Transcript:Steven Phelps/When Spirituality and Religion Meet Science
| Transcript of: When Spirituality and Religion Meet Science; A Bahá'í Point of View (2020) by |
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[0:00] [Host] This week we're so excited to have back with us Dr. Steven Phelps and his topic today will be When Spirituality and Religion Meet Science; A Bahá'í Point of View. Dr. Steven Phelps received bachelor's degrees in physics and philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University specializing in cosmology. He served at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel for 13 years in its research department where he coordinated the indexing and coalition of the Bahá’í sacred writings and their translation from Persian and Arabic into English. During that period he concurrently held a research position in the physics department at the Technion University in Haifa and published original research on the masses of nearby galaxies. His recent published research includes a machine learning test for Covid-19. He currently resides in the Portland area with his wife and three daughters. And with that I'd like to hand it off to Dr. Phelps.
[1:02] [Dr. Phelps] Thank you so much. As you know this is the second part in a mini series -- the first part discussed most of the points that I would want to bring up in an introductory presentation on the topic of science in the Bahá’í Faith. What are some principles of the Bahá’í Faith that facilitate the unity of science and religion? What are some common features of true science and true religion? What are some differentiators? And there was a lot of content in that first talk which won't be necessary to get into this time because what I want to try to do is to come at the subject from a slightly different direction, one that you might perhaps not have seen before, and what I'll do is share a screen and it can pretty much be summed up in just about one slide, but it's going to take a while to get through the slide and I hope there'll be time for conversation around these ideas.
[2:22] What I wanted to start with was the question underlying it all: what is the nature of reality? To what degree do we have access to reality? And what tools do we have at our disposal to describe it? And in particular when we want to describe the world as it appears to our senses we find, in other words when we want to describe the world as a physical thing, as a material thing, it's nearly sufficient to collect physical evidence, to use the scientific method and the laws of mathematics to deduce laws underlying the world of observation, and then to make further predictions from those. But what if the ultimate reality of things includes more than what our physical senses can perceive? Plato famously presented an allegory of prisoners chained to the floor of a cave their entire lives, such that they could only see shadows flickering on the wall, shadows that were cast by others behind them carrying objects back and forth in the torchlight -- so all they're seeing in the flickering torchlight are shadows of other objects, and these other objects that are being carried behind them are figures of animals and other sorts of things that we see in the real world. So what we're really seeing are shadows, and not just shadows but we're seeing shadows of models which are themselves already one or more degrees removed from the real. But being clever we come up with our own language to describe these shadows on the wall. We find very good ways of predicting, for example, when we see a certain shadow we tend to see another shadow right after it. We have a whole shadow language to describe the entire world that we have access to and that shadow language works pretty well for us. But there are those who live in the cave who somehow get it into their heads the strange idea that maybe reality is more than the shadows on the wall, and somehow occasionally one of those cave prisoners is able to break their chains and leave the cave, see first of all what was behind them, but beyond that leave the cave and see the real objects in the world and see the light of the sun itself, the source of all light. They go back down into the cave and as they try to explain this to their fellow cave dwellers they're laughed off because, after all, what evidence is there, to those who are chained to the floor of this cave, of this three-dimensional world when all you have access to is the two-dimensional shadow cast by it? It is a powerful metaphor expressing how the great religions of the world see the true nature of reality, that ultimately it's as though it were some higher dimensional thing and all we have access to is a lower dimensional representation of it. And that is what we are trapped in, that is the human condition which there's no escaping from, except those who able to break the chains, but that only happens maybe every millennium or so.
[7:37] So what can we do to access that world? We develop a metaphorical language to describe what we take to be this three-dimensional reality. That metaphorical language will have a correlation to that higher three-dimensional reality that it's trying to describe, but ultimately like any shadow it's only going to capture the thing that it's the shadow of, it's only going to capture that thing in an imperfect way, the metaphors will always break down at some point and it will never be able to capture more than this reduced dimensional representation of it. So we may have to appeal to multiple metaphors, a single metaphor is not going to do it, so we throw a bunch of different metaphors against it in the hope that approaching it from enough directions will capture enough of the nature of that reality to be able to describe it accurately. So that's a bit of a prelude to what I wanted to talk about in the next few slides here.
[9:13] And here is what I had in mind, is to talk about some central metaphors that are found in the Bahá’í writings, and not just in the Bahá’í writings actually, all of these metaphors are found almost pervasively through world literature of the East and the West as it tries to grapple with these realities that are beyond the realities of the senses. So we're going to look briefly at the metaphors of light, water, tree, word, elixir, will, circle and shadow. This is not of course a complete list -- it's what I was able to come up with late last night as I was throwing these notes together, so I may have missed some obvious ones -- and I welcome commentary and feedback in the discussion that follows.
[10:29] So the first metaphor is that of light. In this metaphor reality is a kind of emanation of light. There is a source, the source is compared to the sun, and all of reality are rays of the sun. This metaphor is found pervasively in the Bahá’í writings, and I'll be sharing some quotations in the slides, most of which we won't have time to read. The metaphor is a powerful one: Light is found everywhere, it's all pervasive. Light reveals things: by casting light on something you come to know it, so it's connected to knowledge. There isn't just one kind of light, it comes in different modes and colors and intensities. The light shining from the sun continues eternally into space. As we look out into the sky we can see the light cast by galaxies that are billions of years old: light is really a timeless thing.
