- Haisch, Bernard.
The God Theory.
San Francisco: Weiser, 2006.
ISBN 1-57863-374-5.
-
This is one curious book. Based on acquaintance with the author
and knowledge of his work, including the landmark paper
“Inertia
as a zero-point-field Lorentz force” (B. Haisch, A. Rueda &
H.E. Puthoff, Physical Review A, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 678–694 [1994]),
I expected this to be a book about the zero-point field and its
potential to provide a limitless source of energy and Doc Smith
style inertialess propulsion. The title seemed odd, but there's
plenty of evidence that when it comes to popular physics books,
“God sells”.
But in this case the title could not be more accurate—this book
really is a God Theory—that our universe was created,
in the sense of its laws of physics being defined and instantiated,
then allowed to run their course, by a being with infinite potential
who did so in order to experience, in the sum of the consciousness of
its inhabitants, the consequences of the creation. (Defining the laws
isn't the same as experiencing their playing out, just as writing down
the rules of chess isn't equivalent to playing all possible games.)
The reason the constants of nature appear to be fine-tuned for the
existence of consciousness is that there's no point in creating a
universe in which there will be no observers through which to
experience it, and the reason the universe is comprehensible to us is
that our consciousness is, in part, one with the being who defined
them. While any suggestion of this kind is enough to get what Haisch
calls adherents of “fundamentalist scientism” sputtering
if not foaming at the mouth, he quite reasonably observes that these
self-same dogmatic reductionists seem perfectly willing to admit
an infinite number of forever unobservable parallel universes
created purely at random, and to inhabit a universe which splits
into undetectable multiple histories with every quantum event, rather
than contemplate that the universe might have a purpose or that
consciousness may play a rôle in physical phenomena.
The argument presented here is reminiscent in
content, albeit entirely different in style, to that
of Scott Adams's God's Debris
(February 2002), a book which is often taken insufficiently
seriously because its author is the creator of
Dilbert.
Of course, there is another possibility about which I have
written
again,
again,
again,
and again,
which is that our universe was not created
ex nihilo by an omnipotent being
outside of space and time, but is rather a simulation created by
somebody with a computer whose power we can already envision, run not
to experience the reality within, but just to see what happens. Or,
in other words, “it isn't a universe, it's a science fair
project!” In The God Theory, your
consciousness is immortal because at death your experience
rejoins the One which created you. In the simulation view,
you live on forever on a backup tape. What's the difference?
Seriously, this is a challenging and thought-provoking
argument by a distinguished scientist who has thought deeply
on these matters and is willing to take the professional
risk of talking about them to the general public. There is
much to think about here, and integrating it with other
outlooks on these deep questions will take far more time
than it takes to read this book.
May 2007 