Beyond Science and Religion


Are we Spiritual Beings Having a Physical Experience?

Our modern mindset conditions us to look at the world as physical beings, collections of matter and dust; advanced robots; machines with a brain.   Into this materialistic framework, we have a hard time fitting spirit, the notion that there is something more than mere inert, lifeless stuff at the core of existence.  Spirit and matter have never gone together well, like a light breeze blowing through the Grand Canyon, spirit does not affect matter, and may be simply an illusion. But this attitude leads to a big what if?  What if we are in fact spiritual beings having a physical experience. who have fooled themselves into thinking that our essence is matter, rather than spirit?  In his controverisal book, The Phenomenon of Man,  French Philosopher and Jesuit Priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote that indeed, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.  Suppose we take this as our starting point, and...

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Conversations Beyond Science and Religion – Is the Multiverse the Final Answer?

An unavoidable fact of science is that the universe is finely-tuned to allow life to exist. Fundamental forces and constants, from the rest mass of the electron to the sun’s distance from the Earth and the strength of “dark energy,” appear to be adjusted to ensure a stable universe and the possibility of life. Scientists, faced with this fine-tuning, confront the age-old dilemma of whether to bring a supreme being into the picture or to seek a “natural” explanation. But science’s natural explanation for the fine-tuning problem is a humdinger: an increasingly number of physicists are jumping on the multiverse bandwagon, supporting the idea that our universe is just one of a near infinite series of other universes, forming a vast landscape of other worlds. On this show, guest Bernard Carr, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, and editor of the book, Universe or Multiverse,...

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The Eternal Question of Life and Death

The classic Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, tells the story of the five sons of the deceased King Pandu, who are exiled to the forest through the treachery of a jealous cousin.  Thirsting for water, the five brothers come upon a crystal lake; as they prepare to take a drink, a voice comes out of the forest and says, “before you drink, first answer my question.”  The first four sons ignore the voice, take a drink and fall dead.  The fifth son, Yudhisthira, stops, and listens to the questions.   The voice asks, “of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?”  Yudhisthira answers: “That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes he himself will not die.”  The voice was of the god Dharma, who proceeded to bring the four brothers back to life. This story either speaks to something eternal in us, or shows that most people cannot face death. ...

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Conversations Beyond Science and Religion – Beyond the Inflationary Big Bang

The universe began with the Big Bang, right? But how did this chaotic, random event lead to an ordered, balanced universe? Recognizing this problem, in the 1980′s, cosmologists developed a new theory called the inflationary Big Bang. This new model called for the early universe to inflate at super-warp speed in the blink of an eye; if this occurred, cosmologists said, it would be possible for the Big Bang to have produced the universe we live in without needing finely-tuned initial conditions. So the inflationary Big Bang made its way into college textbooks, television documentaries, and popular science books. Professor Paul Steinhardt, of Princeton University, is one of the leading theorists who refined the inflationary model into the form it appears today. In a recent Scientific American article, however, Professor Steinhardt raises serious doubts over the inflationary model, showing that it actually requires more fine-tuning than the original Big Bang...

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Beyond the Inflationary Big Bang

The answer most people would likely give to the question of how the universe began is, the “Big Bang.”  But it’s a fair guess that this same group of people do not know what the Big Bang is, or that it has in fact been replaced by another model known as the inflationary Big Bang. The interesting part of this story is why cosmologists decided to revise the standard Big Bang model in the first place. It turns out that the original Big Bang possessed a number of features that deeply perplexed scientific theorists.   Two of these features are the smoothness problem and the flatness problem.   Without getting into unnecessary details, the smoothness problem arises as a result of the near uniformity of the so-called cosmic background radiation — the supposed “afterglow” from the Big Bang.   This background radiation happens to be uniform across the celestial sphere to 1 part in 100,000.  How is...

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