[12:30] The ray of light tells something of the nature of the sun, it gives us information about the sun: the wavelength and the intensity of the light conveys information about the sun. But at the same time it's not the sun, it doesn't share in the substance of the sun. In fact, as far as our physical bodies are concerned, it might as well be infinitely far away. The sun is completely unapproachable. One can enjoy the rays of the sun, but to touch the surface of the sun would mean the dissolution of our elements. Now all metaphors break down at some point, and the metaphor of the sun and its rays breaks down because the rays, having emanated from the sun, never return, whereas the idea in the Baha'i Faith and other traditions is that having proceeded from the One there's ultimately a return to the One. So we need to appeal to other kinds of metaphors to give us other angles on a reality which cannot be entirely captured by any particular word or metaphor.
[15:00] Another central metaphor is that of water. In this metaphor there is a constant rain which is compared to the grace of God. The rain brings life to the dry earth. That rain as grace is not something which has a predefined shape, but it takes the form of the container into which it falls, so there's a kind of malleability to it. The rain comes down as individual drops, so there are elementary realities associated with this phenomenon which are temporally defined -- the drop ultimately merges into the sea once it falls to the earth and makes its way to the rivers, and all the rivers ultimately flow into the sea -- so the metaphor of water and particularly of the drop in the ocean gives this idea of an ultimate source from which all things are derived and to which all things return. That's in a way an improvement on the metaphor of the ray and the sun because in the metaphor of the ocean and the drop you capture the circularity of it, you capture the idea that there's a cycle through which the water flows. And ultimately everything flows down to the Will which is the source of all things, the substance of all things. The Bahá’í writings describe it as a sea, this ocean is the ocean of the Will, of which we are all drops. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá talks about this idea of the malleability of the grace as water which takes the form of its container in one of his tablets which I've quoted here. The idea of the ephemerality of the drop is also captured beautifully by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the idea of the ocean of the Primal Will, of which we are really the waves of that ocean, is also described by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
[17:08] The third metaphor is that of the tree. This is an organic metaphor. The tree is constantly in motion, it's constantly growing. And it's not just growing randomly but it's growing in such a way as to produce something. So there's this idea of directed motion in the growth of the tree, an idea of teleology. There's also an idea in the metaphor of the tree of the interconnectedness of the different parts of the tree, even though the leaf is very different in appearance and in function from the bark and from the fruit and from the root, nevertheless there's an intimate connection between all the parts of this world-tree. But amidst all the parts of the tree there's one part which stands out as being special and that's the fruit. The fruit of that tree which humanity is compared to in the Bahá’í writings, is special in part because the fruit contains the secret of the immortality of the tree, because the fruit contains the seeds and from the seeds spring new generations of fruit. So there's something special about humanity, at the same time humanity is is organically connected with everything else in the world and shares a common origin with everything else in the world. Everything comes from one and returns to one. And the seed is the common origin of all life, of all the parts of the tree just as there's a common origin or ancestor to all life on the planet. The metaphor of the tree is also used to express the principle of the oneness of humanity: We are all the fruits and the leaves of one tree.
[18:57] Finally the metaphor of the tree can be used to explain the mystery of sacrifice. The tree comes from the seed and the seed sacrifices its reality, sacrifices its form, for the tree that emerges from it, even though the essence of the seed nevertheless persists and is contained within every part of the tree. (I'll note that I'm ignoring the final column in the chart here for lack of time, but for each of these metaphors there are examples in nature. And primarily these are drawn from physics which is where I have the most experience and we can maybe talk about some of these in the discussion.) The life cycle of the tree also gives us the idea that there has to be renewal and rebirth. That there are seasons of decay, there are seasons when all the leaves drop from the tree, seasons of winter but those seasons are always followed by spring and summer and there's always a return and a renewal of the fruit. Maybe technically a different fruit appears at the end of a different branch, but with the same sweetness and the same character as the fruit that appeared in seasons past. So again a lot can be unpacked from the metaphor of the tree.
[20:47] A fourth metaphor is that of the word -- as you'll see we're going to be getting more abstract as we go. The metaphor of the word, which expresses the power of speech, is also pervasive both in the Bahá’í writings and more generally. It's one of the central metaphors of creation found in the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". The word is an expression of the will of the creator. It is something that has transmutative power, it has the ability to revolutionize the world. This word is not just an undifferentiated sound but it's comprised of two distinct sounds, a B and an E that are "joined and knit together". It's a happy coincidence actually that it translates nicely into B and E, in the original Arabic the imperative "be" or "kun" is comprised of the two letters kaf and nun. And these two letters are seen as an expression of the male and female principle in the world, the principle of agent (fa'il) and patient (munfa'il), the father of all things and the mother of all things, the substance of things and the form of things. So the word, which is eternally spoken, contains within itself a duality, and everything is an emanation of this spoken word. We also see dualities in the realm of physics, in the familiar e equals m c squared. There's a correlation, really an equivalence between energy and mass, something which is active, an agent, and something which is more passive or the recipient of the active force. Baha'u'llah in His Tablet of Wisdom says that these two "are the same, yet they are different". There are many other such dualities in the physical world.
