Reality has a physical and as a metaphysical aspect.

This statement

is the epitome of David Bohms findings endorsed by his research in

frontier physics. Bohm argued that at the implicate level, all knowledge of
the universe is stored as pure potentiality in a state of dynamic
vacuum, (the infinite inner possibilities of the infinity of the Ultimate
Ego in Iqbals formulation1 and immutable entities of Ibn Arab2) and
at that level, where there are no observable phenomena, reality is entirely
non-local and non-temporal. His theories had deeper ramifications for
religion and philosophy, an unexpected ally in the fight against dogmatic,
scientistic, materialism. Modernism, with its view that humankind can only
know what science can prove, held sway in academic circles for nearly a
century, was shown by Bohm to have been antiquated view. Bohm was
arguing that there is a facet of reality that science cannot see. The best
understanding of the universe necessitated the acceptance of the view that
reality has a metaphysical aspect, an aspect that by definition could never
be directly quantified or measured, though its effects in the realm of
time and space could be. And this is precisely what Iqbal had proposed
to detail in his 2nd Lecture with reference to the Quranic verse He is the
First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Al-khir) and the Outward (Al-hir) and the
Inward (Al-Bin).

Its boundlessness is potential, not actual.Intensive intensity

40/7

!








Iqbal
***




***

There is a relation,
without being able to ask how, without being able to
compare it to anything,
Between the soul of man and the Lord of the soul.

PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

Some Remarks on Iqbals Model of the Ultimate
Reality with Reference to David Bohms
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Reality has a physical and as a metaphysical aspect. This
statement could be safely considered as the epitome of David Bohms
findings endorsed by his research in frontier physics that spanned well
over five decades. David Bohm, physicist and close colleague of both
Oppenheimer and Einstein, was a theorist whose work was an advance on
Einsteins theory and greatly impacted the scientific worldview, opening
new vistas that led towards a viable model for a splice between science
and religion. Bohm was making such interesting claims about the nature of
reality

one

couldnt

think

of

anyone

whose

theories

had

deeper

ramifications for religion and philosophy, an unexpected ally in the fight

against dogmatic, scientistic, materialism that had prevailed in the
academy and was responsible for the colonizing effects of science on
humanities.3
Iqbal was the sage who, while reformulating the classical perspective of
the Islamic tradition on the nature of reality, both in his prose and poetry,
Bohms views, developed through his laboratory experiments spanned
over a period of thirty years, supported the theory that the universe has a

metaphysical aspect; in fact, Bohm described a transcendent level of

reality that sounded almost identical if not identical to Eckharts and
Aldous Huxleys Divine Ground of Being, as well as Hinduisms Brahma4
and, to our astonishment, to the Iqbalian ..the ultimate ground of all
experience

the Immanent-Infinite (Iqbals Model of the Ultimate

Reality). We would have occasion to say more about it later but let us first
have a look at what Bohm had to say about the matter.
Bohm published his landmark book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order,
in 1980, in which he presented a distillation of a theory he had been
working on for more than thirty years. He had been nudged toward his
revolutionary views by the unusual behavior of quantum entities called
photons. In brief, the aspect that intrigued Bohm was this: if two related
photons of light (related because they result from the splitting of the same
positron, which is a larger quantum entity) are traveling in opposite
directions, they somehow maintain the same angles of polarization
(basically, the same orientation in space relative to their point of origin) no
matter how far apart they travel in space, or even if one of them is
affected by an outside force along the way. For example, if a scientist
changes the orientation of one of the photons, the other one will
instantaneously be found to have the same new angle of polarization.
This phenomenon was proven conclusively by experiment two years
later, in 1982, at the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris. It had
already been accepted as most likely even at the beginning of Bohms
career, and what drew Bohms attention and everyone elses was that it
seemed to present a contradiction to Einsteins theory that nothing could
travel faster than the speed of light. This business about one photon
changing its orientation in summary with another seemed to suggest a sort
of

instantaneous

communication

between

two

distant

objects.

