistic nature of existence, citing the fact that in 1982 physicists showed particles of light from a common source ‘continue to act in concert with one another’ no matter how far apart they are, a phenomenon known as ‘quantum nonlocality’. He explains:
The tantalizing implication of quantum nonlocality is that the entire universe, which is thought to have blazed forth from the first light of the big bang, is at its deepest level a seamless holistic system in which every ‘particle’ is in ‘communication’ with every other ‘particle’, even though separated by millions of light years. In this sense, experimental science seems to be on the verge of validating the perception of all mystics – Plotinus included – that there is an underlying unity to the cosmos which transcends the boundaries of space and time.5
Fideler argues that the breakdown of the mechanistic worldview requires a new type of science, and proposes that a fusion of the philosophy of Plotinus and Wheeler’s concept of the participatory universe should provide the model. The consequence, says Fideler, is that:
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