[23:07] The next metaphor is that of the elixir. We see in a few places in the existing translations of Bahá’u’lláh's Writings mentions of the elixir. This is closely related to the metaphor of the word because the elixir, like the word, is said to have a transmutative power. And like the word the elixir also contains a duality, a perfect pairing of the principles of "mercury" and "sulfur" to use the language of the alchemists -- not physical mercury and sulfur, but the spiritual reality behind mercury and sulfur which is the same as the reality behind the B and the E. In tablets not yet translated and available in English Bahá’u’lláh describes in great detail these spiritual principles of mercury and sulfur which are instantiations of agent and patient, of the active force and its recipient, which require purification and perfect balance and combination in order to produce the elixir. The metaphor of the elixir and of alchemy is a centuries-long or millennia-long story in the west and the east. One of the spiritual principles behind it is that there is an innate potential within all things that in their natural state is unrealized, and for that potential to be realized in all of its transformative power one has to be able to extract its elements, one has to be able to purify them, balance them, and join them together. So there are spiritual virtues and ideas closely allied to the idea of transformation or transmutation. And we see a further example of it in the physical world in the crystallization of matter and in phase changes where there's almost an instantaneous transition from one state of matter to another that expresses different kinds of potentialities of matter.
[25:16] Even more abstract is the metaphor of the will. Will itself is a metaphor. We attribute will, an act of will, to the Creator in the moment of creation, even though we know that talking about God's will, talking about God's love, talking about God's intention in the world is really ultimately a metaphor for something which is ineffable. As a metaphor it anthropomorphizes, it takes an abstract concept and it imposes human qualities. It's one of the shadows on the wall; and this particular shadow is one of the harder ones I think to escape, to transcend, because it's so deeply interwoven in the way we think about things. But there is the metaphor of the will being generative, of there being a creative act of observation, or of love, which is not just love for others, love for creation, ere it is created, but love ultimately for one's own essence.
[26:41] ‘Abdu’l-Bahá talks about there being four different kinds of love, and he says the original love is the love of God for his own Essence. What does this mean? Already we know it's a metaphor because love is a human virtue, intention is a human virtue. But there's some expression of circularity in that, that somehow the act of self-understanding, of self-remembrance as the Báb puts it in one of his writings, which we might have gone into in the last week and we won't go into it here, but I recommend having a close look at the second quotation which really I think might upend a lot of ideas you might have had about the nature of the human soul. The Báb describes all these in terms of the divine self-remembrance which is this circular (or self-reflective) operation of the Will. And the idea of circularity as a metaphor is also found in the notion of the circle itself, the notion of orbits, the idea of there being a center around which things circle and that there is no getting to the center, we're forever confined to the periphery, circling about something which is at the center. Just like the orbit of the Earth around the sun, it's always circling the sun, it never reaches the sun but it's always accelerating towards it and always has the sun as the center of its motion. In a similar way, love is that supreme magnetic force that directs the motion of the spheres in the celestial realms. So the movement of the circle, the periodic movement, although described in the physical world quite well by simple equations, is only one manifestation of this force which is described as the force of love.
[28:48] And finally the last metaphor on my list is that of the shadow. And that's really where we began, with the metaphor of the cave from Plato. This idea of the world being in the station of the shadow is expressed in a tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá where he says: "This present life is even as a swelling wave, or a mirage, or drifting shadows. Could ever a distorted image on the desert serve as refreshing waters?... Know that the Kingdom is the real world, and this nether plane only its shadow stretching out." There are counterparts in the spiritual world of physical things. Every physical thing is a sign and imprint of a spiritual thing, every lower thing is an image and counterpart of a higher thing. And the quotations that follow also emphasize this idea, not just that the physical world is kind of a shadow, or let's say a lower dimensional representation of a higher thing, but that there are repeated patterns: take for example the metaphor of Plato's cave, the primary signification of the metaphor is the contrast between the shadows on the cave and the objects that cast the shadows, but already Plato's metaphor contains at least implicitly the idea of there being at least three different worlds: There's the world of the shadow, there's the realm of the shapes that are being paraded back and forth behind the prisoners, but then the shapes are themselves copies of something even more real. And to get to that higher reality you have to escape the cave entirely and go outside and see the actual creatures that are being represented by those shapes in the cave.
[30:38] Bahá’u’lláh seems to suggest that there is a limitless echoing of archetypes found throughout all the worlds of God. And that's in the third quotation here, he says: "Know thou that whatsoever can be found in this mortal world, this realm of limitation--every name and description, every form and attribute that can be seen or heard--hath, in each of the worlds of God, manifestations and appearances corresponding to and befitting that world, and appearing with another name, another description, another form and another attribute". There is a repetition of archetypes, and each archetype may be a poor or flattened representation of the next more real thing, but nevertheless it is faithful to the thing of which it is an echo, or shadow, in all the ways it can be faithful. So there's a kind of fidelity in the representation but at the same time there's loss of information in the active of representation. This metaphor of the shadow also, to go back to the story that I outlined at the beginning, also can explain for us what is the station of the prophet? Why do we put the Manifestations of God in a different category from regular human beings? And the metaphor the cave does a great job of explaining that: the prophets are the ones who have broken the chains, and gone outside, and come back to tell us about it. Physically they're the same as us, but they have an understanding of things which is simply not possible to get if your entire life has been staring at the shadows on the wall.
