Religion seen in a new way

A common ground for all religions can be seen in three respects:

1) All religions agree that there is a God, an agent of what they call downward causation. This is to be distinguished from materialists’ upward causation model; namely that all cause originates from the base level of matter, the elementary particles.

All religions don’t necessarily disagree with materialists’ upward causation, but they additionally postulate occasional intervention by a (non-material) God, such as creation events.

2) All religions also conceive the existence of non-material “subtle” bodies connected with our internal experiences like feeling, meaning, and values, in addition to the material body. The subtle bodies correspond to the pranamaya kosha, manomaya kosha, and the Vijnanamaya kosha of the Upanishads.

3) All religions postulate the importance of certain values as the goal of life; values as, love, truth, beauty, justice, good.  Religions maintain that these godly qualities are what give life meaning.

Scientists negate downward causation. They reject the idea of a -God interacting with matter? They also reject the idea of subtle non material bodies interacting with the material a body? They claim that this is Dualism. Dualism is not scientifically feasible because two bodies that have nothing in common cannot interact without a mediator and there is no mediator that one can see.

As for the third contention of religions, the importance of values in our lives, materialist science does not exactly deny it. But they maintain that values originate in matter as genetic programs but no programmer is required. Instead these programs evolve through Darwinian evolution (natural selection) because they help the organism to adapt to environmental changes.

In quantum physics, objects are not determined things, they are waves of possibilities. When we observe these waves, they collapse into actual events in our experience. Instead of observing spread-out waves, what we observe is a localized particle. This is the famous observer effect.

In every event of observation, there is the object that the observer is looking at and a second object consisting of the observer, a brain. Before observation, before collapse, both are waves of possibility. When consciousness chooses, only then the brain is actualized along with the external object as experiences, as appearances in consciousness.

Consciousness identifies with the brain due to a specialness of the brain, a specialness that makes an object with a brain an observer. This conscious identity is what we call the self, what we experience as a subject looking at the collapsed object. Consciousness, the chooser, transcends both the immanent subject and object.

In this generalized science within consciousness, upward causation gives us the waves of possibility to choose from; downward causation consists of the act of choice. Both modes of causation are incorporated. And there is no dualism; the subject-object duality is seen to be an appearance!

The next step was to realize that the choosing consciousness must transcend personality, must be unitive–the same for all of us. If this were not so, you could look at a multifaceted quantum possibility wave and choose one facet and simultaneously somebody else could look and choose an alternative contradictory facet. The world then would be pandemonium.