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God Is Not Dead By Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Apart from simplistic and very diverse pictures of God that all religions give for popular
appeal, at the esoteric core, all religions agree that apart from material interactions, there
is another agent of causation in the world; and this is what they call God. Religions also
agree that apart from the material level of reality, which we experience outside of us,
there are other subtle levels of reality that we experience when we look inside. Religions
also agree about a third very important aspect of divinity: We must try to manifest divine
qualities—love, beauty, justice, truth, and good, for example—in our lives.
When not so long ago, the philosopher Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” he was
lamenting that the popular religious renditions of God are so simplistic that they can no
longer guide people to move toward Godliness. This is true. Yet to this day, many
scientists beat a dead horse by trying to disprove the popular pictures of God. This is
beating around the bush and not at all useful. The real questions, and these are all
questions of science, are: (1) Is there causation in the world apart from material
interactions? (2) Are there subtle non-material levels of reality? And (3) is there any
scientific justification of ethics, which compels us to pursue Godliness in our lives?
Most scientists today squarely say “No,” in answer to these questions because they
contradict their metaphysics of scientific materialism according to which there is only
matter and its interactions, nothing else is real. In my book, God Is Not Dead, I give
answers also, and they are all in the affirmative. Yes, there is God. Because (1) there is
an agent of causation apart from material interaction; (2) what we experience internally
are subtle non-material worlds; and (3) not only should we pursue Godliness in our lives,
our evolution is taking us toward better and better manifestations of Godliness. In my
book I back up these assertions with both scientific theory and empirical evidence.
Believe it or not, one of the most well known mathematical equations of science proves
the existence of God if examined within the new context that we have set. It is called the
Schrödinger equation named after one of its discoverers, and it is the fundamental
equation of quantum physics. Physicists apply this equation for the study of many
objects and many events; under these circumstances, the equation predicts (statistically)
deterministic results and so most physicists miss God in the equation. The right question
to ask is how does this equation apply to a single object in a single event, as it must?
You see, the problem is that the Schrödinger equation depicts objects not as “determined
things” of Newtonian vintage but as waves of possibility for consciousness to choose
from? How do we know this? Because whenever we look at a quantum object, an
electron for example, we don’t see possibilities—an electron in different places all at
once—but an electron in one actual place, an actuality. So we must be choosing where
the electron actualizes!

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Let’s go deeper. If we (our consciousness) are able to convert possibility into actuality,
our consciousness cannot be a brain product or any other material object since all
material objects obey quantum physics and must be possibilities only. So consciousness
as a nonmaterial agent of choice is a causal agent! Have we discovered God?
No, say the scientists, and they are right up to a point. The above raises the paradox of
dualism if we think of the choosing consciousness or God, an agent separate from us, as
popular religions do. To see this, ask the simple question, how does a nonmaterial God
interact with the material world? It can’t without a mediator. But a mediator signal
requires energy. And the energy of the physical world is a constant; energy never passes
from the material world to a God world and vice versa.
In the esoteric core, the masters of the various religions understood the situation
perfectly. God is not separate from the material world, they declare at various places,
times, and cultures. God is both transcendent and immanent. But what do they mean?
Until recently, scientists and ordinary people alike, have not been able to penetrate the
wisdom of these words. So scientists ignore them and ordinary people go on thinking
about God as a dual agent of causation. Proper understanding of quantum physics
resolves the logjam.
The quantum concept that is truly radical and that is changing our world view is called
nonlocality—signal less interaction. Matter consists of waves of possibility within
consciousness, which is the ground of all being. Consciousness chooses one facet out of
the multifaceted quantum possibility wave and converts possibility into the actuality of
that chosen facet, but there is no dualism because consciousness does the choosing
nonlocally without signal. It is choosing from itself.
Is it like Waiting for Godot: We have been looking for God and it is us? It is each of us
who chooses his or her own reality. Alas! This, too, is too simplistic, which is why your
wishful thinking about manifesting a BMW for yourself does not usually work.
There is a paradox here. Suppose you and your friend are approaching from
perpendicular directions a “quantum” traffic light with two possible facets, red and green.
Being busy people, you both want green, but who gets to choose? If you both get to
choose, obviously there would be pandemonium. Or perhaps you are like the Hollywood
woman who meets a friend on Sunset Boulevard and takes her to a coffee house to “catch
up.” Over coffee, she starts talking and after an hour says, “Oh my God, I have been
talking about myself all this time. Let’s now talk about you. What do you think of me?”
To this woman, the only consciousness in the world is hers, and she is always the
chooser. Such people are called solipsistic.
But solipsism is obviously not the answer to our paradox. It has shifted the question,
“Who gets to choose?” to, “Who gets to be the solipsistic head honcho of the situation?
No more than that. The paradox remains.

