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Spirituality and Science 195 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE By JOHN HONNER ENIZENS OF THE modern world, learning Newton's D laws of motion at their father's knee, find only colloquial usefulness in the terms 'matter' and 'spirit'. These concepts belong to primitive religions and ancient phil- osophies and their presence in our discourse today is vestigial: matter is that which we chew upon; and spirit brings football teams to victory. 'Matter', the more concrete concept, is a more acceptable t~rm to today's hard-nosed realists. Few of us will deny the reality of matter when we run the risk of having our noses rubbed in concrete, or vice versa. 'Spirit', on the other hand, we can take or leave. Who knows, at any rate, what we take and what we leave? These attitudes towards matter and spirit are repeated in popular conceptions of science and religion. Science is assumed to be concerned with absolutely objective knowledge obtained by a pro- cess of detached experimentation in the concrete physical world. Religion, by way of contrast, is thought to be more subjective, more personal, and chiefly concerned with something supernatural and other-worldly. The role of terms like 'matter' and 'spirit' in christian conver- sations, therefore, needs urgent clarification. Until this is achieved, meanwhile, our speech about creation and incarnation, sacrament • and spirituality, will be severely impeded. Further, I am optimistic that contemporary theoretical physics provides new perspectives on the nature of so-called 'material' reality.We find that supposedly sharp distinctions between concrete matter and elusive spirit no longer cut so deep. Christians should therefore be encouraged by the possibility of a revivified account of God's presence in the world. For not quite the same reasons as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we find ourselves arriving at his conclusions: 196 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE Matter and spirit are not opposed as two separate things, as two natures, but as two directions of evolution within the world . What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light between matter and spirit: spirit being no longer independent of matter, or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging from under it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and centration. 1 Primitive notions of matter and spirit First of all, let us go back in time. Imagine what your world- view would have been a few thousand years ago, before the discoveries of modern science. How would you have described the reality in which you lived? I suggest that you would have made a distinction between the things you could touch and taste and see and measure and move around, and the things that you could neither touch nor taste nor move, but which you knew were there. Tables and chairs and rocks and trees, for example, all belong to the world of readily observable things: they are measurable. Our words 'matter' and 'metric' come from a sanskrit root, matr-, which includes the meaning 'to measure'. Natural science, which entails an observing and measuring of matter, operates in the realm of the things we can experience, move around, divide and count. Then there would also be things we could not, in our pre- scientific incarnations, touch or see or measure: the air we breathe, the light that fills our day, and the wind that blows where it will. We could not 'count' the air as we can count chairs or trees. More mysterious still, we would notice that death and the absence of breath go together. Though the body remains the same, life has mysteriously gone from it. Thus an invisible, tasteless, ubiquitous entity was invented, named ruach by the Hebrews, or pneuma by the Greeks, or spiritus by the Latins. These words also had the common meaning of 'breath', 'wind', or 'air'. Here was the source of life and an inkling of the gentle, elusive presence of God. Among ancient philosophies, matter was seen to be of itself incomplete. In aristotelian and thomist thought, therefore, the notion of 'form' was introduced. If matter had to do with sense- experience and particularity, then form was related to abstraction, thought and universality. In theology, naturally enough, various parallels could be drawn between 'form' and 'spirit'. But in the thomist account, all the same, matter and form were seen to be SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 197 mutually connected, rather than rival powers• In classical newtonian science the concepts of mass and force superseded aristotelian notions like matter and form. Prior to Newton's elaboration of these new explanatory concepts, however, the ideas of spirit and matter made much more sense. Spirit provided a superbly suitable model for the mysterious action of God. In dualist heresies, unfortunately, matter became associated not only with the transitory, the sensual, and the fragmentary, but also with the evil. God was taken to enter the material world in a mysterious magical kind of way, coming in from outside. Matter and spirit were seen as mutually exclusive elements of reality. The separation of matter and spirit Science has traditionally been taken to be concerned with the objects we can experience and thus with materiality. God is thus transported far beyond the realm of our ordinary and now explic- able experience and placed in the supposedly utterly transcendent realm of spirit. As a result of the influence of classical science, God could only be found in the material world through the traces of his activity. God can in no way be directly present. Consider Newton's comments in his Opticks and the 'General scholium' at the conclusion of his Mathematical principles of natural philosophy: It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles . and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them . And yet we are not to consider the world as the body of God . He is a uniform Being . being everywhere present to the things themselves . It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God • . In him are all things contained and moved . He is utterly void of all body . and can therefore be neither seen, nor heard, nor touched. Classical science, within a century of Newton's work, became so powerful in its prediction and control of every aspect of reality • that God was hardly needed at all. Everything from now on would have its mechanical cause, whether known or not. Spiritual forces no longer came into consideration. Newtonian materialism and mechanism came to sponsor determinism: where then could God intervene, or spirit, or grace? 198 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE Contemporary science and spirituality Is God far off, or is God immediately present? If God is far off, what relevance has he for us? And if he is immediately present, how is it that we cannot see him: or is God, too, a victim of the confinement of materiality? In the christian tradition God is said to be very near: the Word becomes flesh, the Spirit hovers over creation, God is glorified in our bodies. Yet, despite our belief, we Christians ordinarily keep God at a distance. We tend to operate as dualists, keeping matter and spirit separate. The material world presses us in, while God sits in the heavens. Such an attitude is partly related to the immaturity of our faith, but it is also influenced by the mechanistic and materialist notion of reality that western civilization has inheri- ted from classical newtonian science. If we view matter differently, however, then perhaps we can also discover new dimensions of spirituality. Let me consider just two case-studies, the visions of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Albert Einstein In September 1905, Einstein demonstrated theoretically the general equivalence of mass and energy. Rather than a measure of materiality, said the technical expert third-class at the patent office in Bern, 'the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content'. The factor linking energy (E) and mass (m) together was the square of the absolute speed of light (c), a constant of nature: E = mc 2 (1) The validity of this epochal equation was tragically demonstrated once and for all forty years later at Hiroshima. Any materialist theory of nature is now also going to be a theory of energies. But energies are not quite like particles: they are less local, less manoeuverable, less material, and more mysterious when seen in their relationship to fields of force. One only has to consider the ubiquitous power of radio and television signals or of magnetic fields. Einstein's equation does not exclude a physical theory of nature, of course, but it certainly broadens horizons. In the same astonishing year, Einstein also considered the relationship between fight and energy. He began to explore the possibility that light-energy might occur in small packets or 'quanta'. Here particles of energy were related to light, frequency SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 199 (v) by another constant of nature, the quantum of action, called Planck's constant (h). E = hv (2) This hypothesis, in turn, would eventually lead to light being pictured as composed of particles or photons, rather than of continuous radiation-waves. The material world had thus been shown to be essentially an energy world and, secondly, now the world of light-radiation was being shown to be particle-like or material! In 1924 Louis de Broglie combined equations (1) and (2) in an attempt to illustrate the equivalence of mass and radiation and to explain the particle-like behaviour of light. Roughly, leaving relativistic considerations aside, rnc 2 = hv (3) High drama: in the ancient order, surely, light was the principal guise of the sacred, of revelation, of goodness and mystery.
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