Lapis Magazine

An Interview with Brian Swimme on God and the Quantum Vacuum

John David Ebert converses with mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme on the shared archetypal patterns underlying science and religion.

John David Ebert is a culture historian whose various essays and interviews have appeared in Lapis, Alexandria, The Quest, and Mythosphere. He is a contributing editor to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, now in preparation by the Joseph Campbell Foundation. This interview is a chapter from a larger work entitled Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age.

It was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who in 1927 drew the initial sketch for the big bang hypothesis when he said that the universe must have originated from a sort of “cosmic egg” of matter and energy. Consciously or not, Lemaître was invoking ancient myth, for the image of the cosmic egg as the origin of the universe goes back to the Orphic cults of Greece, and even beyond, to Egypt. For when the human mind is confronted with realms which are beyond the bounds of experience, the mythic imagination goes to work, populating the dark hinterlands of our maps with dragons and chimeras. The narratives of science, accordingly, almost always conceal mythic patterns, if you look closely enough.

Another Catholic priest, Teilhard de Chardin, attempted a more deliberate synthesis of science and religion, but the veneer of scientific imagery that he painted over his theology was more like a vast, crumbling Diego Rivera mural of evolution beneath which the older canvas of Christianity and its mythic structures are still visible. Teilhard’s two main cosmic principles are really God and the Devil in disguise. The benevolent force of Evolution is driving the cosmic drama to its Omega Point, in spite of the resistance put up by the dark force of Entropy. It is the same drama, precisely, in Zoroastrianism, the progenitor of all Near Eastern dualism, in which the god of light, Ahura Mazda, is in cosmic contention with the lord of darkness, Ahriman, and, as in Teilhard’s narrative, the victory of the former at the end of time is already assured.

Science and religion may have a lot more in common than most of us realize, and on the basis of these shared archetypal patterns, are conciliation of sorts might be built. That they may share identical archetypes does not mean that they perform the same functions. The function of religiosity is to awaken a sense of awe with respect to the mystery of the cosmos, and to do so through a transformation of consciousness. The function of science, on the other hand, has never been the alteration of human consciousness, but to render an accurate knowledge of the cosmos through an explanation of its processes. Science is addressed to the intellect, whereas religion normally bypasses the intellect to galvanize emotional energies. The Scholastic debates of the Middle Ages between Aristotelian rationality and Augustinian faith has reawakened for us, today, in the conflict between science and religion.

For mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, resolving this antinomy has been something of a life task. He was educated at Santa Clara, a Catholic university, where he discovered the works of Teilhard de Chardin,which first introduced him to the interface between science and theology. When attending graduate school at the University of Oregon, he realized that this interface was of no interest to most of the scientists there, and in fact, was largely an embarrassment because “as scientists we were trained not to ask these deeper questions”.

Although he took his PhD in gravitational dynamics, the nature of the cosmos as a numinous revelation remained for him the primary interest. He taught at the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California from 1983-1990. His first book Manifesto for a Global Civilization (written in collaboration with Matthew Fox) is a brief exploration into the shortcomings of Augustinian theology and the mechanistic paradigm, emphasizing the need for a synthesis of science, religion, and ecology.

In 1984, he published The Universe is a Green Dragon, a delightful Socratic dialogue sketching out the lineaments of this synthesis. The book was dedicated to Thomas Berry, his most important mentor, whose lifetime of investigation into the religions of the Far East and current ecological concerns immediately caught Swimme’s attention when in 1980 he came across a paper written by Berry, called “The New Story”. For Swimme,the paper echoed his own thinking about the possibility for a new cosmology that transcended the antagonism of science and religion, and for the next decade or so he and Berry worked out the contours of this synthesis, which was published in 1992 as The Universe Story.

He has also produced a series of video courses: Canticle to the Cosmos (1990), Soul of the Universe (1991), and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Currently, he teaches at California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program.

JOHN DAVID EBERT: In your first book Manifesto for a Global Civilization you state that in order for science to thrive in the coming age, its mystical core should be celebrated. Does this mean that science should be transformed into something that more closely resembles the function of religion?

