© 2004 Kenneth Glasziou
© 2004 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
(Emphasis in Paper is by author)
“The Universe of universes, in toto, is mind planed, mind made, and mind administered.” (UB 42:11.2)
The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy ofliving out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness. Such a new and righteous vision of morality will attract all that is good in the mind of man and challenge that which is best in the human soul. Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly coordinated and unified in God, who is love. (UB 2:7.10)
The authors of the Urantia revelation presented their own qualifications in what surely must be one of the most remarkable books ever written — a work that would be even more remarkable if actually written by human beings.
To be the imaginative work of either a human individual or group, we would need to attribute to the authors’ advanced knowledge over an impressive range of subjects, remarkably fertile imagination, and the ability to display extraordinary consistency throughout a 2000 page work — all long before the general availability of advanced computers. In fact, many serious readers are so impressed by what they read that, for them, the revelatory claim is self-authenticating.
However, to grant it a revelatory status and some kind of celestial authorship, there are problems. Not the least of these is its error content-some of which is so obvious that, after considering the mental astuteness elsewhere displayed, one has to acknowledge that inclusion of such error had to be deliberate.
Why? One possible answer is to divert attention away from the revelation and to something of more immediate importance. What that could be is hinted at in the statement, “construct a new appealing philosophy out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness.”
What a challenge! The new philosophies must not only be short, sharp, and simple, but also suited to the immediate needs of its recipients.
What the revelators are asking is not for some academic, scientific, and theological tome, but something more along the lines of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as it is presented in Matthew 5 to 7.
Be aware though that it is not an educated and privileged leadership that constitutes the real menace to the advancement of the Brotherhood of Man. Rather, it is their armies of ignorant and misinformed followers, those who directly create all the havoc and the mayhem.
Getting rid of the leaders will not bring on the Brotherhood. There will always be a surfeit of power-hungry malcontents ready to step into any vacancy.
Rather, it is the army of the underprivileged, the poor, the starving, the ignorant, the illiterate, those who hunger for a better share of God’s good gifts to the world, that could either form a fertile field in which the message of love and respect for one another could take root and flower-or else become recruited for murder and mayhem.
That this world is not a machine in which we all do as we do because we cannot do otherwise is now a proven fact. Quantum theory has empirically demonstrated the existence of a transcendent reality outside of our time and space that can interact with our world in intelligent ways. And for this to occur in the way it does, “consciousness” has to be a component of that transcendent reality.
Some call this consciousness “God.” The Urantia revelators inform us that God has granted us free will, and this grant is inviolate. We are offered a choice. We can enlist on the side of God by revoking our free will and accepting God’s will in all things — placing ourselves firmly on the pathway of selflessness, tolerance, and love.
Or, we can choose to let mayhem take its course.
Most Westerners accept as scientific fact the idea that we live in a materialist world — a world in which everything is made of matter and in which matter is taken as being the only fundamental reality.
In no small part, this scenario owes its origins to the French mathematician, Rene Descartes, who 400 years ago, proposed his famous philosophy of dualism, one that divides the world into an objective sphere of matter and a subjective one of mind. Together these enshrined his ideas of the world as simply being a machine.
Worse still, a century later Newton and his heirs conclusively established the principle of causal determinism — the concept that all motion can be predicted exactly using only the physical laws of motion and the initial conditions of the system in motion.
Imagine a bunch of billiard balls on a perfectly even billiard table. Given Newton’s equations of motion and the initial positions, masses and velocities of all of these balls at some initial time, then, so determinism claims, the whole future of these billiard balls can be calculated.
The philosophical import of this kind of thinking took root to such a degree that another French philosopherscientist, Pierre Laplace, was able to propose that if some superior intelligence, at a given instance, was acquainted with all the forces by which nature is animated, and at some initial moment also knew the position and velocity of each and every particle of matter then, to that superiorintelligence, neither the past nor the future of the universe would be uncertain.
Laplace also wrote a highly successful book on celestial mechanics. This caught the attention of his emperor, Napoleon, who asked why it was that he made no mention of God-to which Laplace responded, “Your majesty, I have no need of that hypothesis.” In a fully deterministic Newtonian world, God was no longer needed!
