FEATURE

Science, God, and Myths.

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

"The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with   our conscious selves, arose through chance seems to me the chief argument forthe existence of God."

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)   

While the word science brings reverence in hearts of many superficial thinkers, the word God also brings about similar feelings may be, ina largergroup of people. It is time to have a liberal debate on the subjects to demolish many myths that abound in this area. Both sides have their proponents who hate the opposite view so strongly that they miss the truth in between the two extremes. The greatest exponent of Neo-Darwinism, the corner stone of science, Richard Dawkins, is still clear in supporting the unsupportable neo Darwinism. Similarly there are powerful people in the organised religious fields who abhor science and attribute everything to their God. There are enough and more data to support the L

amarckian environmental theory of evolution in contradistinction to Darwinism. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an evolutionary biologist, proposed that plants and animals could pass on their adaptations to the surroundings on to their offspring. Charles Darwin was a convinced Lamarckian in that sense. It is only the Neo-Darwinists that are against this theory. Darwin’s book The Variation of Animals and Plants under domesticationclearly brings out this theory of pangenesis. Neo-Darwinists, who began in the 1940s, reject all that and are fanatically opposed to Lamarck.

Epigenetics (above and more than) today has shown the futility of going after the few human genes in our chromosomes ignoring the trillions of germ genes that we also are heir to. Time was when bio-technology was the craze both in the industry and teaching institutions. Many have earned lots of money in this area especially in the arena of reductionist pharmaceutical compounds, all of which are potentially dangerous. Today the industry is not looking up and many have lost their share market in the west. 

Since there is big money in the field even now efforts are on the create in-vitro stem cells and cloning etc. They even tried to make money promising to produce offspring without parents through self-replicating nanobots. Eric Drexler, the first founder of this company, made billions by just the announcement but soon lost the market for his shares when the truth was exposed by his former teacher, Nobel Laureate Richard Smally. When the human genome project started in the 2000s the expectations were so high that a private company, Celera Genomics,quietly started to study and try to patent human genes along with the Government funded genome project.Later that year President Clinton announced that human genes, when found by the genome project, cannot be patented as those belonged to humanity at large. The shares of the private company tumbled down but they went on. 

When the human genes were being mapped the scientists were upbeat saying that the foundation of life will now be charted just as the CERN scientists started saying that they have found (99.9% for sure) the basic building blocks of nature, the God particle. Both proved to be damp squibs. The present day scientists remind me of the poojaris and priests that try and sell God in their places of worship to the gullible public. In what way are our scientists, blinded by their reductionist science, selling their God (science) to the gullible public different? Otherwise, how does one explain the efforts to sell gene mapping to surgically remove someone’s breasts to prevent cancer breast in 2013 when we know that human genes hardly matter in isolation in future happenings?

Neo-Darwinism kept God completely out of nature and thought that(bio) chemistry and physics could run this world.The Decade of the Brain, inaugurated by President George Bush Sr. in 1990, gave the impression that brain mapping would reveal the inner secrets of the mind. Earlier Penfield in Canada did similar studies and believed that secrets of the brain could be totally unravelled!  Now that we know that every human cell has a brain (memBrain) old concepts are vanishing from science but not from materialistic modern reductionist medicine where brain mapping still is a big money spinner. So is gene mapping and counselling. How long do we cheat the common man in the name of our new God, science?

The best definition of today’s science comes from Terrance Kemp McKenna, an American pshychonaut, when he said that “modern science is based on the principle: “give us one free miracleand we will explain the rest.” The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws (man-made) that govern it in a single instant from nothing.” How could one presume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the very instant of the Big Bang? The story of Laws is highly anthropomorphic as only humans have laws, not even animals or plants. That too only so called civilised societies have laws and not all human races. The assumption of mathematical genius, omnipotent God was accepted by the founding fathers of science. Today Laws of nature float in the sea of materialism in a metaphysical void. God concept was well recorded in the Pythagorean and Platonic Greek philosophies.  The father of modern science, Sir Francis Bacon, actually a trained Barrister, asserted in 1620 or so that these Laws of nature are eternal and immutable.  Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton saw the Laws of Nature as mathematical ideas in the mind of God! God in their sense transcended time and space and so the Laws were enforced by God’s Omnipotence.