BRIAN SWIMME: I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but let me just make it clear that I don’t think science should become religion. I think science is a distinct activity. Religion and philosophy are distinct intellectual achievements, but they’re really not separate and to pretend that they are is no longer viable. During the 19th century, scientists were happy striving after knowledge, and the questions beyond that were seen as non-scientific, whereas today there’s a realization that every activity of the human has multiple implications. When I talk about the mystical core, I think the urge of the scientist to understand is ultimately mystical. It has to do with a deep desire to taste and touch reality. So it’s not that science should become religion, but that science and religion should work together toward something else.

JE: How certain are we of our model of the Big Bang? What’s the evidence for it?

BS: The evidence would be threefold: the first is the expansion. If you look at other galaxies in the universe, they’re moving away from the Milky Way. And if you look at galaxies that are twice as far away, they’re moving twice as fast. So if you think about that for a minute, it means that the universe is moving apart like some rapid expansion from an initial point. And so that would be one major piece of evidence.

The second would be – and Lemaître was the first tospeculate about this – that if this began at the great explosion, there should be evidence of that explosion around. George Gamow and his collaborators actually calculated that the remnants from that explosion would be a form of radiation at ten degrees above absolute zero. And then in 1965, Penzias and Wilson actually located this background radiation at 2.75 degrees. So it was lower than even Gamow calculated it, but again, a remarkable discovery.

The third major piece of evidence is the presence of hydrogen, lithium, and helium in the Big Bang scenario. Early on in the universe there’s a moment when light elements can be created, but only in a certain amount. And so there are exact predictions made in the model about how much hydrogen, helium, and lithium there would be in the universe and these have been remarkably consistent with the empirical findings. So the background radiation pretty well eliminated the other models, but since that time more of this has come in. The most recent one would be from the COBE satellite, discovering the ripples from around 300,000 years after the birth that we now think gave rise to the galaxies.

JE: Stephen Hawking is excited about these quantum fluctuations. Can you explain why they’re significant?

BS: If we go back 15 billion years, we have this expanding universe. If the universe is perfectly symmetric and homogeneous – and we imagine that’s how it began – then the universe would simply expand forever and never form any structures. But for structures to actually come about there had to be some break in symmetry, some sort of fluctuation. And one way to imagine this is that at the quantum level we have this foaming of material, space, time, and energy, and that this initial foaming was inflated very rapidly so that those fluctuations at the quantum level suddenly became macrofluctuations – and those are what Mather and Smoot captured on the COBE satellite – they’re what gave rise to the structure of the universe.

You see, if the universe were perfectly symmetric, then early on, for every particle of matter there would be another particle of anti-matter and everything would just annihilate, and there would be nothing left but light. But there’s a slight, tiny, tiny asymmetry. So for every billion anti-protons, there turns out to be a billion plus one protons and so this strange little piece of asymmetry is what gave rise to everything. The same thing could be said now about the structure of the universe in terms of the galaxies: these fluctuations at a micro scale are what enable the Milky Way and Andromeda and other things to come into being. It’s just overwhelming.

JE: Where does the idea of God fit into our current cosmological narratives?

BS: Most scientists would just ignore the question. But many really good scientists have thought about it, too, and there would be a variety of opinions. My own way of relating a sort of classical theological thought with this modern scientific story is to think in terms of the origin of the universe coming out of emptiness. That would be the way in which some scientists would talk about it. We would say that the quantum vacuum, really, is the origin of the universe. And the quantum vacuum is a mysterious realm. It has nothing in it, there’s no thing there but it’s a realm of generativity. And this is remarkably similar to the kinds of speculations coming from theologians such as Meister Eckhart, who talked about the super-essential Darkness of God. Now obviously, when they’re investigating the quantum vacuum, scientists are not saying to themselves, “I’m investigating the Godhead!” I’m simply pointing out that there is a remarkable correspondence between these two ways of investigating ultimate reality. Now if you say that the quantum vacuum really is a scientific way of exploring the Godhead then you begin to see the contours of a new kind of theology, one that would draw upon both traditional sources and contemporary science.