Instantaneous occurs outside the realm of speed altogether, let alone

faster than the speed of light. For Bohm, who agreed with Einstein that
nothing was likely to break light speed, this phenomenon of the

communicating photons suggested that quantum theory must somehow

be incomplete, that perhaps a better theory could resolve or explain away
what appeared to be a contradiction from inside the current view. 6 Maybe
nothing could travel faster than light but instantaneous communication is
somehow also possible.
Bohm began to draft a new and broader perspective, and after more
than two decades finally arrived at his theory, arguing that quantum reality
is actually based on what he termed an implicate order. His view was
that there is a fundamental but unobservable level of order in the universe
that gives rise to all observable phenomena, including not only light
photons but, at higher magnitudes of reality, children, trees and inanimate
matter. The underlying level, which he termed the enfolded order
(synonymous with what others have termed the quantum potential),
sometimes unfolds into discrete quantum moments of physical being.
However, Bohm believed that on the enfolded level, where nothing is
manifest as an observable entity, all things are really part of one thing
though this thing is not a thing at all, 7 at least not in the Newtonian sense.
Bohm described it as an implicate order that underlies the explicate
order of the physical universe. He theorized that as various quanta
emerge from it, they retain some characteristics of their implicate and
infinitely interconnected original state. The beauty of this theory for the
problem of those pesky photons that seem to instantaneously communicate
with each other was that it allowed for the photons to exist as discrete
particles on one level of their being (as they moved away from each other
in the explicit order) but explained how they could also change their
orientation simultaneously. On the explicit level, the photons were in
cahoots simply because they still retained characteristics of the implicate
level from which they had emerged; they were not communicating across a
vast distance at a speed greater than light; they were simply behaving as
the one thing they fundamentally were on the implicate level of existence.

This summary is a redacted explanation of Bohms theory in Wholeness

and the Implicate Order and intended to illustrate the components of
Bohms work that are in sync with Iqbals views that he expounded with
reference to the Quranic verse He is the First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Alkhir) and the Outward (Al-hir) and the Inward (Al-Bin).8 First and
foremost, it contains the premise that there is a level of things that
transcends physical reality and this level of quantum potentiality not only
exists but is the foundation for all existence, a view which sounds very
much like the doctrines mentioned above from Vedanta, Christian
Theology and Iqbal. Though its presence of the implicate order is strongly
suggested by the behavior of quantum entities like split photons, it cannot,
because of its implicit and unmanifest nature, be quantified directly by
scientific methods, since there is nothing to see with the tools of science.
This concept also jibes with the claims of mystics, (in Iqbals words:
religious experts in all ages and countries is that there are potential types
of consciousness lying close to our normal consciousness. 9) who had
written that the purest level of Being exists beyond both time and space.
If one tries to fathom more deeply into Bohms view of Reality, the points
of resonance with the traditional/religious views keep mounting. For
example, Bohms theory supported and expressed the notion that the
universe, at least at its quantum level, is non-local, meaning, in the jargon
of physics,10 that the events and entities we encounter in the explicate
order are not ultimately autonomous or disconnected. Bohm argued that at
the implicate level, all knowledge of the universe is stored as pure
potentiality in a state of dynamic vacuum, (the infinite inner
possibilities of the infinity of the Ultimate Ego in Iqbals formulation11
and immutable entities of Ibn Arab12) and at that level, where there are
no observable phenomena, reality is entirely non-local and non-temporal.
On that enfolded level, it is Oneness or None-ness (since its difficult to
speak of a singularity from which nothing can be separate, including a
place from which to observe its oneness) that then unfolds into physical

patterns and events. The closer we get to the subtlest and most implicate
level of Reality, events express themselves with increasing degrees of
profoundly

interconnected,

self-referential

and

therefore

non-local

behavior.
The idea of pure potentiality, which Bohm attributed to the level of the
implicate order is in fact a shared metaphysical idea of all civilizations
and traditional theologies of the world religions and it is the Iqbalian
formulation as well of ..the ultimate ground of all experience13 about
which he had said Like pearls do we live and move and have our being in
the perpetual flow of Divine life14 and The world, in all its details, from
the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of matter to the free
movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the Great
I am15 and to use the Hindu terms for the same narrative The physical
and metaphysical aspects of the Ultimate Reality, according to the
Vedantic perspective, form a seamless unity. The physical universe and
everything in it is a manifestation of an underlying metaphysical reality
that is infinite, timeless, unmanifest. This metaphysical and spiritual
source of all existence is called Brahma. Everything in the universe arises
from Brahma in the way that waves arise from the ocean and some of the
things that arise from It are us. As physical beings we take form out of this
one eternal, limitless reservoir of all Being. This Brahma is not a thing in
the usual sense, since it has no form or mass, nor duration (in this sense, it
is nothing no thing with reference to the world of time and space and
matter), but it is also not a vacuum or void like empty space. It is reservoir
of pure potentiality out of which all reality emerges from nano second to
nanosecond; it is the Beyond Being that flowers into all forms of being.
To formulate the doctrine in the language of Islamic mystical Theology
one can present it in the following manner: the Supreme Principle is both
Necessary Being and the Sovereign Good; it is Being with respect to its
Reality, and Good with respect to its Positivity or its Qualitative
Potentiality for on the one hand, I am that I am, and on the other, God