To these principles of objectivity and determinism in classical physics, a third was added by Einstein. This came as a consequence of his declaration that the velocity of light was a limiting velocity in a vacuum — the velocity of light was a constant that no material thing could exceed.
The implications of this speed limit were far reaching, perhaps none being more important than that all interactions between things material in space-time must travel through space one piece at a time and with finite velocity. Hence all such interactions must be “localized” — they must occur within the boundaries set by the speed of light. This fact has been given the name, ‘the principle of locality.’ Later, we will learn that certain important quantum events ignore the principle and can occur instantaneously, even if at opposite ends of the universe. Such events are said to be ‘non-local.’
And that, roughly, is where the majority of the Western world finds itself today — all without realizing they are more than fifty years behind the empirical findings of modern science-something we will now seek to demonstrate.
First we need to know that there is an enormous size gap between the micro world of the atom and that world we normally think of as being microscopic — something visible under a microscope. With a very good microscope bacteria and other single cell organisms can become visible. Their size is mostly in the range 1-10 x 104 cm. An atom is about 108 cm; an atom’s nucleus 1013 cm; an electron about 1021 cm. (106 = 1 millionth, 109 = 1 billionth)
Perhaps our first intimations of the peculiarities of the quantum world came in the early 19th century when Britisher, Thomas Young, obtained unequivocal evidence that light had similar characteristics to what is observed in a pond of water when wave fronts emanating from different disturbances meet one another. Where their wave peaks meet, they reinforce. When trough meets peak, they cancel.
Young’s concept of the underlying wave characteristics of light dominated physics for the next one hundred years. But then along came the young Einstein to throw a hammer in the works with his interpretation of the so-called photoelectric effect which implied that light also behaved as if it consisted of particles. It turned out that both Young and Einstein were right — light does behave both as a wave and as a particle.
The light particle is given the name “photon.” It is also determined to be mass-less. So what about other sub-atomic particles, those that do have mass, and even electric charge, such as the electron for example?
Experiments of the same kind as Young’s in which a narrow beam of electrons was passed through two parallel slits and then onto a screen gave the same result as Young obtained-an interference pattern of narrow bars interspersed by gaps. So electrons, too, appear to have wave-like characteristics. However, when electrons were used, it was also technically possible to slow their presentation rate until only one electron at a time was presented.
At first the result appeared to be that each electron registered on the screen as a single spot-that expected for particle-like behavior. But as time went by and thousands of spots accumulated on the screen, the result was extraordinary — a series of bars interspersed with gaps slowly built up. And since each electron went through the slits, one at a time, for this pattern of light and dark bars to build up, each electron surely had to go through both slits and somehow interfere with itself!!
Many years of quite ingenious experimentation were required to catalogue what happens.
In view of the surprising results already obtained it was inevitable that, sooner or later, someone would pose the apparently stupid question, “What would happen if the second slit was not opened until its photon or electron had already gone through the alternative open slit?”
When the second slit was opened but only after the photon had already passed through and beyond the first slit, the single dots gradually built up into the bars of the interference pattern. This remained true when any signal to open the second slit would need to exceed the speed of light. Thus any such signal would need to be non-local. (ref. Hellmuth at al, 1986)
Labeled ‘necromancy’ (utilizing information from the dead) when first proposed, the actual experimental proof for “non-locality” had to await development of appropriate technology before becoming achievable. In the meantime advances both in theory and technology already indicated what the probable result would be.
The critical advance in theory came from Irish physicist, John Bell, whose 1965 theorem, among other important predictions, showed that in order to be compatible with quantum theory, hidden variables must be non-local. This was contrary to the criticism of quantum theory by Einstein who insisted that the theory was incomplete, that there must be undiscovered “hidden variables” that would complete the theory and make its extraordinary results rational. To his dying day, Einstein would not accept the concept of non-local signals. For him, all had to be predictable, determinist, and within the boundaries set by local signaling, the speed of light being the upper limit.
Einstein was long dead before technology advanced sufficiently to permit the concept of non-locality to be put to empirical testing.
Though Bell’s theorem had been scrutinized in the laboratory and had given some positive results, it was only in the year 1982 that incontrovertible evidence, acceptable to peer scrutiny, became available through the work of a French group of physicists led by Alain Aspect.