[32:24] So I feel like that's enough of me talking, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this attempt at drawing out let's say some of the foundational metaphorical vocabulary of the Bahá’í writings, each of which might be thought of as a pathway into a subject which cannot be properly and fully expressed in simple words alone, and each of which at the same time is incomplete and lacking and breaks down at some point. So our ultimate goal we might say, and extra points to whoever identifies the source of this quotation, is to go "beyond this life of metaphors" and to try to reach to the reality behind the images. [Note: The quote displayed in the video reads: "Go on toward the crimson shore, beyond this life of metaphors. Where doors of understanding's house decorates he them with clove." -- Seals and Crofts, "East of Ginger Trees"] So thanks for listening up to this point.
[33:31] [Host] Thank you so much for that really in depth, that was really interesting I hadn't even thought of all those metaphors and different allusions in the Bahá’í faith, so that was really great. Maybe if we could just stop sharing your screen so we could all interact with each other that would be great. Okay so now we'd love to have a Q&A portion. You can either put your question in the chat or you can use the raise hand button which you can find by clicking participants and then the button is in blue. So it looks like our first question is from Brendan so I'll unmute you now.
[34:05] [Audience member 1] Hey Steven, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, that was super interesting. You know I had a question around you know some of the what I'm seeing with a lot of my current friends who I consider very smart, but they're not very religious, and so they tend to, you know, they tend to agree that there's probably more to the world than what we see, there's more to reality than what we experience. But you know they're very skeptical or cynical of religious institutions so they usually go for ideas around agnosticism or simulation theory and I think, you know I'd love to hear your thoughts on specifically what you think about simulation theory and how that kind of compares and contrasts to the Bahá’í writings.
[34:54] [Dr. Phelps] Well the this whole presentation in a way is directed at precisely those people who are not let's say comfortable with the standard metaphors or the standard narratives that we have to describe religion and the truth behind religion. And I don't think I could do better than Plato did 2500 years ago in evoking this imagery of the cave as a way to describe the world. Simulation theory is kind of an updated version I think of Plato's cave. I mean the shadows on the wall are the simulation and they bear a resemblance to the real thing but ultimately the real thing is outside the simulation. There's the thing that's generating that simulation. I haven't read enough of simulation theory to critique it or even compare it in detail against the cave analogy, but I feel that the two share most of the substance in common.
[36:29] [Host] Thank you. Our next question is from Shahlah[?] so I'll unmute you now.
[36:37] [Audience member 2] Loved it, thank you very much. I have two, three questions. One is that why did you not put love as a metaphor?
[36:48] [Dr. Phelps] Oh, I included love in the metaphor of will and circle because the will is really... I probably, maybe I should have put... I didn't think of love I guess so much as a metaphor as much as the action of the will, as it loves its own essence, so you know under will I talked about the four kinds of love and the love of God for his own Essence without defining it as its own metaphor. Perhaps it could have been done that way, certainly in presenting it this way I don't want to be exclusive and say this is the only way to parse these ideas. But that's a very good point, love certainly deserves all the prominence we can give it, perhaps it needed to be pulled out into its own category.
[37:38] [Audience member 2] I would do that but of course it's up to you. Now the light: you said the light does not go back to the source. I'm not sure because when you see the reflection in the mirror, depends on the purity of mirror, so if you have a mirror that's tarnished you don't have much reflection, whereas when you have a pure or very clear mirror it reflects quite a bit. If you take a mirror outside actually it also sort of not only it reflects but you can see its shadow playing on whatever you are reflecting. So I have...
[38:28] [Dr. Phelps] Speaking of which I should, yes, sorry, speaking of which I should have added the mirror as one of the metaphors. I mean that's I guess an obvious one I missed. It's connected to light of course and in the mirror metaphor the light is reflected back to you so there's a kind of return but in the metaphor of the ray and the sun once the ray escapes the sun it, astronomically at least, doesn't turn around and come back to the sun. That's the only point I wanted to make.
[38:57] [Audience member 2] Are we sure of that? If we can look at, take the example of the mirror, and see that when sun reflects in the mirror, if you hold it to even the wall you can see the the light on the wall and if you hold it further out it... So I'm wondering how much knowledge we have of the fact does it return or not? Or how far does it stretch? That's my question.
[39:27] [Dr. Phelps] Well as far as we can look out into the universe, and it's around at this point billions of light years, as far as we can tell light travels in a straight line. I mean there may be some curvature to space time itself but not so much that it's bending all the way back, at least as far as the distant galaxies that we can see.
[39:46] [Audience member 2] Okay. Now it's interesting that you took the idea of the cave to reflect of this world, and I see the idea of the womb from you know also very much similar because my father used to have a story about twins sitting in the womb and one says to the other, do you think there is a mother? And the other one said oh no no no, when we die here that's it: all. Because you are limited in what you can see.
[40:22] [Dr. Phelps] Well there's another one I missed, the womb. Two good reasons not to pull these sorts of talks together late night before before the thing [laughter].
[40:34] [Audience member 2] Actually you've done very well, I love what you put together, it's just that as you were speaking things just popped into my mind and that's a good talk. When somebody gives a good talk it opens your mind, thank you very much.
[40:52] [Host] Thank you so our next question is from Komron so I'll unmute you right now.
