THE MATHEMATICAL CONNECTION BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning. Thus do many scientists opine these days – the likes of the Nobel chemist and devout atheist Harold Kroto, who is deeply suspicious of the Templeton Foundation's sympathies with both science and religion. Stephen Phillips's book, nay, a veritable encyclopædia, proves with chapter and verse that such presumptions are the product of crass ignorance, blind prejudice and appalling arrogance. For the greatest of mystics and religious sages saw no polarized animosity or dichotomy between science and religion. Just one example is the Lebanese poet-mystic Kahlil Gibran, who saw no incompatibility between science and religion, only between science and faith. Equally, such legendary scientists as Newton, Einstein, Schrödinger, Jeans and Eddington – to name a mere handful – intuited the connection between science and religion so eloquently expressed by the Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli: 'I consider the embracing of both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity [Religion with a capital R], to be the mythos of our present day and age.' One cannot embrace without connecting, and that connection is attained through MATHEMATICS – a subject that unfortunately puts off many readers, but this need not be so. For one does not have to be an ace quantum physicist to sense the intrinsic worth of a lucidly presented scientific exposition, any more than one needs to be an academic botanist to appreciate the beauty and perfume of a rose. Non-scientific readers should bear this in mind. But for a convincing proof of the arguments presented, it is not possible to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater'; a grasp of mathematical physics to, say, university undergraduate level would be a serious asset. The fundamental truths of Nature are reflected in mathematical relationships as affirmed by the likes of Pythagoras and Newton; and in more recent times by James Jeans. And mathematics never tells lies, nor can it be so distorted to misrepresent facts without this becoming apparent to a discerning reader. The book is profusely illustrated in colour, with an appendix, a bibliography and two indexes, one for subjects and another for significant numbers. But there is no picture of the author and only the barest three-line biodata on him; his website is similarly lacking. There is a message to be gleaned from this. So at this juncture it would not be inappropriate to state that Dr Phillips is an eminent theoretical physicist who graduated from Cambridge. He acquired his M.Sc. from the University of Cape Town, gaining the university's premier research scholarship, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, where he also taught mathematics and physics. He has published in several academic and scientific journals, and is also the author of three erudite books on the links between modern particle physics and extrasensory perception. Needless to say, his book shows him to be abreast of the latest developments in quantum physics, relativity and cosmology; add to this the Kabbalah and ESP phenomena (the product of a lifetime's study) and if they were not enough, knowledge about human anatomy, genetics, music theory and theosophy – such breadth of coverage and depth of thought is quite remarkable as the work of a single scholar. Taking into account the profoundly esoteric and abstract nature of his subject, his style is extremely lucid, but without any rhetoric, and the argument is developed with a magisterial inexorableness rather like the unfolding of a Bach fugue. And like a fugue, there is a principal theme running through the entire densely concentrated work of 494 A4-sized pages: SACRED GEOMETRY – that the underpinnings of the cosmos are based on geometry, hence on a harmony of number and proportion. Sacred geometries therefore contain scientific information about holistic systems by way of mathematical prescriptions through gematria (assigning a numerical value to a word or phrase) by the ancient Hebrew names of God. Numbers are not merely symbols expressing scientific magnitude but also embody a qualitative aspect of religious and spiritual meaning. Nature ever builds by form and number, as Pythagoras, Plato, Blavatsky and others have taught. The range of topics covered is vast, as a listing of the contents under the broad headings of philosophy, religion and mysticism, modern physics, music, human anatomy, genetics, divination and their overall interconnections will reveal: Pythagoras' Life and Philosophy; The Kabbalistic Tree of Life; Superstring & M-theory; Remote Viewing of Subatomic Particles; The Outer & Inner Tree of Life; The Tree of Life Basis of Superstring Theory; The Five Platonic Solids; The Holistic Nature of Music; The Tree of Life Nature of the Human Skeleton; The I Ching as Sacred Geometry; The Sri Yantra; The Polyhedral Tree of Life; The Universal Nature of Sacred Geometries; How Sacred Geometries Encode DNA; and finally Conclusion, which addresses questions and criticisms, makes some predictions, deals with the meeting of science, mysticism and the paranormal, and summarizes the holistic nature of mater. What have all these subjects to do with the principal theme of Sacred Geometry? The answer is the resounding message so clearly demonstrated in the book: that wholeness is ontological in nature, being the manifestation (or explication) of the wholeness (or implicate order) of Divine Being (Transcendent Consciousness) at the microscopic scale of space-time. So everything in our world bears the holistic impress of its cosmic blueprint or template – the Image of God in Matter, so to say – on the basis of the Hermetic Axiom, 'As is the Inner, so is the Outer; as is the Great so is the Small; as it is Above, so it is Below; there is but One Life and Law …'. So whether we talk of such disparate things as the five Platonic solids, the biblical Tree of Life, the Hindu Sri Yantra or I Ching, they are all equivalent representations of a universal blueprint; hence they show detailed correspondences with the sacred geometries of religions whose origins are separated by epochs, and matching maps of all levels of reality, both physical and superphysical. That being the case it would be unrealistic to go into details about all the various correspondences, rather to present some highlights. The chapter on Pythagoras shows why it is that 'the tetractys [or Pythagorean triangle] is the "Rosetta Stone" that enables sacred geometry to be converted into numbers of universal, therefore scientific significance. Sacred geometries are Divine Ideas frozen in space. The tetractys is the key that deciphers their representation into intelligible information about holistic systems,' and, as Blavatsky states, 'it symbolizes both the ideal and the visible universes'. Unsurprisingly, then, it has connections with both Jewish and