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The authentic solution is this: The choosing nonlocal consciousness is not us in our
ordinary ego, but a “transcendent” consciousness that is both us and beyond us, both
transcendent and immanent.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? And more. This nonlocality of our choosing consciousness is an
experimentally verifiable idea. In fact, this nonlocality has been verified by five different
experiments by five different groups at five different laboratories all showing the direct
transfer (without signals) of electrical activity from one subject’s brain to another when
the subjects are correlated through meditative intention. This is reported in God Is Not
Dead.
So the scientific evidence for God and God’s causal efficacy is already here. The
evidence is definitive because nonlocality can never be simulated by material interactions
that always occur via the intermediary of signals.
This is not the only evidence. God’s choice is creative and manifests in our creative
experience through discontinuous quantum leaps akin to electron’s leap from one atomic
orbit to another without going through the intervening space. Creative experiences are
subjective, you say. Not when such leaps heal a person from a life threatening disease, a
phenomenon called quantum healing for which plenty of evidence exists.
Objective evidence for such creative quantum leaps also show up in biological evolution
and explains the puzzling phenomena of the fossil gaps (or missing links) which
Darwinism cannot explain.
How about subtle bodies? If matter consists of waves of possibility for consciousness to
choose from and conscious choice leads to our experience of sensing, then it makes sense
to posit that our internal experiences are also due to conscious choice from subtle
domains of quantum possibilities. As the psychologist Carl Jung first codified, we have
four kinds of experiences: sensing, feeling, thinking, and intuiting. In this way there must
be four different compartments of conscious possibilities; the physical we sense, the vital
energies we feel, the mental meaning we think, and the supramental archetypes—love
etc.—we intuit.
The empirical evidence for subtle bodies abound in health and healing, in dreams, in the
phenomenon of biological morphogenesis, in survival after death and reincarnation, just
to name a few.
Again, scientific evidence for God is already here, so what should we do about it? For
one thing, we should take the religious masters seriously and pay attention to ethics. The
values—love, beauty, justice, truth, and goodness—that ethics talk about are what we
intuit. And plenty of evidence exists (for example, in the phenomena of dreams,
creativity, and reincarnation) for the importance and validity of ethics as discussed in
God Is Not Dead.

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And more. When we recognize that Darwin’s theory of continuous evolution is
incomplete and complement it with the creative discontinuous quantum leaps, we
discover an astounding thing. Biological evolution’s direction from simple to complex
organisms can be explained. We evolve from simplicity to complexity to be able to
manifest our experiences of the subtle domains of possibilities better and better. In
particular, right now we are evolving toward manifesting better and better Godly
qualities.
Someday, said the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, we shall harness . . . the
energies of love.” Teilhard was right. That day is not very far away.
In his private life, Goswami is a practitioner of spirituality and transformation. His forth
coming book, The Everything Answer Book: How Quantum Science Explains Love,
Death and the Meaning of Life will be published by Hampton Roads Publishing
Company in April 2017.

How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization By Amit Goswami, PhD

Quantum physics is the most successful paradigm of physics ever discovered. All
scientists follow it in their practice of science because they have to in order to make
predictions. And yet most scientists avoid acknowledging certain embarrassing
principles of quantum physics that squarely contradict science’s cherished worldview and
exclusive attitudes against the refined aspects of the human experience. Quantum
activism is an activist movement designed to use, instead of hide, the weird quantum
principles that upon closer examination are seen to have transformative value for our
societies and us.
Human civilization is in danger. Our social systems are breaking down—capitalism,
democracy, liberal education, health care and nutrition, religions, all are in crisis.
Civilization is in danger because the pursuit of meaning and values that it is based upon
are no longer deemed important by the metaphysics/worldview that most scientists
subscribe to—scientific materialism according to which everything is matter and material
interactions. Through material interactions (upward causation), elementary particles of
matter make a hierarchy of conglomerates: atoms, molecules, cells, and the brain. This is
an exclusive philosophy; meaning and value are at best secondary epiphenomena of the
brain along with the mind and consciousness of which they are attributes.
Civilization is in danger because the religions, which heretofore have been the upholders
of meaning and values, support a scientifically untenable philosophy—dualism.
According to religions, values are imposed upon us by a nonmaterial God’s downward
causation acting as a behavioral master of rewards and punishments. But if that is so,
God and the material world need mediator signals to interact and that involves energy
transfer between the two worlds. But it is a verified scientific fact that the energy of the
material world alone is always a constant.
Of course, science may not have the ultimate authority to settle the worldview question.
So the religions are far from conceding their case, simplistic as it may be. The battle of
the two worldviews—scientific materialism and religious dualism—has led to a
worldwide polarization among people. The net effect of this polarization is a pervading
avoidance of change, change that can save civilization, change that is urgently needed
that can lead us away from this divisiveness to inclusivity, integration, and progressivity.
It is convenient for the followers of both scientific materialism and religious dualism to
maintain the status quo to retain the current power structure, but the truth is that recent
developments in quantum physics are clearly demonstrating the scientific inconsistency
of the materialist worldview as well. And more. Quantum physics is guiding us toward a
new integrative science with a non-duality idealist worldview (monistic idealism) that
includes both science and religion in its essence—spirituality.