This French group took advantage of the fact that a radioactive isotope of calcium emitted twin pairs of correlated photons in opposite directions. Being correlated means that they share certain properties such that if the magnitude of such a property for one of the twins is known, that of the other can be also be determined.
The result of their experiments was to show that whatever happened to one of the correlated photons affected its twin even though no signal at light speed or less could pass between them-implying that instantaneous communication somehow occurred and would still do so even if the photons were at opposite ends of the universe.
Thus the criticism by Einstein and co-workers, Podolsky and Rosen, regarding hidden variables and correlated properties, was shown by Aspect’s group to be entirely wrong. It also established the reality beyond doubt of the phenomenon of non-locality, as well as demonstrating that if hidden variables existed they must be non-local — that is in a transcendent dimension outside of our space-time.
The Aspect experiment has since been confirmed by independent workers, one such group being in Switzerland where the optical fiber system between two villages separated by a high mountain was utilized. The distance between them was about 15 kilometers. But that was some time back. The record is probably very much larger at the present.
Among the many confirmatory experiments demonstrating the reality of non-local effects is a group of optical tests that raced twin photons to a target, one of which had to tunnel through a barrier placed in its path. Curiously, the photon tunneling through the barrier arrived at the target before its twin (which traveled at the speed of light.) For the twin that tunneled through the barrier, the average tunneling velocity was 1.7 times that of light, so a non-local effect. A second curiosity was that the twin doing the tunneling was able to “sense” the far side of the barrier and cross it in the same amount of time, no matter how thick the barrier was made. (see Chiao et… al. 1993)
Query: how does a mere photon “sense” the thickness of a barrier?
Quantum theory has many strange quirks that are rightly labeled “out of this world.” Of these, surely the most significant for us human beings is the Bell-Aspect proof of the reality of non-locality — that is a transcendent arena of reality outside of space-time — the existence of which constitutes the ultimate challenge to materialism.
Carried to a logical conclusion, non-locality implies the existence of a transcendent universal consciousness (i.e. how does a mere photon “sense” the thickness of a barrier?) — and that consciousness is both within and beyond this material world. For material realists the alternative interpretations are:
A) To accept that there are faster-than-light signals in a transcendent realm in which hidden variables exist.
B) Either give up strong objectivity or else accept a role for observer’s consciousness.
C) Sweep the Bell-Aspect work under a carpet.
The Bell-Aspect results and their independent confirmation occurred more than 20 years ago. And although they shattered the foundations of materialism, they can provide a meaning for life, even open the pathway to God, and are by far the most significant achievements of quantum science for humanity up to this present day — nevertheless they remain ignored and almost unknown.
Back in 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a planetary model for atomic electrons which he said, circulated around the atom’s nucleus much as planets revolve about the sun.
However this model had a weakness in that it was inherently unstable and should eventually result in electrons crashing into the nucleus or being lost by its atom.
Suppose, said Norwegian physicist, Neils Bohr, that the orbits the electrons describe are discrete. Each such orbit, from the lowest energy level to the highest, has a fixed unalterable pathway — a stationary orbit, non-changing in its energy value. To change that orbit, energy must be absorbed or emitted in discrete quanta. But in doing so, it is by a quantum jump, without that electron ever being anywhere in between.
These electron orbits were also visualized as stationary waves, each of which, according to Max Born, was really a probability wave that tells us where we are likely to find an electron in any attempted observation. However, in order to do so for a single electron, the observer is forced to collapse the wave pattern. Thus single electrons can only ever be observed in particle form.
These concepts were slowly developed by physicists such as Heisenberg, Dirac, and Schrodinger — the wave equation for matter, known as the Schrodinger equation, emerging as the connection for the mathematics that replaced Newton’s laws in the new physics.
The revolution in all this was that the change over from classical to quantum physics introduced uncertainty, for we can no longer think in terms of the absolute position and momentum of any object. Now, and presumably forevermore, we can only provide a probability estimate of such parameters, and these must be in accord with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which states that the more accurately we know the position of the object, the less we can know about its momentum or velocity — and vice versa.
