Beyond the Occult (71 page)

There is however quite another sense of ‘tough’ and in that sense I do not qualify at all.
That is the sense of being a reductive positivist, entertaining a belief about the world as a very bare and spare concatenation of accidents and causal pushes and pulls.
So far as I’m concerned, this is a mean and meagre philosophy to which I do not subscribe.
I think the world is a very mysterious and wonderful place and we only know a small fraction of its properties.

I ought to say that I have never made a very special study of survival but I am very impressed by the evidence for it.
I mean not only the traditional SPR-type mediumistic evidence (excellent though much of this is) but also the more recent near-death experience type of evidence.
There are also some of the reincarnation data that are not at all easily dismissed; although in their case the evidence seems to point more to an occasional accident rather than a systematic happening.

So all in all, I am inclined to go a bit further than Alan Gauld and say I do tend to believe in the personal survival of death.
Admittedly it hasn’t been
proved
but then hardly anything ever has or could be that is at all at the edges of knowledge.
^*

In my own experience most researchers would be willing to make some such cautious admission, although few of them would be happy to be quoted.
The reason is obvious.
The evidence for ‘hidden powers’ — telepathy, clairvoyance, even precognition — is very strong indeed, and most reasonable people would be willing to concede that a belief in them is not incompatible with a scientific attitude.
But a man who admits to a belief in communication with the dead is in danger of being labelled a spiritualist and dismissed as a credulous sentimentalist.
This happened in the 1920s to Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: there was a general feeling — which still persists — that they had gone soft-minded.
What is not generally realized is that both of them were finally convinced only after many years of scepticism.
Lodge had been interested in telepathy since 1884; it was only in 1908 that he finally admitted that he accepted survival.
His friend Conan Doyle remained unconvinced; it was not until 1915 that he received overwhelming evidence for the survival of his brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie, killed at Mons, and admitted his conversion to a belief in life after death.

This is undoubtedly the reason that Jung spent most of his life insisting that all ‘occult’ phenomena can be explained in terms of the unconscious mind and that he had never had any direct experience that convinced him otherwise.
It was only after an accidental fall in 1943, when he was sixty-eight, brought him close to death that he decided to burn his boats and admit to a lifelong interest in the paranormal and a belief in life after death.
His earlier attitude was plainly a matter of caution.

Surprisingly enough even T.
S.
Eliot abandoned an attitude of rigid orthodoxy a few years before his death (in 1965) and admitted to an admiration for Rudolf Steiner:

I think that the present time will spontaneously lead to something like the separation of individual human beings from time’s events.
They will stand on their own feet, and from their innermost being they will seek new paths, spiritual paths.

It seems to me that Goethe, for example, had a compass of consciousness which far surpassed that of his nineteenth-century contemporaries.
Rudolf Steiner expressly upheld this, and I do too.

In a certain connection, atomic science has a meaning, namely inasmuch as it is in the hands of men who are in no way able to cope with it.
It has no importance whatever for the progress of mankind.
I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner.

But these remarkable words were uttered in a broadcast on Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk on 26 September 1959 and remained unreported in England or America.

Eliot would certainly have been startled if he could have foreseen that the atomic science he regarded with such suspicion would, within a quarter of a century, give birth to a theory that was in fundamental agreement with Steiner.
This was the ‘anthropic principle’ that we have already considered briefly.
In the final chapter of this book it deserves to be examined in more detail.

^*
C.
Daly King,
The States of Human Consciousness
(1963), p.
120.

^*
Franklin Merrell-Wolff,
Pathways Through to Space, An Experiential Journal
, pp.
4–5.

^*
Letter to the author.

As soon as man began to study the heavens he reached the conclusion that our earth is the centre of the universe.
And since man is obviously the most intelligent creature on earth, it followed that he must also be the most important creature in creation.

In 1512 a canon of the Church named Nicolaus Copernicus realized that many of the riddles of astronomy could be cleared up by assuming that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the universe.
Being a timid soul he preferred not to publish the idea, even though the Pope’s right-hand man, the Cardinal of Capua, urged him to do so.
His book
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies
finally appeared when he was on his death-bed.

On the whole his misgivings were well-founded.
As the new theory slowly gained acceptance science came to recognize that man is less important than he assumed.
By the mid-nineteenth century most scientists had come to accept that man is an accidental creature who was born on an unimportant planet of a second-rate star.
Religious men were inclined to challenge this view.
But it was not until 1974 that science began to raise its own mild objections.