To cite one example how the Laws could be flouted is the story of liquid helium when kept in a big vessel at the bottom, slowly starts climbing up on the walls of the vessel to spill over defying gravity. Plants follow gravity and sun for their existence but not by following the laws of gravity as we understand it. Fourteen out of the sixteen experiments in mapping star light coming to the earth on solar eclipse nights did show that both Newton and Einstein were not correct in their laws. Only two clumsy experiments on cloudy nights by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington tried to prove them right. The materialistic world believes Eddington. Poor Eddington belies his own findings when he propounded the “Fish Net Hypothesis.” The size of the fish depends on the size of the holes in the fish net. Smaller fish could always escape the eyes of the “net using” scientists.

The Big Bang theory, one of the pillars of modern science took root in 1960s and scientists started swearing by it ever since. The truth is that the Big Bang theory was propounded as primeval atom by Rev. Father Georges Lemaitre, a Roman Catholic priest and cosmologist. He said the universe started as a “creation-like event.”  It is ironic that one of the staunch opponents of Father Georges was Fred Hoyle, who contemptuously called this theory as the “Big Bang Theory” and the latter name stuck permanently.  This reminds me of the Goddem particle which the author had suggested for the Higg’s bosons but the editor thought that the word was too bad for a book and made it “God Particle”. The latter name stuck!

The concepts of both God and science will have to change in this materialistic world for the common man to survive. In a way both those could have a unitary origin. Quantum physics knows that the “world is immaterial-mental and spiritual” in the words of Johns Hopkins physicist, Richard Conn Henry. The new science of biology which the great biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, describes in his “morphic resonance” theorygives  a new direction. This, of course, was criticised by materialistic scientists as pseudo-science. The theory has had a mixed reception. His book A New Science of Life has been described by the editor of New Scientist thus: “Sheldrake is an excellent scientist, the proper and imaginative kind that in anearlier age discovered continents and monitored the world of sonnets.”Biologist editor wrote: “well written, provocative and entertaining….improbable? Yes, but so was Galileo.”

I am still trying to graspwith the concept of “morphic resonance”. My new book on The New Science of Man (still in the press but articles on the topic have been published by me) takes us into another area of holistic science of man where the human body is NOT treated as a machine, containing parts called organs but as a bundle of energy vibrations where the trillions of body cells, which are capable of independent living, are in sync with one another. Health is that state where the body cells are in sync and ill health is the altered energy state where cells are out of sync. This would be the basis for new therapeutic efforts using energy to make medical care (illness care) universally affordable and effective.

Human being is a part of this universal consciousness (call it God, if you like) and is interconnected with all else in the universe. Even human meta-genome has more than two trillion germ genes. This truth should make manhumble and tranquil. When human greed disappears with this new scientific awakening, man will lose interest in hoarding money both in the name of science and religion. Even a Nobel Laureate physicist, Hans Peter Durr, calls this world as a changing drama, Wirklichkeit, akin to Adi Shankara’s Maya. Durr’s “a-duality” (energy=matter) theory comes down to Advaita philosophy of tat/sat. Durr himself alludes to Advaita philosophy in his paper, matter is not made out of matter.”

Let us face the truth. Both science and God concept (not the one inside temples, churches etc.) have helped mankind a lot. While science with its technology has made life easier with many amenitiesfor life, God concept has saved millions by its faith,which kept millions from committing suicide in frustration. God concept has been a great placebo for man. Latest science shows that it is only the placebo effect that heals even in modern medical quick fixes, at the end of the day. Both God and science are ill understood, in my concept; they will remain like that for all times to come. Man will never be able to know his future. If nature places all her cards on the table, life loses its charm and becomes insipid. Rather than fighting with each other let the scientists and religionists sit across the table and understand each other and decide to stop fooling the unsuspecting gullible public to make unethical profits.

“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”

Ilya Prigogine, Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry