Waves of Possibility

Alan Watts, psychedelic philosopher of the sixties.  He called himself a spiritual entertainer, and he was the first to bring eastern mysticism to the American Average Joe.  Ask your mom, she probably heard him on the radio.  One of my favorite of his stories is the overview of science and religion, the Ceramic Model and the Fully Automatic Model of the Universe.  He claims that most early religions follow the Ceramic Model, in which God is a craftsman, making humanity and everything else out of the dust of the earth, or maybe clay or wood.  Jesus is not a carpenter by coincidence, he cleverly remarks.  In this view, still popular in America today, there is room for God but not science.  We've been made.  We didn't grow, we didn't evolve, we were crafted.  We are separate from nature because we were pulled from it and given - poof! - the breath of life, the elan vital.  This model can be stretched to accommodate some scientific theories, but generally doesn't like the analytical approach to science, or its bias towards universal laws.

Partially in response to the Ceramic Model, scientists evolved the Fully Automated Model, in which there is plenty of room for science, but no room for God.  In this view of the creation of the universe and its myriad contents, once the initial push was over (the inexplicable initial push), everything developed without any need for divine intervention.  Everything that happens follows as a consequence of prior happenings, each step follows a prior step.  This view can sometimes slide towards determinism, and those who love free will have to close their eyes and wave their hands rather than reconciling the two.  The most popular image in this view is Newton's clockwork universe.

Of course, having set up thesis and antithesis, Alan Watts enjoys the opportunity to find a synthesis of these world views.  I think we all want God and science, or we might call it spirit and logic, mysticism and rationality.  We have an intuitive sense, these days, that we need both.  But do they fit together, or is it like China, where men of political affairs have for millennia been Confucians by day and Taoists by night?  Alan Watts finds his synthesis in the idea that all creation is one great ocean, and each apparently individual manifestation (person or star or plant) is merely a wave of the ocean.  He says, "The ocean waves and the universe peoples."  Everything is not a thing but a verb.

Although this is a lovely image, I don't feel much like a wave, I don't feel like and extension of the sun.  It's lovely to learn that my atomic constituents are molecules formed in stellar nucleosynthesis, I am in fact stardust.  But that doesn't make me feel at one with the stars.  I have this miraculous consciousness that doesn't seem to have any parallel in the heart of the sun, or even the heart of my backyard strawberry patch.  I feel different, I even feel unique.  So now I get the fun of imagining my own synthesis of the divine with the observed laws of nature.

I've decided to look to quantum physics for the NextGen Model of the Universe.  Scientists claim that electrons are not actually located in specific places, but wander through some sort of probability field.  Quarks pop in and out of existence.  At the fundamental levels of existence, there is a roiling activity of particles waving and wavering in and out of space, in and out of reality.  Whether B will follow A is a gamble, a flip of a coin, heads or tails.  Despite Einstein's beliefs, God does in fact play dice with the Universe.  This puts paid to the determinist viewpoint.  The future is not fully determined by the past.  The future unfolds out of probabilities, out of possibilities.  This view fully embraces free will, as we are each moving into a future that doesn't move in lockstep with the past. 

Each step, we leap into the unknown.  This leap is not purely random, but rides on waves of possibility.  Roll the dice.  The divine has a sense of humor.

Laura Secor