It was in this year that an astronomer named Brandon Carter, of the Paris Observatory, formulated what he called ‘the weak anthropic principle’.
This stated, in effect, ‘Well, there’s one thing about the universe — no one would be here to observe it if it hadn’t created the observers in the first place.
So in that respect, at least, we are privileged.’
In other
words it may have done it accidentally, but it
did
it.
So we needn’t regard ourselves as total nonentities.

But when we speak of ‘accidentally’ we are using a word that has no place in science.
If the universe is a machine then there is no accident: everything
had
to happen the way it has.
And this in itself is something of a puzzle.
If we imagine two gods sitting in a ‘dimensionless hyperspace’ and discussing the idea of creating a universe, we can see that they would have an infinite number of choices: ‘What about the weight of the electron — what shall we make that?
How about the speed of light?
What about the force of gravity?
And electromagnetic forces… .’
If any of these had been different the universe as we know it would never have come into existence.
But these ‘constants’ were not different and our universe
did
come into existence.
And in due course it brought
us
into existence.
If even one of those constants had been changed we wouldn’t be here either.

Considerations like this led Carter to formulate what he called ‘the strong anthropic principle’, which says that the universe is such that life
had
to develop.
That sounds, at first, a controversial statement, almost religious in its implications.
But anyone who reads the foregoing sentences again will see that it is a strictly logical consequence of our scientific argument.

Long before Carter thought of the anthropic principle scientists had been aware of certain interesting oddities about the relation between man and the
universe.
For example our planet just happens to be perfectly suited to the incubation of life.
The sun had to be exactly at the right temperature: a few degrees higher or lower and there would have been no life.
Gravity had to be exactly the right strength: slightly lower and there would have been no atmosphere; slightly higher and the struggle to move would have been too great for living things.
Life on earth is balanced on a knife edge, and if Victorian divines had known about this they would undoubtedly have used it as a proof that God created the earth especially for man.
This has been called ‘the fine-tuning effect’ and it applies to the whole universe: in short the universe itself seems singularly suited to the existence of life.
The eighteenth-century theologian William Paley pointed to his watch as a proof of the existence of God, arguing that even a savage would recognize that such a complicated instrument must have a maker, and that this applies even more to man.
The fine-tuning argument is in some ways similar, except that a better comparison would be a vast jigsaw puzzle, every part of which fits exactly into the next part.
The physical constants of the universe interlock in precisely that way.
And one
inevitable
result has been the creation of life.

So far the argument has remained within the bounds of the most rigidly materialistic science: we are merely saying that life is one of the inevitable side-effects of a universe such as ours.
But some scientists — such as Fred Hoyle and the chemist Lawrence Henderson — took it a stage further and argued that the universe seems almost unreasonably suited to the existence of life.
In the 1950s Hoyle was working out how the elements are created in the heart of the stars.
He noted that in order to make carbon — the essential element for life — two helium nuclei have to collide, a contingency as unlikely as two billiard balls colliding on a billiard table the size of the Sahara desert.
But when this has happened the new atom seems to attract a third helium atom to make carbon: no other element behaves in this way.
Moreover if another helium atom hits the carbon it produces oxygen, another element essential for life.
Then why has not all the carbon in the universe been converted to oxygen?
Because the forces involved are so subtly out of tune that only about half the carbon gets converted to oxygen — a highly convenient accident for the creation of life.
Hoyle came to the extraordinary conclusion that:

A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a ‘superintendent’ has monkeyed with the physics — as well as chemistry and biology — and that there are no ‘blind forces’ worth speaking about in Nature.
I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to
draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.

This is only one step away from saying that these laws have been designed to produce life.
This is a startling conclusion, but not quite so anthropomorphic as Paley’s watch argument.
When we add to it the impressive body of evidence about the fine-tuning of the universe, it seems a justifiable assumption — if only an assumption.

