Did we evolve from the apes? Or did God create us on the sixth day? Retired University physics professor Dr. Amit Goswami says the answer is some combination of both.
“God does create, but not in six days like in Genesis,” he said. “It’s an intermediate position that reconciles both points of view.”
While science and religion are often seen as polar opposites, Goswami believes the two are connected. He said there are so many things – such as dreams and fossil gaps in biological evolution – that science can’t explain, which he thinks point to the existence of a higher being.
“I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily wrong, I just don’t understand it,” said University mathematics professor Dr. Jim Isenberg, director of the Institute of Theoretical Science, a center for research that encompasses physics, math and chemistry. “We do experiments to understand the phenomena of the universe in nature, and religion deals with a lot of things that aren’t particularly accessible by scientific experiment.”
Goswami, also a member of ITS, wrote “God Is Not Dead,” which will be released in June. The book is a self-described “guided tour of quantum physics, consciousness and their relationship to the existence and experience of God” that was inspired by a 1994 experiment by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, a neurophysiologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
After meditating together for 20 minutes, pairs of subjects were placed in separate electromagnetically shielded chambers and connected to electroencephalography machines, which measure brain activity. Both subjects were inclined with semi-closed eyes; one was shown 100 random flashes of light, while the other was not.
Results found that the two subjects often had similar brain responses after the light flashes, even though they were only seen by one subject.
“There might be an interconnectivity that does not depend on signals,” said Goswami, adding that several follow-up experiments found similar results.
Goswami earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Calcutta in his native India in 1964, arriving in Oregon four years later. At that time in his life, he was a “staunch materialist,” as he wrote in the introduction to his book.
“I believed everything is made of matter, I believed religion was ‘Bah, humbug!’, all of it,” he said.
He began studying the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness in the early 1980s. Today, he describes himself as a “ginervic mystic,” studying a mix of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism – with which he grew up – and Kabbalah, an ancient form of Jewish mysticism.
“I think everything in the universe is connected and that’s why I think religions are interesting because they’re trying to do that,” said Krista Harper, a University junior studying journalism and religious studies.
While Harper is unfamiliar with Goswami’s research, she thought he was fascinating in “What the #$*! Do We Know!?” a 2004 film in which he was one of the interviewed scientists.
A mix of fiction, documentary and computer animation, “What the #$*! Do We Know!?” was about the connection between quantum physics and consciousness.
“Personally, I don’t understand science, but I definitely appreciate when people try and tie everything together,” Harper said. “I’m studying religious studies because I’m personally very spiritual, but also because I feel like in some ways, religious stuff is the truth just as much as science is.”
Harper thinks Goswami’s research is “awesome,” but University biology professor Patrick Phillips doesn’t think it holds up, scientifically.
“I would fall into the camp that people are free to believe that (evolution and creationism go together), but that’s not a scientific idea and it can’t really be addressed by science,” he said. “Just because we don’t understand everything doesn’t mean we can’t.”
Another of Goswami’s religious-scientific hypotheses involves reincarnation. He believes that children, who are born as “blank slates,” are able to absorb things so quickly because they’re remembering them from former lives.
“It’s quite clear that children aren’t blank slates and humans are evolved from other organisms,” Phillips said. “I don’t think it helps foster the debate on the differences between science and religion to have a misunderstanding about how child development works or how evolution works.”
Isenberg grew up in a religious Jewish household and though he doesn’t attend synagogue every Saturday, he still thinks religion is very important, despite being a physicist and an advocate of the Big Bang theory.
“I think the Bible is useful in helping understand life in the universe, but it’s not to be taken literally,” he said.
Goswami agrees. While he is trying to scientifically prove the existence of God, in his mind, a higher being is a supplement to science, not a replacement for it.
“If we do our science based not on matter but on a new metaphysic and the primacy of conscious, then all the paradoxes of quantum physics can be solved,” Goswami said. “That was the most surprising and most satisfying discovery of my entire life.”
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