JE: You contrast the current view of irreversible time given by our scientific narratives to that of the old mythic view of cyclical time. Can you describe what implications our current cosmology has for cyclical views of time and history?

BS: There are cyclical patterns that we’re involved with and we’re quite aware of them. There’s winter, and new people are born, new people are dying, and they go through this cycle over and over again. And that I think is a deep understanding from cosmologies all around the world. But the scientific one adds to that the discovery of irreversible time. For instance, we have no way of validating the statement that if life extinguished on earth, it would recreate itself. But rather, the mainstream theory would be that the emergence of life on planet earth is a one-time event because the actual emergence of life alters the conditions which enable life to come about. So that irreversible aspect to creativity adds a degree of drama to the other cosmologies that they would not otherwise have. There’s something dramatic and even tragic about the loss of a form of life. For instance, we’re on the verge of losing the higher primates, like the gorillas. Well, in a cyclical cosmology one could fail to really feel the depth of that event because there would be a sense of earth replenishing itself and the gorillas would come back. But in our understanding the gorillas would never come back, ever.

JE: James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have put forth their model of the Gaia hypothesis, in which the earth seems to behave like a living organism. Likewise, you have suggested that the universe can be thought of as a self-organizing being. Can you describe this idea?

BS: Well, for instance, Lovelock and Margulis point out that the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere is not a random number. It’s the highest concentration that the atmosphere can really bear and support life. If it were much higher, you would have spontaneous combustion. So there would be a big destruction of life. If it were much lower, the more complex organisms would not have come into being. So, one of the things they point out is, it’s not an accident that the earth organizes itself so that oxygen will be around 21 percent.

In an analogous way, if you look at the universe as a whole and go back to the expansion of the galaxies, they’re moving away from each other at a certain rate, and you can measure the rate, but it turns out that the rate is not random. Again, like the percentage of oxygen, if the rate of expansion had been just slightly higher, then looking back over 15 billion years, we would have a situation where the universe would have expanded rapidly and never would have formed a structure. The formation of a structure is such a delicate event. So even a slight change in the expansion would have made the galaxies impossible. On the other hand, if you slow the expansion down just slightly, even a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one percent, the universe would have expanded out and then collapsed back into a massive black hole after maybe a million years.

So you can think about the expansion of the universe as a way in which the universe is proceeding so that life might come forth. Now, that statement I just gave you would be a cosmological assumption. And some people call it the strong Anthropic Principle. I’d just like to point out that in a certain sense, it’s a conception of the universe that’s new. The idea that the universe could be involved with its own unfolding simply wouldn’t be conceivable scientifically a hundred years ago. Now, in no way has it been advanced as a theory, it’s simply in the minds of some scientists as a new way of thinking about the universe as a whole.

JE: In your lecture series Canticle to the Cosmos, you say that the reason the universe created chlorophyll was to capture sunlight and that the reason the universe created human beings was to capture the depth of things. What did you mean by that?

BS: I meant that there seems to be the possibility of developing human sensibilities so that we can become deeply moved by the magnificence of existence. Now, it’s quite possible to avoid that kind of development and to throw yourself into a more simplistic pursuit of money or whatever else, and that too is a human life. But I just mean there is the possibility for evoking sensitivities and sensibilities that respond very deeply to the majesty of the universe. So it seems to me that the whole tradition of poetry and music and art and religious expression comes out of humans who have developed this capacity to be moved to awe. That really is what I was trying to get at.