alone is good. From Necessary Being is derived possible being which

may be or may not be that is, existence; and all manifested qualities are
derived from the Sovereign Good which is their only cause or essence.
Or to formulate the doctrine in a more religious specific (i.e.
Islamic/Quranic/Hadith) language one may look at a few of the Quranic
verses, since they provide a convenient introduction to basic Islamic ideas
about the relationship between God and the cosmos and God and human
beings:
Surely We have created everything with a measuring out. (54:49)
There is nothing whose treasuries are not with Us, and We send it down
only with a known measuring out. (15.21)
A famous Hadth could be added to it. I was a Hidden Treasure, so I
loved to be known.

Hence I created the creatures that I might be

known.16 These two verses and the Hadth illustrate the basic Quranic
themes that God is the source of all things, so all things are found with
him. Whether they are with him in the Unseen or with us in the Visible, he
knows them:
With Him are the keys to the Unseen, none knows them but He. He knows
what is in land and sea, not a leaf falls, but He knows it. Not a grain in the
earths shadows, not a thing, fresh or withered, but it is in an explicit
Book.
(6:59)
When God creates something, he brings it into existence. At the same
time, he keeps with himself the treasuries from which he provides for the
things existence. These treasuries represent the good and the real, which
belong only to God. "There is nothing real but the Real." In more detail,
the treasuries represent the divine attributes, which are the sources for all
good and real qualities in the world. Hence, a things life is supplied from
Gods treasury of life, a things power from his treasury of power, a things
compassion from his treasury of compassion. Who decides what it is that
things receive from the treasuries? The owner of the treasuries. What is

his decision called? Measuring out. He measures out knowledge, power,

mercy, good, and so on. No created thing is able to control its share of
these qualities. Everything participates in the real qualities of existence
only to the extent that Reality allows it to participate; God is on the giving
end, and created things are on the receiving end.
In short, when we discuss God and tawhd, the discussion takes
place on three different levels. First, we recognize that a single
reality is there (the essence), hidden behind the diversity of
appearances. Second, we describe the ways in which that thing
appears to us, and our descriptions are called attributes. Third, we
describe the things that are apparent before our eyes as acts and
we recognize that these acts depend upon those attributes.
God (add) Gods acts are all the things that he creates in the universe
throughout time and space. The universe, or cosmos in all its temporal
and spatial extension is a single infinite act that externalizes everything
that God knows about it in his infinite knowledge.
Islam is not alone in saying that. In all the metaphysical doctrines of the
East and (Premodern) West , there was the premise that the physical
world, the realm of change an impermanence, rises out of an unmanifest
reality, and that Reality itself is also non-local. 17 Bohm was arguing,18 that
all of reality is interconnected, and it is to be noted that Bohm didnt leave
the phenomenon of consciousness out of his theory regarding this
interconnectedness. In fact, Bohm had devoted two full chapters of his
book to a discussion of the nature of consciousness, arguing that as matter
and energy were once treated as separate entities, along with space and
time, perhaps nothing, including consciousness and matter, is ultimately
separate from anything else. Reality merely comprises varying densities of
one infinitely self-referential and all-inclusive phenomenon (Iqbals
parallel with Bohms formulation, which he termed as the ultimate
ground of all experience [read: phenomenon], despite Bohms nontheological scientific terminology, would not have been lost on the