[41:00] [Audience member 3] Hi Steven, hi everyone. Steven I am very glad that we meet, but in very strange circumstances. Mr. Dunbar wanted us to meet in the 90s, it never happened and then my good friend Shadie Saliyan has always wanted me to be in touch with you. So I actually think that this type of presentation should expand within the Bahá’í world and it is at the very heart of engaging the general public because I think this is at the very heart of the harmony of science and religion. And the peoples of the world are really interested in it so I've actually been thinking of... I've given a number of presentations dealing with this very same issue and I think in some ways I think maybe in another world we were brothers or twins or something, the way that we think about this issue. So I gave a talk about the metaphoric approach to the concept of spirit, and I'm convinced that all the objects in the physical world are, can be used as metaphors for spirit. So it's not just five or six or... everything in the physical universe can be a metaphor with different degrees of fidelity and as you mentioned also information loss, to approach the idea of spirit. So any investigation in the physical world is basically trying to find a lens to look at patterns of spirit, which you refer to as archetypes. Not only that I'm also convinced of the holographic isomorphic nature of the concept of spirit being like a house of mirrors: that we go into it and it keeps replicating itself. And I think this is one of the reasons why I'm kind of convinced of this, that human consciousness is based on analogy and metaphor. And the same thing with language, because without analogical structures or metaphors there can be no human thought. So it must have been in the origin of existence for it to be like that, and as such then I think that not only do I see a loop in human consciousness but we actually find the same loop in the patterns of Bahá’í writings. So this is why I think that somehow a group of Bahá’ís should explore these things and bring them out and correlate them with science, mathematics and information science. So I'm really grateful I see that other people are interested in these concepts.
[44:29] [Dr. Phelps] Yeah, it really strikes me that what we're trying to do is build a different language. It has different nouns and verbs and particles and so forth, and the objects of speech in this language may have words that carry dictionary definitions in our standard dictionaries, what we're really trying to do is build -- and all we can use are the words that we have, so what you're left with doing are taking words we already have like tree and light and water and so forth and trying to infuse new meanings into them, and that can really be done through this this narrative process, you know building a new narrative using these metaphors.
[45:15] [Audience member 3] Yeah I'm always fascinated that Shoghi Effendi defines independent investigation of truth as this correlation between science, and so truth somehow appears in a dialectic between the two. So I was giving a talk about spirit and I used the concept of practice and recursion, and then I mentioned to someone that the reason now we can actually understand the language of the Bahá’í writings better is if I didn't have access to the concept of recursion or fractals, I don't think I would have seen that idea in the writings even though it was there. So as our scientific understanding and mathematical develop, there is development in mathematics and science, I think they also shed light and help us have stronger metaphors to actually understand the Bahá’í writings. Anyway thank you, I greatly appreciate this and I hope I get your email and I can contact you.
[46:28] [Dr. Phelps] Thank you, good to meet you finally.
[46:35] [Host] Alex I will unmute you.
[46:40] [Audience member 4] Hi Steven, thank you so much for your talk. One thing that I've been wondering about is that there are some social teachings in the faith that Bahá’ís and friends of the faith find really challenging to accept and I don't want to necessarily open that can of worms, but some of these these teachings the House of Justice has explained they don't lend themselves to rational analysis. Nevertheless many people try to speculate or sometimes unfortunately get into debates about what might be the reason or the practical purpose of some of these laws. And there are some laws in the faith that to my understanding they don't have any practical purpose to them but their significance is primarily having a spiritual symbolism. One of those being ablutions, which Bahá’ís do by washing their hands and their face before obligatory prayer. Even if they've already bathed or showered or something so it's not a matter of cleaning, you know it's not a matter of hygiene. And so I'm wondering if maybe some of these challenging social teachings of the faith, if it's possible that their primary reason is to be a symbol of spiritual reality, if some of the relationships among certain people that Bahá’u’lláh has prescribed might be to... so that human social reality can also serve as a metaphor or a reflection of spiritual reality, and not necessarily for some obvious practical benefit to us.
[48:42] [Dr. Phelps] This may be a tangential response, but one of the I think powers of the shadow metaphor, where you have this higher dimensional reality projected onto this lower dimensional surface, is that a lot of unexpected maybe contradictory or illogical things happen on the surface. To give an example, if you take a cube and you project it onto a surface and that cube is tilted at any kind of an angle, the thing that's projected onto the surface is kind of a mess of lines and angles and so forth and if someone were to say, well all of those angles are right angles and all of these lines are equal in length to the other lines you might look at the surface of the wall and say that's just not true. Some of these lines are less than 90 degrees and others are greater than 90 degrees and not all the lines are of equal length. So there's information lost in the projection of this higher dimension of reality onto the lower dimensional reality. And if we can't see into, you know if our brains can't reach into that reality of the cube itself and if we're always confined to the projection of the cube we may never be able to reconcile what we think that thing is: it's perfect and it's regular and it has this structure and symmetry and so forth to it. But when it's thrust into the world it loses some of that beauty and symmetry. And that's part of the essential and sort of necessary loss of information that happens when you pass into this "realm of water and clay". I don't know if that helps with some of the more challenging teachings but it's a potential application of this toolbox of metaphors that we have.
[50:36] [Audience member 4] Yeah that's helpful, thank you.
[50:40] [Host] Thank you our next question is from Nuria so I will unmute you now.
