Back to the Beginning

Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys in Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, Kindle ed., 2010.

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

Starting at the time when those words were written down perhaps 2500-3000 years ago, human thought concerning the origins of the universe in which we live has essentially moved along two parallel tracks. One, which was associated with some versions of ancient Greek philosophical thought as well as with Hinduism right down to the present day, claimed that it has always existed and would always exist. The other, which is exemplified by the sentences from Genesis just quoted, was to assign its origin to some kind of conscious God (or gods) who, once He had made up His mind, created it just as a constructor designs a building and then does on to erect it.

Looking back over the three and half centuries since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the outcome has been a kind of compromise. On one hand, few non-Hindus have accepted the idea that the world has always existed and will always go on existing in the same form. On the other, God has been banished from the discussion, at any rate as conducted among scientists as the most important purveyors of modern knowledge concerning questions of this kind. For example, Isaac Newton around 1700 still devoted as much attention to his theological works as he did to the laws of motion, gravitation, and optics. But when Napoleon in 1802 asked the famous physicist Pierre Laplace whether the existence of the observed universe did not prove that there was indeed a God he was told, “Sir, that is a hypothesis I do not require.”

Since then attempts to understand how the universe could have come into being without invoking the “hypothesis” in question have gone on and on. Laplace’s own answer, as set out in his writings, was that it had started out as a rotating nebula, or interstellar gas cloud. From there the planets and sun coalesced in accordance with the ordinary laws of gravity on one hand and mechanics on the other. Newton’s latest successor, Stephen Hawking, who incidentally is buried right next to him at Westminster Cathedral, argued that it was formed 13.8 billion years ago as a result of an imaginably enormous explosion popularly known as the big bang. However, there are many things this theory cannot explain. Asked what had exploded (impossible to say), why it had done so (for no known reason), what had existed before (a meaningless term) the explosion, and what the young universe, triggered by the explosion (of nothing), expanded into (also nothing), all Hawking could do was to shrug and declare that these questions and others like them were unanswerable. So precise, supported by so many equations. Yet so lacking, so unsatisfactory; it is enough to make one want to tear out one’s hair.

In other words, the scientists’ continuing efforts to do without Him, while admirable, have never been able to carry complete conviction. However often it was derided and dismissed, the idea that there must have been a creator of some kind could not be gotten rid of any more than the devil having been driven out through the door, could be prevented from returning by way of the window. He was, however, not God—a taboo term, since His existence could not be verified by any kind of observation or experiment—but consciousness.

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Starting at least as far back as Laplace—much earlier, if one cares to go back all the way to Epicurus—scientists have been arguing that consciousness grew out of the matter that preceded it. Not so, says Dr. Lanza: no natural process known to us could have performed that feat. Instead, he says, it was consciousness which gave rise to the world—so much so that, without the former, the latter could not even have existed.

To understand what he meant, take the popular riddle concerning a tree that has fallen in a forest with no one there to witness the fact. did it make a sound? Of course it did, say ninety-nine percent of those asked. Not so, say Dr. Lanza and a few others. The splintering of the trunk and its crash on the ground certainly gave rise to vibrations in the surrounding air. However, in the absence of anyone to receive those vibrations in his or her ears, transmit them by way of the acoustic nerves, and process them with the help of the brain, they would not have amounted to what we know as sound.

What applies to hearing applies equally well to our remaining senses. What the specialized neurons in the back of our brains register is not the world’s existing, objective, sound, light, and impact. On the contrary, light, impact, and sound are created by those neurons. To adduce another example, a single rainbow that can be seen by everyone who looks in the right direction at the right time does not exist. What does exist are trillions of raindrops. Each one carrying a potential rainbow; and all “waiting” to be discovered by animal sense organs and brains to be brought to bear on them. Instead of the internal and external world being separate and independent of one another, as Descartes would have it, they are merely two sides of the same coin. That, incidentally, is also the best available explanation for the riddle of quantum mechanics where, as far as we can make out, the speed and position of elementary particles seem to be determined by the fact that they are or are not observed.

This premise serves Dr. Lanza as the foundation on which to build everything else in the book, leading up to the conclusion that “the universe burst into existence from life [which is the seat of consciousness], not the other way around.” What I personally found most interesting in it is the following. We present-day humans are immensely proud of our scientific prowess. And rightly so, given that it has enabled us to study, and often gain some understanding of, anything from the bizarre submicroscopic world of elementary particles that exists right under our noses to gigantic galaxies more than thirty billion light years away. Dr. Lanza’s contribution is to point out that, without taking account of consciousness and the life with which it is inextricably tied, we shall never be able to understand reality as a whole. Some people might find this prospect disturbing. In so far as it means that there will never be a shortage of questions to explore and ponder, I personally find it comforting.

But isn’t consciousness, pure and unadulterated by a physical body, simply another word for God?