As we saw earlier (p.
242) Professor John Wheeler has taken this argument an astonishing step further.
Wheeler’s argument is based upon Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
The simplest interpretation of this principle is that we cannot know both the position and speed of an electron (or photon) because in order to observe them we have to ‘interfere’ with them.
It is a little like trying to observe the development of a piece of film by shining a powerful light on it: the exposure destroys the photograph.
However Wheeler and many other quantum physicists insist that the Heisenberg principle means far more than this.
It means — according to Bohr and Wheeler — that the electron
has
no position until we ‘expose’ it by observing it.
This means in turn that we ‘create’ it by observing it, for until we observe it, it is nowhere in particular.
This interpretation of the Heisenberg principle led Wheeler to the strange position — reminiscent of Bishop Berkeley — that we may be creating the whole universe by observing it: after all, the universe is made of electrons.

Wheeler explained his view by describing a game of twenty questions he had once played at a dinner party.
Someone is sent out of the room: an object is chosen, then the victim is re-admitted and has to ask twenty questions to try to determine the nature of the object.
Wheeler noticed that his friends were smiling as he came in, and guessed they had decided to play a joke on him.
What puzzled him was that when he asked the questions there was a perceptible pause before he received an answer, and the pauses got longer as the game went on.
Finally Wheeler asked, ‘Is it
cloud?’
His friends thought for a long time then said yes, and everyone burst out laughing.
It turned out that they had decided not to choose a word: anyone could answer as he pleased, but all the answers had to be consistent.
This, Wheeler says, is a good simile for describing Bohr’s view of the electron.
Everyone assumes it has position and velocity before it is observed, just as Wheeler assumed that a word had been chosen before he came into the room.
But there was no word: he created it by asking questions.
And according to Wheeler there is no electron before the scientist creates it by trying to observe it.

We also noted in the earlier chapter the experiment in which, in some baffling way, a single photon appears to ‘interfere’ with itself.
Wheeler has devised a slightly more complicated version of this experiment which he believes to be crucial to the participatory anthropic principle.
A beam of light is split into two beams — at right angles to one another — by a half-silvered mirror, then these two beams are made to cross by reflecting them off two more mirrors.
Now another optical device is introduced at their crossing point, so that both beams become a mixture of the two.
This device can be so adjusted that one of the double-beams cancels itself out.
(Imagine two lots of waves on a pond superimposed on one another so that they vanish and the surface becomes flat.)

What is so astonishing is that if the beam is dimmed until it becomes only one photon at a time, this ‘interference’ effect still takes place.
That seems absurd: one photon has nothing to interfere with, so it should be able to choose either of the two paths.
Why it does not do so is baffling.
If a photon-counter is introduced into the system to find out just what is happening, this mysterious effect promptly vanishes and the photons behave just as one might expect them to, choosing either path.
Wheeler argues that this proves that the photon does not exist until it is observed.
And the same thing, he suggests, applies to our universe.

There is one obvious objection.
We know the universe existed for billions of years before life came along.
Is Wheeler telling us that it did not exist before there were observers?

He is indeed.
He argues that if you use the light from a distant star for the same experiment, that light set out millions of years ago.
Yet the same argument applies: the light does not exist until it is observed.
So, says Wheeler, we are actually creating the past.
His view is summarized by John Barrow and Frank Tipler as follows:

Wheeler points out that according to the Copenhagen interpretation, we can regard some restricted properties of distant galaxies, which we now see as they were billions of years ago, as brought into existence now.
Perhaps
all
properties — and hence the entire universe — are brought into existence by observations made at some point in time by conscious beings.
However, we ourselves can bring into existence only very small-scale properties like the spin of the electron.
Might it require intelligent beings ‘more conscious’ than ourselves to bring into existence the electrons and other particles?
^*

In fact Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle is simply an updated version of Berkeley’s suggestion that we bring things into existence by seeing them, a position that we all instinctively reject as absurd.
Most of us will take the view that if the Copenhagen interpretation leads to this preposterous view then the Copenhagen interpretation must be wrong.
It seems far more likely that Einstein was correct and that the electron
does
have both position and velocity, even though science has no way of determining them.

But even if we reject Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle, the two earlier versions remain unshaken.
And, as Barrow and Tipler point out, they suggest one more logical step to a Final Anthropic Principle:

Suppose that for some unknown reason the strong anthropic principle is true and that intelligent life must come into existence at some stage in the Universe’s history.
But if it dies out at our stage of development, long before it
has had any measurable non-quantum influence on the Universe in the large, it is hard to see why it
must
have come into existence in the first place.
This motivates the following the generalization of the strong anthropic principle.

Final Anthropic Principle: Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out
.