[50:50] [Audience member 5] Thank you very much, I appreciate. When we listen to talks of Mr. Adib Taherzadeh we see that he uses metaphor all along his talks and that's makes everything so understandable to us, otherwise you know I would have no idea what you know all these writings talking about. As the matter of fact there is a quotation says that the material realm being most accessible to human understanding serves as a vehicle of metaphor and onology to assist in comprehension of the principles of spiritual reality. This is a page 100, Spiritual Reality, a booklet. So therefore we love this, we have no idea. And we have talked to many people friends of their faith when we put these things into the garment of the example an analogy, they really get it. If they have no prejudice they get it. So therefore thank you very much for your time
[52:02] [Dr. Phelps] Thank you. Mr. Taherzadeh was an absolute master of employing these metaphors and a master of storytelling which we can see glimpses of in all of his books, especially his four volume series on the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. I remember once on pilgrimage, I was a staff member at the World Centre and sat in the back row as he gave one of his pilgrim talks and I remember he started off the pilgrim talk not by saying anything but just taking questions from the audience. He said, so does anybody have any questions? And you know everyone raised their hand and everyone had a completely different question for him. And he took in all the questions and then he paused, and then he gave this talk which wove all the questions together into one, I don't know how he did it but he managed to answer all the questions in the course of this one talk that he gave which he composed on the spot--using of course these beautiful stories and images as he always does--really a genius.
[53:05] [Host] Great, okay I see Shahlah[?], let me unmute you now.
[53:15] [Audience member 2] This issue of laws is interesting because we do have laws that we don't fully grasp, but we follow because we believe in Bahá’u’lláh. And I also wondered why do you wash your hands and face for some prayers and not for others, why is it that we do it for this one and not that one? If it's a matter of cleanliness then we should be doing it for all prayers and so I'm waiting to get to the pearly gate and ask this question. Because there are a number of questions that you kind of don't have an answer, and I used to ask my father this question and my dad said you know in the Christian religion Christ said eat fish every Friday. So the people ate fish every Friday, they had no idea why not on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday and why only on Friday. And the way my father explained it was that the animals were caught at the beginning of the week and it was hung in the bazaar and people came and they bought a cut of that animal and by the time Friday came because there was no refrigeration the meat was bad and if you had ate it you would have got sick, so Christ instead of trying to explain the idea of microbes and diseases which would have been difficult for the grasp of the time, he said eat fish on Friday. So then when my father explained that it kind of made sense to me because now with this virus we are constantly washing our hands no matter what. So I'm wondering what some of these laws really mean eventually, when we fully grasp the realities of those laws, so I mean, often I argued some of these laws with friends who are not Bahá’ís for example the law of chastity, a lot of my friends said okay chastity: what if somebody never gets married? Does it mean that he or she has no right to feel that physical enjoyment? And then aids came along, and that kind of explained it a little bit more even to some of the Bahá’ís. So there's a specific reason for some of these that I don't think we have fully grasped yet and I'm wondering if we will in our lifetimes? So I'm wondering if you have any answer for that?
[56:09] [Dr. Phelps] No particular answer. Except that all of these, to bring the metaphor of the tree back in, there's change in evolution in all of the circumstances of life. I believe the House of Justice has been given enormous power and range of of activity by Bahá’u’lláh to do what is needed to keep the Bahá’í Faith in tune with the exigencies of the day. That is its mandate by Bahá’u’lláh in His book of laws. And I'm fully confident that it will execute on that mandate and keep the Bahá’í Faith in tune with the needs of the day.
[56:50] [Host] Great, next we have Komron so I'll unmute you.
[56:57] [Audience member 3] Just I think quick comment which I think is important Miss.. I forgot her name, Nuria someone raised the issue of metaphors. I think even though metaphors are empowering, they are also dangerous because if we overuse any metaphor then it can reify human thinking, and we then assume that that nonsensible reality which we are trying to understand becomes limited by that. For instance, sometimes I feel we overuse the, let's say, the metaphor of a cup for capacity. Or the metaphor of mirror for some other functions. Because as I think, again I'm convinced that we can use innumerable metaphors for all these non-sensible realities. I have only done research with regard to two things, one is spirit the other one heart, metaphors of heart. And both of them, heart you have fewer metaphors than spirit, spirit is infinite. But if we use any metaphor then we run into reification and reification is something that has plagued humanity for thousands of years and I actually find that oftentimes even as Bahá’ís we fall for it. As an example in Some Answered Questions let's say ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says there are five kinds of spirit. We may understand what metaphor is, but there are many layers of metaphor. So metaphors can become metaphors of metaphors. And then we think that there are actually five kinds of spirit, so the five kinds refines it. So anyway I think it's very important for us to study the nature of metaphors rather than just linguistic devices that give us access to something.
[59:21] [Dr. Phelps] And I think in the Bahá’í writings or in the Bahá’í revelation, the safety that we have is that Bahá’u’lláh is very explicit in telling us that it's all metaphor. And so I think the danger of reification, you know this danger of taking the metaphor to be the hard and unchangeable truth of things, which has happened in the past, I think is less likely to happen in a faith that is very up-front in acknowledging the limitations of its own vocabulary and its own conceptual framework. We know because Bahá’u’lláh has told us that He's only revealing a glimpse of ultimate reality, that is not itself final.
[1:00:20] [Host] Great, next question is from... just says iPhone so I will unmute you.
