From Heaven to Earth

Why truth, faith, and enlightenment are beyond science.

(STARpod.org) -- In the ultimate search for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, there are limits to science.

Human beings thrive on explanations. The human spirit is motivated by meaning and purpose.

Some of the deepest human mysteries are beyond scientific explanations.

In their search for the ultimate "theory of everything," physicists and mathematicians have been forced to confront "the landscape" -- a realm of unfathomable possibility, an affront  to the search for a simple, beautiful equation, like E=Mc^2, which could explain how the world came to be.

Sir Roger Penrose, the famed Oxford mathematical physicist, has argued that the human mind, and the property we call understanding, must be non-computable.  Penrose shares a belief, along with many mathematicians, in a "Platonic Realm" of absolute eternal truth, underlying the mathematical concepts at the heart of physical reality.

Penrose pictures three spheres which represent different aspects of human experience.

There is a material world, the "nuts and bolts" of human experience, the subject of scientific explorations, where ideas are put to the test.

There is the mental world, the home of our thoughts, where we experience our self-perceptions of our material existence, yet seemly outside of or, beyond the material world.

And there is a third world, above both the mental and the material, where eternal truth resides. It is this third Platonic realm, the home of mathematical truth, which transcends space and time. The third sphere of reality, in a very real sense, exists beyond the dynamics of mind and matter.

The third world imposes mathematical truth upon the material world. It is this truth which is observed by the mind as it contemplates the material world and allows science to create explanations of the phenomena around us.

The third world is evidence of something more: a greater reality outside of the worlds of our experience.

Most amazingly, the human mind makes contact with the third world every time a mathematical truth is imposed upon the material world by the human mind.

At the core of our understanding, in that personal and inexpressible experience of enlightenment and understanding, the human mind reaches into this third world and grasps hold of an eternal truth.

Our best explanations require a human connection, a faith in transcendence, a bridge  from Heaven to Earth.

Copyright (c) 2009, 2011 by Gary S Bekkum / STARstream Research / STARpod.org -- All rights reserved.