A Unified Theory of God, Mind & Matter
by Xavier L. Suarez
Category: Body, Mind & Spirit

In the prequel to his best-seller, The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown narrates the story of a great scientist who tries to unify science with religion by replicating the first moment in natural history, known as the "Big Bang." That prequel, called Angels and Demons, is about humanity and its search for suitable answers to the source of our existence and the quandary of our destiny. This book is a non-fiction version of Angels and Demons - only without the angels or the demons. It is a serious and strictly scientific attempt to make sense of all the knowledge acquired by our species during the course of history. In particular, this book seeks to reconcile the exciting discoveries of the first part of the Twentieth Century (including relativity and the Big Bang) with the perplexing discoveries of the second half of that troubled century, when strange and paradoxical solutions were offered by science (most notably quantum physics and Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty). The conclusions of the book can be summarized by saying that it is an admittedly immodest effort to compile a "theory of everything." Weaving together the theories of humanity's quest for harmonious understanding of nature, its origins and its destiny entailed many mysteries; solving those mysteries often required advancing novel ideas. Perhaps the most creative of all is the proposition that the Big Bang produced not just space and time, but order as well. This proposition is buttressed by the latest findings in astronomy, which suggest that order came quickly to our world, as if delivered in a package, complete with ribbons and wrapping intended for our appreciation and use. Does that mean that the package was created by anomnipotent being - the god of theology? The answer to that question is not tackled until the last two chapters. The first eight tackle a more elementary question: whether our species differs from the animals merely in the sense of being a more sophisticated aggregation of organic life, as Darwin argued. That view is contrasted to one characterized as Integral Humanism, a philosophical framework which offers the opposing argument, under which humans are understood to be an unpredictable and wonderful mixture of three distinct dimensions: mind, matter and spirit.