readers!) Where Newtonians and strict materialists had argued that

consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter (consciousness having
developed slowly as a by-product of increasingly sophisticated stages of
biological evolution), Bohm wondered if it might not be the other way
around. Perhaps material creation is actually an epiphenomenon of
consciousness. And this compels us to think, what if, in terms of another
context altogether, it could be that people are all connected on a deeper
level of reality (which different theories of psychology/neuroscience, like
Jungs and Campbells collective unconscious and their later day variants,
had been grappling to understand) because that level of physical existence
retains more of the absolute interconnectivity endemic to the deepest level
of Being? Could the collective unconscious exist closer to the Pure
Consciousness from which all superficial levels of our psyches (and all
other things in the world) arise?
It was ironic that at this time when metaphysics had been barred from
philosophy and couldnt be taken seriously in the academic study of
religion, it was being legitimately considered in the discipline of Physics,
the hardest of the hard sciences. Einstein had replaced Newtons view of a
three-dimensional universe floating in linear time with a four-dimensional
space-time continuum where matter and energy are transposable.
Quantum mechanics had suggested that the universe isnt built out of
atoms or any other absolute or indivisible particles, but rather is a complex
interaction of energetic processes arising from pure potentiality (the
Hidden Treasure, the Divine Ground of Being, the Brahma19 and,
the ultimate ground of all experience, Its boundlessness is
potential.. of Iqbal). The universe, composed of interrelated vibratory
events, is more like a cosmic interference pattern than a structure
comprising discrete material objects. In fact, with reference to objects,
quantum physics was and is entirely undermining the materialists
viewpoint, and so Bohm was simply adding support to this position. Even
he came to see that his views had a definite resonance with certain ancient

viewpoints, and later in his life he would discuss these similarities with
mystics of several traditions.20 The similarity between Bohms views and
certain tenants of the traditional metaphysical doctrines suggests that
science was bringing metaphysics out of mothballs. Now that metaphysics
(read: God) had been returned to physics perhaps it could also be returned
to philosophy and the academic study of religion! This is in complete
accord with the Iqbalian project. Strict materialism had had its day, and
the next step in the development of the hard sciences suggested that the
ancient traditions hadnt been as wrong as the modernists had supposed.
What Iqbal had said about the Newtonian view of reality in 1929,21
Classical Physics has learned to criticize its own foundations. As a result
of this criticism the kind of materialism, which it originally necessitated, is
rapidly disappearing; and the day is not far off when Religion and Science
may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies.22 It resounds in a
contemporary review of the intellectual milieu, The developments in
science have undercut a kind of crass Newtonian view of reality as
consisting of ultimate little atoms that are unrelated to other things our
century has undercut that. The interrelation between the parts of being
which David Bohm23 emphasizes with his concept of implicate wholeness
clearly is a move back toward the unity which traditional philosophies,
those of Asia included, emphasized.
It also deserves mention here that thirty-four years earlier, in 1946,
Erwin Schrodinger, the winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics, 4 had
commented in his book What is Life?, The point of view taken here levels
with what Aldous Huxley has recently and very appropriately called The
Perennial Philosophy.24 Schrodinger agreed with Huxley, though he knew
Huxleys views contradicted the scientific dogma of their time, because
Schrodinger believed metaphysics might actually be important even to
physics, and so he later commented in Mind and Matter (1958):
It is relatively easy to sweep away the whole of metaphysics, as Kant did.
[]. But you must not think that what has been achieved is the actual

elimination

of

metaphysics

from

the

empirical

content

of

human

knowledge. In fact, if we cut out all metaphysics it will be found to be

vastly more difficult, indeed probably quite impossible, to give any
intelligible account of even the most circumscribed area of specialization
within any specialized science.25
It is important to note that Bohm was the first to give a complex
explanation of how it actually worked. Modernism, with its view that
humankind can only know what science can prove, held sway in academic
circles for nearly a century, so to suggest, as Bohm had done, that this was
an antiquated view constituted an attack on modernisms root assumption.
In short, Bohm was arguing that there is a facet of reality that science
cannot

see.

Bohm,

like

Schrodinger,

was

saying

that

the

best

understanding of the universe necessitated the acceptance of the view that

reality has a metaphysical aspect, an aspect that by definition could never
be directly quantified or measured, though its effects in the realm of
time and space could be. And this is precisely what Iqbal had proposed
to detail in his 2nd Lecture with reference to the Quranic verse He is the
First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Al-khir) and the Outward (Al-hir) and the
Inward (Al-Bin). 26
*****

