Sunday, December 30, 2007

FAQ 9 - Does God and spirituality fit into this?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

9. Does God/spirituality fit into this way of imagining the dimensions?

Talk about a hot button issue! In the tenth dimension forum, questions surrounding God have generated hundreds of posts. But this is also the source of division in this project: some people become immediately suspicious when they see a scientific discussion that acknowledges the possibility of spirit, and some religious people assume that this project must be atheistic because it talks about science.

The goal of this project is to come up with a way to meet in the middle, and that is both its strength and its achilles heel. Luckily, there are a growing number of people in the world who are willing to discuss the middle ground this project is exploring: where science is revealing the truth about the nature of our reality, and that truth has to acknowledge the role of consciousness, creativity and free will.

Here are some blog entries discussing various ideas surrounding this topic:
What's Around the Corner
I Know You, You Know Me
God 2.0
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?
God? Or the Multiverse?
Gevin Giorbran - Gone But Not Forgotten
The Stream
Beer and Miracles
Happy Birthday Paul

Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment? magazine also does a good job of exploring the spiritual side of this project, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here. And here is an interview where Tom discusses these ideas with me at some length.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MteowQVkEHs

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Actually, in the view of science, consciousness and "Free will" are products of evolution. That is why the most intelligent species on the planet, (us), is conscious and the rest are not.

Thus the role of "consciousness" in discovering higher dimensions shouldn't at all be reconciled with the idea of God, and the idea of God existing in dimensions that we have no proof of makes him/her/it infinitely more complex, especially considering many dimensions theoretically exist in fractions of a millimeter.

Trying to push God into science only slows it down.

jane r said...

I think that you've found a great way of opening peoples minds to think about the possibility of higher dimensions.

But I did get worried when I read this part.
"The goal of this project is to come up with a way to meet in the middle, and that is both its strength and its achilles heel"

How can this be the goal?
Have you have already decided that the 2 should meet in the middle somewhere?

I think the goal should be open ended. Only to open peoples minds and to allow them to make there own conclusions. Other wise there is a danger of the whole project becoming bias.

Having a closed goal like that sounds like the beginnings of another religion, where everyone must believe the same thing, and where there is only one conclusion.

At the end of the day no one can know for sure, so it's surly more healthy to encourage people to think about these things without trying to sway them into any particular conclusion. If everyone has a different conclusion, so much the better, because no group of people will claim that they have the definitive answer.

Tenth Dimension Vlog playlist