But to give one example, a human can go outside and look up and see the Andromeda galaxy. You can see it with your naked eye, no telescope or anything, it’s just there. It’s slightly different than the other stars, and if you have really good eyesight or a set of binoculars you can actually see that it’s a galaxy. You can see the spiral structure. And it’s just so remarkable because as you’re looking at that, the light that’s entering your eyes took two and half million years to get here. It left Andromeda right when the first humans were discovering how to use stone tools. The eye that I’m using to see Andromeda has been shaped by two and a half million years of human development, starting with those first stone tools. You know, it involved mathematics and language and all this, and eventually we’ve arrived at a place where we can now see Andromeda and know what we’re seeing. And the light that we’re seeing has been traveling toward us all that time, for two and a half million years, so that to experience Andromeda is to experience not only the depth of the galaxies, it’s also to experience the depth of the human. And I just mean that that kind of experience is something like what a chlorophyll molecule does in capturing sunlight. We capture instead wonder or amazement that so easily could have been missed.

JE: In your book The Universe is a Green Dragon, you articulate a philosophy of “cosmic allurement”. Can you explain that?

BS: It’s just the idea that in physics we’re always looking for what causes things to happen, and we’ve arrived at four fundamental interactions: the gravitational, the electrical, and then the strong and weak nuclear forces. Basically everything we’ve looked at in the universe is a combination of these forces. I mean, there’s nothing we’ve found that doesn’t involve these. So I was reflecting on that and I realized that if you look at 15 billion years of cosmic evolution, it means that everything that’s happened is a weaving of these fundamental interactions. And it doesn’t matter what level you look at: asteroids, stars, galaxies, planets, the first cells, or multicellularity – at any level these four will be at work.

So then I thought, well, what if you looked at the human world from that perspective? If you look at the galaxy, the reason stars are moving about the center is this common gravitational attraction. And I realized when I thought about my own life that so much of what I do comes down to fundamental attractions of various sorts to things that I was interested in or drawn to. And we say, “Well, I’m interested in studying cosmology because I find it fascinating and whatnot”, but why do you find it fascinating? See, ultimately, it comes down to this power we call fascination, so it’s similar to trying to understand why a star goes around a galaxy. It’s attracted by gravity. Well, but why? What’s gravity? So it’s a way of simply pointing to the fact that things happen in the universe because of these fundamental powers and one of them is the power of attraction. On the plane of stars, we use the word “gravity” but we’re really using the word “gravity” to point to a fundamental power of attraction. And on the level of the human, we say “fascination” or “interest”. But once again, that’s pointing to the same power of attraction, just in a different form.

And so, much of my work is always an attempt to understand the human in terms of the cosmos, because during the last 300 years we’ve isolated the human from the cosmos. We think of ourselves as an appendage or an addendum, but it’s so wrong now that we understand it’s all one story. So I was trying to reflect on the ways in which our understanding could be deepened if we embedded it in the larger story of the galaxy or of the earth. And it’s simply a way of recognizing that what fascinates us, what draws us as individuals, is utterly mysterious. There’s no reason for it, it’s something we discover and experience that’s at the core of our lives. And it’s to be explored with a real sense of awe that it would have been captured that way.

JE: You co-authored with Thomas Berry a book called The Universe Story. In that book, both of you say that we are moving into an Ecozoic Era. Can you explain what that means?

BS: The Ecozoic Era would be a vision, and our hope is that the human species will move in this direction. It’s a fundamental shift. If we look at our situation today on the planet, there’s a great deal of destruction taking place. And in our own thinking, a lot of this comes from the gap between the human and the natural world. So if we’re talking about human rights, the natural world has no rights. Or if we talk about the GNP we’re talking about human economics. We’re not thinking about the economics of the birds. In terms of our religions, we’re talking about the relationships between the human and God and we don’t imagine that the natural world is the locus of God. So there’s a separation between the human and the natural world that permeates society and the Ecozoic Era would simply be an era when we would see ourselves as embedded within the earth community. We would begin with the fundamental respect for all of life, in fact, all of the components of the earth. That would be the basic orientation of the Ecozoic. And the one challenge of entering the Ecozoic would be to invent a way of human life that is mutually enhancing throughout the natural world. So rather than just focusing on human benefits, we would look for a way of increasing those benefits while at the same time increasing the benefits to the natural world.