1 One of the Iqbals remarks reads as follows: The infinity of the Ultimate Ego

consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the
universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word Gods infinity is
intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series. (M.
Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp.
57-58.)
2 One of the more common and probably best known terms that Ibn al-Arab
employs for the nonexistent objects of God's knowledge is "immutable entity"
(ayn thbita). Entity here is synonymous with "thing" (shay'), and "thing," as
should be apparent from the way I have been employing the term all along, is
"one of the most indefinite of the indefinites" (min ankar al-nakirt), since it can
be applied to anything whatsoever, existent or nonexistent (though it is not
normally applied to God as Being). The "existent things" are the creatures of the
cosmos (though never ceasing to be nonexistent objects of God's knowledge).
The "nonexistent things" are objects of knowledge, also called the "immutable
entities." These things or entities are immutable because they never change, just
as God's knowledge never changes. He knows them for all eternity.
3 The scientific method . . . has created an economic, political and educational system
that values facts over curiosity, financial gains over social contributions, precision over
insights.
4 In order to avoid all confusion it should be observed that the word Brahma,
without an accent, is neuter while the word Brahm is masculine ; the use,
current among orientalists, of the single form Brahman, which is common to both
genders, has the serious disadvantage of obscuring this essential distinction,
which is sometimes further marked by expressions such as Pra-Brahma or the
Supreme Brahma, and Apra-Brahma or the non-supreme; Brahma:
5 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987,
pp. 50.
6 Iqbals critique of Einstein goes like this: Personally, I believe that the ultimate
character of Reality is spiritual: but in order to avoid a widespread
misunderstanding it is necessary to point out that Einsteins theory, which, as a
scientific theory, deals only with the structure of things, throws no light on the
ultimate nature of things which possess that structure. The philosophical value of
the theory is twofold. First, it destroys, not the objectivity of Nature, but the view
of substance as simple location in space a view which led to materialism in
Classical Physics. Substance for modern Relativity-Physics is not a persistent
thing with variable states, but a system of interrelated events. In Whiteheads
presentation of the theory the notion of matter is entirely replaced by the
notion of organism. Secondly, the theory makes space dependent on matter.
The universe, according to Einstein, is not a kind of island in an infinite space; it
is finite but boundless; beyond it there is no empty space. In the absence of
matter the universe would shrink to a point. Looking, however, at the theory
from the standpoint that I have taken in these lectures, Einsteins Relativity
presents one great difficulty, i.e. the unreality of time. A theory which takes time
to be a kind of fourth dimension of space must, it seems, regard the future as
something already given, as indubitably fixed as the past. Time as a free creative
movement has no meaning for the theory. It does not pass. Events do not happen;
we simply meet them. It must not, however, be forgotten that the theory neglects

certain characteristics of time as experienced by us; and it is not possible to say

that the nature of time is exhausted by the characteristics which the theory does
note in the interests of a systematic account of those aspects of Nature which
can be mathematically treated. Nor is it possible for us laymen to understand
what the real nature of Einsteins time is. It is obvious that Einsteins time is not
Bergsons pure duration. Nor can we regard it as serial time. Serial time is the
essence of causality as defined by Kant. The cause and its effect are mutually so
related that the former is chronologically prior to the latter, so that if the former
is not, the latter cannot be. If mathematical time is serial time, then on the basis
of the theory it is possible, by a careful choice of the velocities of the observer
and the system in which a given set of events is happening, to make the effect
precede its cause. It appears to me that time regarded as a fourth dimension of
space really ceases to be time... Whiteheads view of Relativity is likely to
appeal to Muslim students more than that of Einstein in whose theory time loses
its character of passage and mysteriously translates itself into utter space. The
Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 31-32; 106.
7 Known in the language of Far Eastern metaphysic as the distinction between
Non-Being and Being.
8 Quran, 41: 53.
9 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987,
pp. 146.
10 Also argued earlier by John Stewart Bell.
11 One of the Iqbals remarks reads as follows: The infinity of the Ultimate Ego
consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the
universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word Gods infinity is
intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series. (M.
Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp.
57-58.)
12 One of the more common and probably best known terms that Ibn al-Arab
employs for the nonexistent objects of God's knowledge is "immutable entity"
(ayn thbita). Entity here is synonymous with "thing" (shay'), and "thing," as
should be apparent from the way I have been employing the term all along, is
"one of the most indefinite of the indefinites" (min ankar al-nakirt), since it can
be applied to anything whatsoever, existent or nonexistent (though it is not
normally applied to God as Being). The "existent things" are the creatures of the
cosmos (though never ceasing to be nonexistent objects of God's knowledge).
The "nonexistent things" are objects of knowledge, also called the "immutable
entities." These things or entities are immutable because they never change, just
as God's knowledge never changes. He knows them for all eternity.
13 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987,
pp. 50.
14 Underlying the human self and animating it is a reservoir of being that never
dies, is never exhausted, and is unrestricted in consciousness and bliss. This
infinite center of every life, this hidden self, is no less than the Godhead. Body,
personality, and this infinite center a human self is not completely accounted for
until all three are noted. That was not only Iqbals fundamental position, as
reflected in this quatrain, but the shared anthropocosmic vision of all wisdom
traditions of the world.

