From Science to God: The Mystery of
Consciousness and the Meaning of Light

Excerpted from From Science to God: The Mystery of Consciousness and the Meaning of Light . (c) 2002 by Peter Russell. Reprinted with permission of Elf Rock Productions. All rights reserved. Buy the book from Amazon.com and help support GraceOnline.

From Science to Consciousness

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering. St. Augustine.

I have always been a scientist at heart. As a teenager, I delighted in learning how the world works: how sound travels through the air, why metals expand when heated, why bleaches bleach, why acids burn, how plants know when to bloom, how we see color, why a lens bends light, how spinning tops keep their balance, why snowflakes are six-pointed stars, and why the sky is blue.

The more I discovered, the more fascinated I became. At sixteen I was devouring Einstein and marveling at the paradoxical world of quantum physics. I delved into different theories of how the universe began, and pondered the mysteries of space and time. I had a passion for knowing, an insatiable curiosity about the laws and principles that governed the world.

I was equally intrigued by mathematics, sometimes called "the queen and servant" of science. Whether it was the swing of a pendulum, the vibrations of an atom or the path of an arrow shot into the wind, every physical process had an underlying mathematical expression. The premises of mathematics were so basic, so obvious, so simple, yet from them unfolded rules governing the most complex of phenomena. I remember the exhilaration I felt upon discovering how the same basic equation [one of the simplest and most elegant of all mathematical equations] governs the propagation of light, the vibrations of a violin string, the coiling of a spiral, and the orbits of the planets.

Matter has reached the point of beginning to know itself... [Man is] a star's way of knowing about stars. George Wald

Numbers, so boring to many, were to me magical. Irrational and imaginary numbers, infinite series, indefinite integrals: I could not get enough of them. I loved the way they all fitted together, like pieces of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Most intriguing of all was how the whole world of mathematics unfolded by the simple application of reason. It seemed to describe a preordained universal truth that transcended matter, time, and space. Mathematics depended on nothing, and yet everything depended on it. If you had asked me then whether there was a God, I would have pointed to mathematics.

The Young Atheist

Conventional religion I had rejected at an early age.

Conventional religion I had rejected at an early age. I was brought up as a member of the Church of England, but in a somewhat lax fashion. Like many families in our village, we attended Sunday service every few weeks, enough to keep our sins in check and our guilt at bay. That was as far as religion affected me. It was an accepted part of life, but not an important part.

So it was until I entered my teens, when I went through the customary ceremony of confirmation. If the process had lived up to its name, I should then have been confirmed as a member of the church. Nothing could have been further from the truth. If anything was confirmed, it was my skepticism toward religion.

I could accept ideas of not sinning, loving thy neighbor, caring for the sick and other models of Christian behavior, but my mind balked at some of the articles of faith I was expected to accept. On Sundays, the congregation dutifully recited the Nicene Creed, professing their belief in "God, the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth...[whose] only begotten son...born of the virgin Mary...arose from the dead...and ascended into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father." Such a creed might have been credible at its inception seventeen hundred years ago, but to a budding scientist growing up in second half of the twentieth century, it was far from believable.

Copernicus had shown that we were not the center of the universe. Astronomers had found no evidence of a heaven up in the sky. Darwin had dispelled the idea that God created the earth and all its living creatures in six days, and biologists had proved virgin birth impossible. Which story should I believe? A text whose only authority was itself, and whose proclamations had little bearing on my everyday reality? Or contemporary science with its empirical approach to truth? At age thirteen, the choice was obvious. I dropped out of conventional religion, and for the rest of my teens my spiritual concerns were reduced to an ongoing debate as to whether I was an atheist or an agnostic.

Psycohological Inclinations

I was not, however, a diehard materialist; I did not believe everything could be explained by the physical sciences. By my mid-teens I had developed an interest in the untapped powers of the human mind. Stories of yogis buried alive for days, or lying on beds of nails, intrigued me. I dabbled in so-called out-of-body experiences and experimented with the altered states of consciousness produced by hyperventilating or staring at pulsating lights. I developed my own techniques of meditation, though I did not recognize them as such at the time, I was fascinated by the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligence; given the trillions of stars in the cosmos, I thought it extremely unlikely that ours was the only planet in the entire universe that had developed conscious life.

I was also making my first ventures into philosophy. My friends and I spent countless hours debating whether or not the mind had an independent existence from the brain. If so, how did the mind and the brain interact? Or was the mind somehow generated by the brain? When we tired of that, there was always the related question of free will versus determinism. If everything, including the state of our own brains, was predetermined by the laws of physics, was our experience of free will genuine, or just an illusion?

Related Links

God in Our Minds? Is your brain hardwired for an experience with the divine? Find out if scientists have found the answers that theologians have sought for thousands of years. Audio.

Bill Joy: Exploding Technology Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, gives us his predictions of where technology is headed and how it will continue to reshape our lives and the way we think. Audio.

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