These are “uncertain” times in which the atom and its sub-atomic components belong to the quantum world a world of components that exist in states of “being neither this nor that” and are dislodged from such states only when observed.
Beyond all this there is the problem of decision making. Who, what, and where are the decisions made on the actions to be taken. And who or what keeps the records? After an electron wave is collapsed by an observer to become a particle in order to make a measurement, an electron particle will, of its own accord, spread out quite rapidly but only as a probability wave.
Given sufficient time it could spread throughout the whole universe — only to be ordered to collapse instantaneously to a particle state again because some inquisitive human being wants to make a measurement. Who has the record of its probability distribution so that the collapse can be carried out instantaneously in an orderly manner?
In the Aspect experiment, it was the measurement of the polarization of one of two correlated photons that collapsed its wave function — and instantaneously and automatically brought about the polarization alignment on the same axis of its correlated partner. Yet no signal at light speed or less could pass between them.
It was the conscious decision of the experimentalists that both started the chain and triggered the second collapse. A consciousness that can trigger both collapses, the second collapse somehow getting its instructions from beyond space and time, must surely itself be non-local or transcendent, or at least be contiguous with a consciousness that is so capable.
Quantum physics has demolished materialism as a valid concept. So what alternatives are there that are consistent with presently known ‘facts.’ One possibility is some form of monistic idealism such as the well-known platonic version of people who sit in a dark cave watching the shadows on its back wall. According to Plato, that is the reality, for what we experience in this world is but the reflections of the reality of the perfect world that lies beyond our vision.
Is our science compatible with an appropriate form of idealism (based on ideas), and if so, can we interpret both science and philosophy on some mutually compatible formulation?
At least superficially, there is a resemblance between the answers to key questions given by quantum physics and those given by Zen masters.
“What is Buddha?” asked a student monk. “The mind is Buddha,” answered the master. “Then what is mind?” asked another student. “The mind is not Buddha,” responded the master.
Imagine a student asking the ghost of physicist Neils Bohr if an electron is a particle. “It is,” is his likely reply. Another student asks him “Is an electron a wave?” Again Bohr responds, “It is.” “Where can we find such a wave?” asks another. “Beyond time and space,” says Bohr. “And where is that?” is the next question — to which Bohr enigmatically answers, “Where the wave is.”
When we fire electrons, one at a time through parallel slits, at first single hits register on our screen — which is consistent with the electron as a particle. But if we fire thousands of single electrons, one at a time, through the same slits, we get an interference pattern-which is consistent with the electron as a wave. This wave aspect persists, even for a single electron-a wavicle? Where is this wave aspect before the thousands of other single electrons were fired, before the interference pattern commenced to register? It never manifests in ordinary space, so where was it hiding and how does it manifest as diffraction only after the event?
It we wish to observe the single electron of a hydrogen atom, we can only do so by collapsing its wave form and observing it as a particle. As soon as we cease observing it commences to spread out probabilistically in accordance with the Schrodinger equation. Where does it go? Wherever that may be, the moment we again choose to observe it, it collapses instantly.
According to physicists, the collapse of such a wave is just too rapid to be within the limits set by the speed of light — so it cannot be within our space-time. So where was it? Heisenberg named its location “potentia,” a word which he borrowed from Aristotle. To be in “potentia” is to be in a transcendent domain that appears to be conceptually identical with “non-locality” as defined by the Bell-Aspect work.
Idealists also consider that to be non-local is to be in the domain of “consciousness,” which for them, is also the “ground of all being” — a domain which is “original, selfcontained, and constitutive of all things, manifesting itself as the subject that chooses, experiences what it chooses, and which collapses the wave function in the presence of brain-minded awareness.”
Quantum theory then, when interpreted according to idealist metaphysics is paving the way for an idealist science in which consciousness is the “all of being” — and matter and materialism pale into secondary importance.
However, a primary contribution of quantum physics to this scenario is that it has positively demonstrated a new dimension, non-locality, showing that there is more to this world than just matter, Einsteinian space-time, and a predetermined, mechanistic universe.