15 This is reference to Quran, 20: 14. The statement continues: Every atom of

Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is an ego. But there are
degrees in the expression of egohood. (M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of
Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 57-58.)
16 This saying, attributed in Sufi texts to the Prophet, is better known in the
form, "I was a Hidden Treasure, so I loved to be known. Hence I created the
creatures that I might be known." The scholars of Hadith consider it a forgery,
as the Shaykh is well-aware. However, in his view its authenticity has been
proven by unveiling (kashf), or vision of the Prophet in the imaginal world.
Hence he writes that this hadith "is sound on the basis of unveiling, but not
established by way of transmission (naql)" (II 399.28).
17 For Hindus, information about the totality of the universe is contained in each
discrete moment of creation, which they then describe with the visual analogy of
the Jewel Net of Indra. Reality is depicted in the analogy as an expansive net
created by the god Indra, and at each junction in the threads of the net there is a
highly reflective jewel. Each of these jewels can be seen reflected in all the other
jewels, and the reflections of all of the jewels are contained in each jewel. So in
the Vedantic conception, each discrete moment of creation contains the blueprint
of the entire universeor, to mix metaphors, the entire creation is contained in
the DNA of each moment of creation. For Vedantists, the entire universe can be
as it were cloned from any aspect of the universe, though it is also, and
somewhat enigmatically, a discrete moment in the jewel net of Indra.
18 In accord with Advaita (non-dual, or even non-local) Vedanta.
19 In order to avoid all confusion it should be observed that the word Brahma,
without an accent, is neuter while the word Brahma is masculine ; the use,
current among orientalists, of the single form Brahman, which is common to both
genders, has the serious disadvantage of obscuring this essential distinction,
which is sometimes further marked by expressions such as Pra-Brahma or the
Supreme Brahma, and Apra-Brahma or the non-supreme; Brahma:
20 Most notably with Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian holy man.
21 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987,
pp. xxii.
22 Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province.
But its resources for deepening religious insights and enriching religious
thinking are inexhaustible. (Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, p. 137.)We
must be careful here, Smith says in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, for science
cannot take a single step toward proving transcendence. But what it proves in its
own domain in the way of unity, inter-relatedness, the immaterial, and the
awesome makes it one of the most powerful symbols of transcendence our age
affords.
Religious triumphalism died a century or two ago, and its scientistic counterpart
seems now to be following suit. Here and there diehards turn upRichard
Dawkins, who likens belief in God to belief in fairies, and Daniel Dennett, with
his claim that John Lockes belief that mind must precede matter was born of the
kind of conceptual paralysis that is now as obsolete as the quill pen but these
echoes of Julian Huxleys pronouncement around mid-century that it will soon
be as impossible for an intelligent or educated man or woman to believe in god
as it is now to believe that the earth is flat are now pretty much recognized as

polemical bluster. It seems clear that both science and religion are here to stay.
E. O. Wilson would be as pleased as anyone to see religion fail the Darwinian
test, but he admits that we seem to have a religious gene in us and he sees no
way of getting rid of it. Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and
learning will banish religion, he writes, but this notion has never seemed so
futile as today.
With both of these forces as permanent fixtures in history, the obvious question is
how they are to get along. Alfred North Whitehead was of the opinion that, more
than on any other single factor, the future of humanity depends on the way these
two most powerful forces in history settle into relationship with each other, and
their interface is being addressed today with a zeal that has not been seen since
modern science arose.
(Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, p. 72-73.)
23 Its important to note that Bohm wasnt the first quantum physicist to allow

metaphysics back into the discussion or to suggest that mystics of the ancient
world had had accurate intuitions about the nature of reality.
24 Erwin Schrodinger, Was ist Leben, Bern, 1946, p.128.
25 Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter, Munster, Germany, 2007, p. 224, 230.
26 Quran, 41: 53