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Is there any reason to believe that science and religion can ever be brought
under one umbrella of understanding or even reconciled to each other? Ideologues
from both sides who like to think of themselves as moderate believers have been
making tireless attempts to integrate the two diametrically opposing belief
systems for some 30 years now. It all began in the 1970s with the publication to
two blockbuster New Age books called The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and
The
Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. Both were basically metaphysical
interpretations of quantum reality and both considered they had found a link
between the modern physicist’s world view and tenets of Eastern mysticism.
The discovery of such supposed parallels is not limited to best-selling authors.
Werner Heisenberg, the celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate who was
one of the founders of quantum mechanics, is a case in point. He too was
apparently aware of such correspondences. On a lecture tour of India where he
was a guest of Rabindranath Tagore, the two men talked extensively about Indian
philosophy and Heisenberg later acknowledged it had helped him a lot with his
work in physics. He said it showed him that a great deal of new developments in
quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy and that there was, indeed, a
whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas.
But a similarity is not the same thing as being identical. Heisenberg realized
this and, so, never unnecessarily mixed up the two. Neither did Einstein despite
his famous utterance that God does not play dice with the universe. Or for that
matter Steven Hawking, the world’s leading cosmologist, who openly talks about
getting to know the mind of God.
Because to mix up is to invite trouble and confusion. For instance, a very
high-tech state-of-the-art “creation science” museum has just opened in the
United States, sponsored and funded by Christians who believe in a literal
interpretation of the Bible. It depicts God creating the heavens and Earth in
just six days some 6,000 years ago and dinosaurs that lived 60 million years
before humans arrived on the scene, as coexisting with them. Obviously children
visiting these galleries are going to be pretty muddled in their minds during
science classes in school which would flatly deny such things. Perhaps, Capra
himself was right when he said: ‘Physicists do not need mysticism, and mystics
do not need physics, but humanity needs both’.
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