[1:00:29] [Audience member 6] Hello everybody, it's Kendall Williams actually I didn't realize it's just iPhone. So I wanted to dialogue about materialism, which you know I'm 52 in science most of my life, and so the dominant competing ideology for any all things religious and very influential philosophy is materialism. And it seems so 80s now with simulation theory out there but I wanted to make a point and then sort of get your thoughts as well Steven. First, it seems to me that materialism as a philosophy is the exact opposite of what you're describing, right? It's almost a form of fundamentalism, or biblical literalism as applied to the natural world and to the material world. Because what the Báb is saying that everything in the natural world is actually a reflection of something spiritual, something that exists beyond it, it's almost like Biblical literalism, that somebody looks at the meaning of the text and it can only mean what that says, it can't have the metaphorical understandings that we know as Bahá’ís that all of the scriptures have. So I wanted to make that point but in my thinking about materialism as well, it seems to me increasingly obvious that, and to many people, and maybe I this idea of the whole world being a computer simulation is even people sort of implicitly recognizing this, that materialism is really quite limited in its ability to explain the complexity of the world that we see. And though it's a highly conservative philosophical position it's almost too conservative to be true. Because increasingly the more we know about the world the more it can't be fully explained in a purely bottom-up process. So those are my thoughts I was just curious if you had others.
[1:02:47] [Dr. Phelps] The philosophy of materialism to me fairly neatly maps back onto the metaphor of the shadows in the cave. The materialist is the one looking at the shadows on the wall and says it's only shadows. And you can't argue with that, being chained with the materialist to the floor of the cave next to them, not even able to look at them but only able to look at the shadows. All we have reference to, all we have access to are the shadows. So someone who says it's just shadows, prove to me otherwise, and I can't say turn around and look behind you. All I can say is well, which model of reality works better? And by "works better" I've now shoved all of the problem into what do you mean by "works better"? It can mean whatever gives better predictions as to what happens next in this panoply of shadows on the wall. And maybe the shadow specialist who spends his whole life thinking it's just shadows might do a better job than me who's spending a lot of my time thinking about what's behind, might do a better job than me of talking about and predicting what's happening on the wall itself. But I would continue to maintain that the model of reality that is three-dimensional, and that sees the physical world as two-dimensional, even though I have no direct evidence for this, ultimately "works better". Why does it work better? Because it has better human outcomes. I'm launching into kind of a separate talk here, but the talk would be on... ultimately the pragmatism that I see in Bahá’u’lláh own Writings. When Bahá’u’lláh describes His station and His function to a good non-Bahá’í friend of His, who wasn't a follower, this was Mánikc͟hí Ṣáḥib His Zoroastrian friend from Baghdad days. And Mánikc͟hí Ṣáḥib asks him all of these philosophical questions, no doubt he was interested to know, since we talked last you've made this prophetic claim, so tell me tell me about this? Bahá’u’lláh gives him the metaphor of the physician. He doesn't say I'm giving the correct set of axioms about spiritual reality, He says I'm giving the remedy. And the remedy depends on the sickness, and the remedy for today is specially tuned, specially concocted to deal with the sickness of today, and the sickness of today is disunity and hatred on a global scale. And so the remedy I'm bringing is a remedy that is going to enable all the different tribes, peoples, ways of life, mental modes of thinking, to come together and all find some sort of common ground. And Bahá’u’lláh does this so brilliantly with that metaphor, and so brilliantly throughout His writings in giving us a common theological ground to understand the idea of the unity of religions, and a common mental space for the secularly minded person and the spiritually minded person to also come together, and to find some unity of action in the world. And Bahá’u’lláh does this again in a later tablet He wrote to Mánikc͟hí Ṣáḥib in demonstrating this principle in answer to a very technical philosophical question about the relationship between God and the universe, I mean Bahá’u’lláh is given four different options. Instead of picking one of the four and saying this is the correct answer, Bahá’u’lláh gave a very, on the surface, equivocal answer, and when pressed He goes on to say that there is truth to be found in all of these different schools of thought. And in several other places in His writings when His interlocutors tried to pin him down and say, you have option a and option b, tell me which is the right option, Bahá’u’lláh invariably says well they're both correct from a certain point of view. And I think in doing so He's laying the foundations for the remedy of the divine physician. And that is to open up the space of conversation so that tribe A doesn't have to say well my view is totally rejected and now we're all going to have to join tribe B, because that's not the solution.
[1:07:40] You know again in one of Bahá’u’lláh's mystical tablets, this is in The Call of the Divine Beloved, it's the third tablet, Bahá’u’lláh basically says this difference of minds, this difference of opinion is an ineradicable feature of the human condition. That's not a quote but it's a paraphrase. And he said so the solution is not that one tribe wins, the solution is not to replace all the wrong opinions with the right opinions, the solution is forbearance, patience, love, kindliness, all the things we're supposed to be in the world, that's the solution. Because there is no getting around the fact that different minded people are going to see the world in different ways, there are always going to be people looking at the shadows on the wall and saying I'm sorry but that's all I see, that's all there is. There has to be a way for that kind of mindset to coexist in the world with those who say you know, I'm not convinced, I think that there are objects behind me and I'm really looking at a kind of projection of a higher reality.
[1:08:49] [Host] Great, I think Kurosh has a comment on this point so I'll unmute you now.
[1:08:57] [Audience member 7] Hi Steven, this is Kurosh, nice to see you here. In regards to the metaphor of the cave and the shadow, you know the unseen realm, the realm that is outside of the cave is having an influence on the course of things in the cave that we see, the shadows on the wall. And so you know in terms of predicting the future if you think of just the short-term prediction maybe the materialist can predict, you know the cube is going to move this way, and give a very nice short-term prediction but in terms of long-term prediction you know like centuries, I think the the model that assumes that there are influences from outside the cave you know in the form of the Manifestation of God infusing the world with love and spiritual teachings that suit the times, and I think the long-term prediction of the non-materialist, the one who acknowledges the three-dimensional or you know n-dimensional world is going to be more accurate, and the same thing could be said for the past. You know to explain that things that have happened in human history which model really fits the facts better. Although there's a lot of argument that could go on about that.
