DUALITY AND DIVINITY

In a recent post, I suggested that modern cosmology raised questions about the adequacy of the traditional Judeo-Christian picture of the relationship between the human body and the human spirit. Today’s consensus model of cosmology, combined with principles of quantum mechanics, suggests new possibilities for interpreting the body-spirit relationship. These interpretations derive some aspects of Restorationist theology as a more unified and natural — and less special, less supernatural — expression of the way God works.

These interpretations also force us to question whether our human misunderstandings about the “mechanisms of heaven” are leading us to do serious injustice on earth right now to members of the families with whom so many in the Restoration hope to spend eternity — to harm the very church and family structures we believe are essential to doing God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven”.

Before exploring such ideas further, I must first present another concept that has become a central part of emerging 21st Century physics: the concept of “duality”.

THE BRASS BALL

New Scientist is a British weekly scientific magazine with a very strong emphasis on a secular view of the world. I put up with its regular gratuitous slaps at theists (particularly American theists) because every couple of weeks it comes up with a gem of an article that makes you view the world differently, and it can involve almost any scientific discipline. It clearly doesn’t depend upon Restorationists for its readership.

So I had to laugh when I stumbled across an article (available on-line only to New Scientist subscribers) last year where an unknowing reference to a liahona-like navigation tool popped up in the middle of a story about a sea wreck. I thought I’d share a summary of it because so few Restorationists may have seen it. Make of it what you will.

YOU’VE READ THIS POST BEFORE!

Really. You have.

In fact, you’ve written this post before. And I’ve commented before on your witty style and clever application of science to theological thought.

That’s the implication of work by cosmologists like Max Tegmark. And although much of the science with theological implications is uncontroversial among scientists, I don’t know that many people in Mormonism are aware of it, or have considered its implications for particular Mormon belief systems. I think it’s time we did, because it may give an entirely new take to what are simultaneously some of the most troubling and the most attractive aspects of the Mormon religious tradition.