Here are the most fundamental aspects of the new science and monistic idealism:

Consciousness is the ground of all being.

Manifest actuality is preceded by possibilities—quantum possibilities. Conscious choice
converts possibility into actuality. Since this choice is exerted from a non-ordinary state
of consciousness “higher” than our ordinary ego, we call it downward causation. We will
refer to this higher consciousness as quantum consciousness; esoteric spiritual traditions
refer to it as God; but rising above the dualist populism of religions, these traditions have
long been able to conceptualize non-duality in the way that quantum physics is leading us
to.
Within one undivided consciousness, there are four worlds of quantum possibilities
wherefrom, via downward causation consisting of conscious choice, come all our
experiences: the material world that we sense, the vital world whose energies of
movement we feel, the mental world that we think and process meaning with, and the
supra mental world of (Platonic) archetypes—truth, beauty, love, goodness, justice, etc.
—that we intuit, that give us values.

Conscious choice precipitates the collapse of the multifaceted quantum possibilities in
each domain to become actuality. The multiple parallel worlds do not directly interact;
consciousness mediates their interaction through simultaneous choice and collapse
(change) of possibility into actuality.
Collapse is nonlocal meaning that it requires no interaction, no communication involving
the exchange of signals. Non-locality is signal less communication taking place
“outside” of space and time. Quantum consciousness is nonlocal, choosing from itself,
from its own possibilities. Nonlocal consciousness mediates the interaction between the
different worlds that are said to be “correlated” or thus “entangled.”
Collapse is discontinuous. Before collapse, quantum possibilities, waves of possibilities
really, reside in transcendent potentia, outside space and time. Collapse changes the
waves into immanent particles in space and time. Do you see why discontinuity must
prevail? How else can you depict “outside” space and time? If “outside” space and time
were continuous with what is inside space and time, we could just expand the boundaries
and include it, couldn’t we? The word transcendent reminds us of both non-locality and
discontinuity.
In transcendent potentia, consciousness remains undivided from its possibilities, and
there is no experience. This is what is called unconscious in depth psychology. Collapse
produces “dependent co-arising” of an experiencing subject and an object that is
experienced. The subject is not a mere artifice of language. Subjective experiences often
have the causal power of downward causation behind them.
Creativity is fundamentally a phenomenon of quantum consciousness discontinuously
manifesting really new (previously unmanifest and unconscious) facets of possibilities
from the transcendent to the immanent domain. Now you see why in ancient traditions,
creativity is seen as a divine attribute, which we can have only as God’s gift.

Even in this brief introduction, you can see how this new science integrates science and

spirituality—the essence of all religions. In this way we can begin the age of post-
secularism in which religion (which is not necessarily scientific and therefore had better

be kept separate from the affairs of the state) and spirituality (which is scientific and
therefore can be supported by the state) must be distinguished. Having potential access
to the causal power of freedom of choice and creativity, we can emphasize new change
and creativity along with the exploration of what is known in our education system.
Being able to include meaning, values and feelings at equal par with physical sensing,
this new science also opens the door to an integrative approach to the crisis problems
endangering our civilization. We need to make the crisis areas our arena for quantum
activism.

Why Quantum Activism?
We need quantum activism because scientific materialism has become entrenched in a
power politics that defy change. Changes can come if we not only use the quantum
principles to change ourselves (which is similar to doing spiritual practices) but also to

change our society. Spirituality without social responsibility will not do in this twenty-
first century.