The Concept of a Non‐Material Reality: Its Implications for Science and Religion

Abstract

The Concept of a Non‐Material Reality: Its Implications for Science and Religion Eugene P. Trager The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind‐related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Thomas Nagel Is there a non‐material or spiritual reality that exists pari passu with our material world? This is a question that in various forms has haunted mankind since antiquity. In his book, Mind and Cosmos, the contemporary agnostic philosopher Thomas Nagel, from a scientific and logical perspective, makes a compelling case for such an existence. However, ancient peoples have had an intuitive notion about a non‐material reality as well. The spirit of God in the Hebrew Bible and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament are Judeo‐Christian expressions of a non‐material reality. Deuteronomy 4:15—”You saw no form at all on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire.” John 4:24—”God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” In Islam, the Holy Spirit is often referred to by the phrase Ruh‐al‐Qudus and is mentioned four times in the Qur'an in sura 2, sura 5, and sura 16. Sura 2:87—“We gave Jesus the son of Mary clear signs and strengthened him with the Holy Spirit.” In Eastern religions, the equivalent of the Holy Spirit is the Atman (Sanskrit: breath) which is a reference to cosmic consciousness. There is a compelling motivation for exploring the existence of a non‐material or spiritual reality. Some of us cannot live with the notion, as Earnest Nagel puts it, that “human destiny is an episode between two oblivions.” There is a need for Salvation from that possibility. David McCarthy states that “we cannot accept the idea that we are merely products of our genes and environment and all is explainable by physical causes and probabilities.” We are haunted by the notion that there is more to life than that. Whether we admit it or deny it, I believe all of us, atheists, agnostics, and believers alike, have an unconscious sense of a non‐material or spiritual reality and the possibility of some sort of connection between that spiritual reality and what we call our souls. In the material universe of matter and energy that we know, one event causes another according to the laws of physics. For believers, that is because God has set it up this way. God is the author of a material universe which operates according to physical laws. One could argue that the universe's laws came into being spontaneously without the need for a creator, as Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow do, but that begs a question. Who or what caused conditions to come about such that the laws of universe were able to come into being spontaneously? This is an argument from causality. But causality in its usual sense is a human mode of reasoning that may not apply to how the universe really works. If, as humans, we cannot conceive of any form of reasoning beyond causality, our capacity to understand how the universe works is limited. Therefore, the ability to understand how the universe works depends on whether and to what extent, our thinking can transcend causality. Quantum mechanics seems to do that. It seems to suggest that a non‐material or spiritual consciousness, both individual and universal, changes existence itself from a probability to matter and energy as we know it. This is the position of scientists such as Amit Goswami who attempts to bridge the age‐old gap between science and spirituality with his monistic idealism hypothesis, and Robert Lanza who attempts to do this with his Biocentrism hypothesis. According to quantum theory, solid objects like electrons and photons in the subatomic world of quantum have a probability...