In what appeared to have been an absurd idea, philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Bertrand Russell both suggested that the views of realists and idealists can be reconciled if each of us has two heads. Empirical objects, the ordinary objects of our daily lives, would lie outside our “Small Head” to be used or experimented with. But simultaneously these same objects would be theoretical ideas inside our “Big Head” — which also embraces our “Small Head” — and thus itself becomes an object of empirical scrutiny.
In reality, this “Big Head” does not have to be ours alone, but can be composed of all such Heads. And since this one super Head would hold all of reality within it, we could all be sharing the one “Big Head.”
This concept provides us with two ways of sharing reality. One aspect, all of our small Heads, is local — it is within the confines of Einsteinian space-time with accessibility limited by the speed of light. But Big Head is non-local, instantaneously accessible, and encompasses the experiences of every empirical object, including our Small Heads, our empirical brains.
Given the existence of both local and non-local aspects of mind, the latter being an organizing principle connecting with brain-mind and local and non-local consciousness, both idealism and realism can be valid — for if brain-mind is an object in a non-local consciousness that encompasses all reality, then what materialists nominate as objective empirical reality is also within this same consciousness.
But why is there so much consensus about an apparently material, determinist objective world that looks to be so permanent? If it is true that the moon is there only when we look at it — as most quantum physicists will assert-why does that moon appear to be so real, so permanent?
Firstly, even the smallest of classical objects, relative to quantum objects, have enormous masses — which means their quantum probability waves spread only very slowly. Such slow spreading makes the trajectory of their approximate center of mass highly predictable. Thus, whenever we look at the moon, we find it where we expect it. Furthermore the complexity of macro bodies translates into a very long regeneration time for their wave function — which induces us to look at them in causal terms.
In the non-local universal consciousness all phenomena, even so-called classical empirical objects, are simply objects in consciousness.
The world, the whole universe, is made of consciousness and is existent only in consciousness. That is a lesson of quantum physics and its differentiation of locality and non-locality.
With idealist science we have arrived at a science that excludes neither the subjective nor the objective, neither spirit nor matter-and thus is able to resolve the deep schism of our thought.
(Please note that the words “consciousness” and “mind” are not precisely defined either in philosophy or in the Urantia revelation and tend to be interchangeable.)
“In the evaluation and recognition of mind it should be remembered that the universe is neither mechanical nor magical; it is a creation of mind.” (UB 42:11.1)
“Mechanisms do not absolutely dominate the total creation; the universe of universes in toto is mind planned, mind made, and mind administered. But the divine mechanism of the universe of universes is altogether too perfect for the scientific methods of the finite mind of man to discern even a trace of the dominance of the infinite mind. For this creating, controlling, and upholding mind is neither material mind nor creature mind, it is spirit-mind functioning on and from creator levels of divine reality.” (UB 42:11.2)
“Cosmic mind is the diversified mind of time and space. Cosmic mind comprises all finite mind levels and coordinates experientially with the evolutionary deity levels of Supreme Mind and transcendentally with the existential levels of absolute mind. Mind always connotes the presence and activity of loving ministry plus varied energy systems, and this is true of all kinds of mind. Paradise mind is beyond human understanding; it is existential, non-spatial, and non-temporal.” (UB 42:10.6)
“The Universal Father is the only personality in all the universe who does actually know the number of the stars and planets of space. All the worlds of every universe are constantly within the consciousness of God.” (UB 3:3.2)
“God is possessed of unlimited power to know all things, his consciousness is universal. Hispersonal circuit encompasses all personalities, and his knowledge of even the lowly creatures is supplemented indirectly through the descending series of divine Sons and directly through the indwelling Spirit of the Father.” (UB 3:3.3)
“The Universal Father realizes in the fullness of the divine consciousness all the individual experience of the progressive struggles of the expanding minds and the ascending spirits of every entity, being, and personality of the whole evolutionary creation of time and space. And all this is literally true, for ‘in Him we all live and move and have our being’.” (UB 1:5.16)
(to be continued…)
Ken T. Glasziou, M. Sc., Ph. D., is a research scientist, retired, who is active in church work in Australia. He is author of “Science and Religion; The New Age Beyond 2000 A. D.,” and “Christ or Chaos: The Evolution of a Revelation.”
He also publishes “Interface International” from which this article is taken, with the author’s permission.