Summary of the Faith and Science 21st Century mini meet up – 18 June 2009

Jay Lakhani opened the meeting eventually outlining his view on why Science and Religion were not two mutually exclusive spheres of human endeavour. He cited the influence of Wittgenstein, whose insistence that different models of belief could exist separately within their own universes, if they were internally self consistent with their own truths, as a key to why there has been some little integration between these two disciplines.

The resultant lack of reconciliation between Science and Religion has done untold damage both enterprises. Jay is extremely passionate about the benefits and achievements of Science which is the most enduring and widespread of all human systems. Science evolves by making hypotheses testing out theories and changing to encompass new discoveries. Scientific thought though is flawed with it’s fixation on matter. Religion though in comparison is stuck in a rut.

To understand the historical interpretation of religious experience Jay explained that the revelation of spirit or the absolute is always unchanging and transcendent in its nature yet has to be interpreted by the human experience through whatever the cultural filters and knowledge of the time. This explains the ancient tendency to create a personified aggrandised externalised God with superhuman attributes.

Today Science is struggling with the limitations of its own methodology; conceptually it is not generating notions with sufficient explanatory power to describe the phenomena that it is witnessing. As a quantum physicist Jay has been privileged to be taught by Roger Penrose and is very well acquainted with the key discoveries at the quantum level that challenge the underpinnings of scientific methodology.

Even Einstein as a physicist who was deeply committed to a rational material explanation of phenomena got himself into difficulties refuting the claims of Bohr Schrödinger and Heisenberg. Taking the group into the detail of quantum discoveries Jay demonstrated the limits of the materialist model to explain quantum entanglement and the uncertainty principle for example.

Jay drew the group’s attention to the fact that when you peered beyond the current limited scientific explanations all matter seems to be an appearance and also everything is inextricably interconnected. The deep introspection and contemplation of the mystics describe the essence of everything as non material consciousness.

Jays passionate evocation of the non material essence of reality, created a very receptive atmosphere for his claim that a new spiritual humanism was required, to embody the both the discoveries of Science and Religion.