Conversations Beyond Science and Religion



An Interview with Tim Freke – The Soul Crisis

Modern science describes the workings of the physical world, and religion tries to do the same for the spiritual world. But science has reached its limits in seeking to define the universe as simply a mindless machine governed by impersonal and random forces. Religion forgets that God — and our conception of this Being — must itself evolve with time. Thus, we must go beyond science and religion, and break free from these old ways of thinking, to find a new and brighter perspective on viewing the world we live in. These podcasts feature interviews with a wide range of leading thinkers from the fields of science, spirituality, new age, and parapsychology who are offering original and creative ideas that expand our understanding of who we are and the place we find ourselves in....



UFOs as a Commentary on a Divided Worldview

Probably no topic so divides science and the “new age” as UFOs.  A recent column in Astronomy Magazine entitled, “Let’s cut the UFO crap,” makes the point that it is only naivete about the cosmic distant scale than allows people to believe in UFO’s.   This is a powerful argument when one considers distant scales.  The closest star to the Earth other than the sun is Alpha Centauri, which 4.37 light years — or over 25 trillion miles away.   An extremely fast spacecraft traveling at 100,000 mph    (the record for a manned spacecraft is just under 40,000 mph)  would take about 28,000 years to reach the Alpha Centauri planet.  And this is the closest possible one.  So from this perspective, the notion that alien spacecraft are roaming the sky, darting in and out of our vision, waiting for the right moment to land, seems preposterous.  The scientific case builds...

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Dr. Joe Dispenza: You are the Placebo

The wall between spirit and matter, mind and body, is collapsing. This may be the key finding of the new age of thinking that just now is gaining momentum. Perhaps nothing better highlights this development than the “powerful placebo,” fake drugs and medical treatments that nevertheless cause real physical improvements in the body. But how is this possible unless there is a link between mind and body? In this latest installment of my radio show, Conversations Beyond Science and Religion, best-selling author and internationally known speaker, Dr. Joe Dispenza, talks about his new book, You are the Placebo, in which he takes the findings of the placebo effect one step farther.  When we transfer the findings of the placebo effect to the world-at-large, the possibilities for human development become endless.  That’s when we find that  well-intentioned thoughts and emotions, rather than the outside world, control our future....



Is Intelligent Design Science?

On my upcoming radio show, Conversations Beyond Science and Religion, webtalkradio.net, scheduled for posting on July 29, 2013, I interview Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University and author of the controversial book, Darwin’s Black Box.  This book, which the back cover says helped launch the intelligent design movement, contains a devastating attack on Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  We are conditioned to reject the intelligent design movement as unscientific (if not unAmerican) and to believe that the Darwinian camp, led by Richard Dawkins (of Blind Watchmaker fame), must be right.  While taking this stance, I would guess many people have not really  examined for themselves natural selection or Behe’s version of intelligent design.  And this may be the biggest problem facing opponents of Darwin: it doesn’t matter what the facts show, to be a true scientist one must be a materialist (matter, not mind, is fundamental) and reject any role...

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Conversations Beyond Science and Religion – The Higgs (God) Particle Made Easy – Almost

In 1993, Noble prize-winning physicist, Leon Lederman, published a book entitled, The God Particle. The book was about a particle, hypothesized most prominently by Peter Higgs, which is associated with a field that permeates the universe and gives mass to the elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics. On July 4, 2012, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, announced they had discovered signs of a new particle that looks an “awful lot like the long sought after” Higgs particle. So does this mean that the secret to the universe has now been revealed and that with the God particle in its sights, there is nothing left for particle physics to discover? Or does this discovery simply convert the mystery of particle mass into the mystery of the properties of the Higgs field? Learn what the Higgs particle really is 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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Conversations Beyond Science and Religion: The Invisible Bridge Between Science and Mysticism

Science deals with the real world; mysticism, with the spiritual world. Science is based upon testable facts and logical deductions; mysticism, upon wispy thoughts, dreams, and hopes. But is there a deeper connection that we are missing? Notably, science too is filled with mysteries – the origin of matter, the laws of nature, the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, the origin of life, to name a few. Is mysticism an integral part of the world? This week’s guest, Jude Currivan, of the UK, is a cosmologist, author (HOPE: Healing our People and Earth), and mystic. She joins host Philip Mereton in a wide-open conversation about reconciling the worlds of science and mysticism. Listen to this episode  ...



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