War of the Worldviews: Let’s Talk God

By Deepak Chopra

In this series of posts about science and spirituality, I’ve left God for last, even though God has become the hottest topic as we struggle toward the future. The arguments against belief in God have been stridently raised by a small band of scientific atheists — their avowed leader, Richard Dawkins, has become a household name. In our recent book, “War of the Worldviews,” my co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, doesn’t pursue the atheist line. His worldview is scientific, but Leonard holds a view that is much more defensible than atheism:

“While science often casts doubt on spiritual beliefs and doctrines insofar as they make representations about the physical world, science does not — and cannot — conclude that God is an illusion.”

I believe that spirituality can take hints from modern science to actually support the existence of God. Some of these hints have emerged from quantum physics, which long ago showed that the seemingly solid, convincing world of matter and energy actually derives from a highly uncertain, invisible realm that existed before time and space. Is this the domain of God? If so, it can’t be the God of Genesis, a human-like figure sitting above the clouds who created heaven and earth in seven days. I think a new and expanded spirituality can deliver a God that is the same as pure intelligence, creativity and consciousness. Such a God is our source without being human — a source from which all possibilities emerge and flow. Quite a number of credentialed scientists are thinking in the same direction without necessarily being religious. It would explain a lot about the cosmos if we fit into a living, conscious universe.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

War of The Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Agree and Disagree

Leonard describes Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum theory, and how they are combined to create a scientific theory of how the universe began and evolved. He describes the impressive agreement between the theoretical predictions based on this picture and actual observations of the heavens made by astronomers. Deepak proposes a creative first cause that preceded the infinitesimally brief Planck epoch (10-43 seconds) following the Big Bang. He suggests that since the laws of nature and perhaps space and time emerged after the Planck epoch, any understanding of the pre-created universe remains outside the scope of objective science.

 

It is said that real spiritual world starts when science ends. According to this science and real spiritual world can not go together.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Stephen Hawking’s Grand Book, But Where Is the Design?

Huffington Post

by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
Fletcher Jones Professor of Computational Physics,
Dean College of Science Chapman University

Stephen Hawking occupies a position in popular culture comparable only to Einstein’s eminence sixty years ago: he is our last wise man speaking with the total authority of advanced science. Until his new book, The Grand Design, appeared, co-authored with Caltech physics professor (and adept writer) Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking had left open the whisper of a possibility that God might be allowed to survive scientific scrutiny. Einstein had a strong feeling for the presence of awe and wonder at the far horizon of the cosmos and saw evidence for the existence of a unifying, rational presence in the mathematical order of the cosmos. But since then the universe of theoretical physics has become random, complex, paradoxical, and barren of divine presence. Therefore, when Hawking made worldwide news recently by declaring that “it is not necessary to invoke God…to set the Universe going,” a blow was struck for the noisy camp of atheists while the world of devout believers had one more reason–this time a crushing one –to consider science as the enemy of religion.