Hindu mysticism, as later portions of the book demonstrate. Another fine case in point is the remote viewing of subatomic particles, at intervals over a period of nearly forty years from 1895 to 1933, by two pioneering theosophists, Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, using a form of ESP virtually unknown to parapsychologists although long known in India as a yogic siddhi (psychic faculty) having the Sanskrit name of 'anima'. What was observed and meticulously recorded by them in Occult Chemistry has demonstrable consistency with the established facts of nuclear physics and with the theories of quarks and superstrings, with the qualification that not all their interpretations can be taken at face value because the very act of clairvoyance disturbed what was observed (faint echoes of the Uncertainly Principle here). Nonetheless this is the only recorded example of a whole series of ESP observations where one can have cast-iron certainty that any charge of fraud or the unconscious use of sensory clues can be demolished a priori by the total absence of the scientific information and concepts that they verified, only to be discovered decades later. For example, after the first edition of Occult Chemistry in 1908, Rutherford confirmed the nuclear model of the atom two years later; the neon‑22 isotope was discovered four years later by Aston's mass spectrograph (clairvoyantly detected in 1908 and referred to as 'meta-neon'); Bohr presented his theory of the hydrogen atom five years later; Chadwick discovered the neutron twenty-four years later; and the first quark model was proposed by Gell-Mann and Zweig fifty-six years later in 1964. But even more than showing the consistency of Occult Chemistry with the facts of modern science – a feat in itself – Phillips further proves that these descriptions (to reiterate, provided well over a century ago from the remote viewing of atoms and their constituent particles) confirm the proposition that the tetractys, the Tree of Life and other forms of sacred geometry not only express the multidimensional nature of space-time but also embody the dynamics and structure of superstrings. For me, the most intriguing and original chapters are those concerning music theory, the human skeleton and DNA, Sri Yantra and the I Ching. Taken as a whole, their overarching message is the unity behind the various mystical traditions of both east and west, and their correspondences with (mapping on to) the human being and matter. Phillips shows the connections and archetypal patterns between the structure and interactions of superstrings, the intervals between the notes of the seven musical scales (used for centuries in church music), the bone structure of the human skeleton, and the codons and anticodons in human RNA that parallel the 64 hexagrams in the Chinese I Ching (regarding which Phillips wisely avoids discussion on its supposed divinatory merits and instead focuses on a demonstration of its correspondence with other holistic systems). All of this is convincing proof that neither matter nor mankind is the product of blind forces of nature or merely random evolutionary adaptations. On the contrary, the visible and subtle counterpart of the human body, down to the minutest speck of matter, are structured according to the cosmic blueprint (prototype) of the 'image of God' referred to in mystical and religious traditions, such as in biblical Genesis 2:27. But the reader should beware that this has nothing to do with the naïve and literal notion of 'intelligent design by a creator god' propounded by the Christian creationist-fundamentalists; it is all to do with pointing towards our transcendent origins, our 'image' so-called being the mathematical paradigm that it signifies and is embodied in sacred geometries. It is worth drawing special attention to the chapters dealing with the human skeleton and DNA. Phillips shows how the Tree of Life represents the 206 bones of the human skeleton, the 'trunk' of the Tree representing the axial skeleton (80 bones of the skull, vertebral column and thoracic cage) and its 'branches' representing the appendicular skeleton (126 bones of pectoral girdles, pelvic girdle and upper and lower extremities). The number of acupuncture points in the human body (the 361 'Classical Points') is also shown to be embodied in the outer form of the Tree of Life. Later on Phillips states that the only plausible reason (disregarding the sceptic's charge of miraculous coincidences) why the morphology of the DNA molecule should conform to the sacred geometries of the various religions is that this molecule of biological life embodies the very mathematical nature of Divine Mind that these geometries are supposed to represent. This assertion is made on the basis of enormous detail on the nitrogen base triplets in the DNA molecule that encode the amino acids and the sacred geometry of RNA. In summary, then, Phillips's work has demonstrated with mathematical verification the increasing congruence of modern physics with the mystical insights of the custodians of the perennial wisdom. He has revealed how the true nature of Pythagorean number mysticism provides the key to understanding the process whereby the infinitesimal building blocks of matter conform to the pattern of the cosmic blueprint: the 'image of God'. He has shown the equivalence of the sacred geometries of the mystical traditions of both east and west, and demonstrated how they embody information about holistic systems, be they the nature of music, the human body or DNA. The reason that the sacred geometries within the mystical traditions of world religions are isomorphic is that they were revealed to prepared and deserving human minds through contact with Divine Mind. The considerable persistence and tenacity necessarily demanded of the reader are richly rewarded, each page revealing the author's reverence for, and profound understanding of, his subject. In a recent SMN article, Professor Marilyn Monk, UCL Emeritus Professor of Molecular Embryology, observes that most scientific endeavour nowadays 'is piling more facts on an existing pile of facts initiated on some arbitrary basis that could be leading in the wrong direction. Few scientists work on the edge of the known and unknown and very few are seen to be asking questions in the unknown.' For sheer originality of thought and 'asking questions in the unknown', Phillips is poles apart from the herd. It has been an exacting task, but a privilege and a humbling experience, to peruse his magnificent work, which is living testimony to Schiller's renowned saying from The World of Thinking Beings, quoted on the epigraph: 'The Universe is a thought of the Deity. Since this ideal thought-form has overflowed into actuality, and the world born thereof has realized the plan of its creator, it is the calling of all thinking beings to rediscover in this existent whole the original design.'