[1:10:14] [Dr. Phelps] Yeah that's a great point. You know in explaining the universal currents of history, on a short term, on a matter of what happens in the next microsecond, you're not going to do better than physics. But if you want to understand the currents of history on thousand-year time scales, well physics is going to tell you it's entropy, that's all physics can produce for you at those sorts of time scales, is the expectation that ordered states are going to end up becoming disordered. But what we see in fact is the opposite, not just in terms of human history over the last few thousand years but in terms of life on the planet over the last few billion years. Now it's not that this contradicts any particular laws of physics, it's not that you have to explicitly add in some external force into the equation itself, but certainly conceptually, the current model of there being just four known forces, gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, can't be the final description of things. Because it's leaving out motions, I mean not measurable physical motions, but it's leaving out the movement of consciousness let's say, at the largest scales. And, for that, other principles it seems need to come into the picture. On this topic for those who are interested in this topic from a pretty rigorously thought through perspective, there's Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos which as expected, was quite strongly attacked by the materialist camp, but I think he makes some very good points about the need to include some concept of mind and consciousness in our vision of the cosmos.
[1:12:06] [Host] Great, our next question is from Kalim, and he says: what is the Bahá’í view of revelation? Is revelation purely divine or did it get polluted when it got appropriated in order to fit with worldly circumstances? I was listening to a talk of Dr. Surosh[?] where he described revelation as something which even though it comes from the divine, the cause of it according to him is earthly.
[1:12:30] [Dr. Phelps] I don't know if I can comment on that statement in particular but I would just refer back to the cave analogy. I mean revelation as far as we know, the words that have been left to us, are our shadows on the wall just like everything else. That's all Bahá’u’lláh could leave us. What was in His mind though was what He saw and experienced when He left the cave, which none of us have seen or experienced. And we try to extrapolate from the words that were left, as imperfect and as impoverished as they are, as Bahá’u’lláh himself says that they are imperfect and a poor representation of reality, they're all we have and so we're forever left trying to extrapolate from these words, which somehow carry a mystical potency, which somehow have this ability to change people, and that I think is part of the proof of their origin. What other words have the power to fundamentally change people? And this leads us to the metaphor of the elixir. I mean the Word Bahá’u’lláh describes is like an elixir, it's magic if you didn't understand how these things work. The transformative power of the word is not supernatural, I mean it's part of the fabric of things, but it seems supernatural to us, because we're again chained to the wall and we're just seeing the shadows so we don't understand why it's so transformative, but it has that that kind of potency.
[1:14:05] [Host] Richard I will unmute you.
[1:14:11] [Audience member 8] Hi, yeah thanks. Mainly I just wanted to say thanks for doing the talk. I think it's a really important topic in general, this understanding of the relationship between science and religion. And for my own background and I think for a lot of folks in what has become a very largely secular world in a lot of places this topic can be one that makes the Bahá’í Faith very approachable for a lot of people who don't know about it already. So I think it's a great topic to be investigated and discussed and I just encourage you to keep having these types of discussions. One topic in particular I'll mention and you know see if you have any specific comments on is the the concept of progressive revelation in the Bahá’í Faith, and how that may or may not have any parallel to the process of discovery in modern science. So I'd leave that and with you to comment on as you as you might want to and otherwise just say thank you again for for doing this kind of thing and please do keep doing these, I look forward to participating in more of them, thank you.
[1:15:42] [Dr. Phelps] Thanks a lot. I do think that progressive revelation and the recent historical progress in modern science over the last few centuries are intimately connected, to me they're aspects of the same process which I've talked about in other talks, and so I'll just try to sum up in a sentence or two and just refer you to the things I said in the past about it, but both progressive revelation and the advances in modern science I see in light of the principle of unfolding consciousness which I think is the overarching narrative framework for the cosmos that is suggested in all the world's religious traditions. That is, that history is not a random sequence of events but has a direction, that direction may not be expressible at the time scale of human lifetimes or even centuries: you see rise and fall of civilizations on vast time scales where things tend to go backwards for long periods of time, the collapse of the roman empire and so forth. But it inevitably gives rise to the seeds of the next civilization which takes things further. And this directionality to history seems to be in the direction of expanding circles of unified coherent activity on the part of conscious entities which unlocks greater and greater potentialities which were hidden in the world. These potentialities were always there but they had to be unlocked through matter coming together in particular configurations. The advance of science is a perfect example of that, I mean it couldn't have come about without civilization having reached a certain point where you could have whole cadres of individuals with the luxury of spending their lives just drilling down on particular questions of no immediate practical consequence. I mean to have that kind of freedom and that kind of spare time and spare resources to be able to pursue these sorts of questions requires there being, you know configurations of people working in such a way to make that possible. And I think the overarching narrative that we find in the Bahá’í writings is that of a creation that in some way has been generated in order to produce consciousness of its own self, because in so doing it fulfills its purpose. The ultimate purpose of creation is self-knowledge, because the entire creation is the primal will's love for its own essence. The entire creation is a circle taking place in universal cycles of unimaginably long periods of time -- as Thomas Nagel said, the universe is in a process of waking up. But this process of waking up is infinite, it stretches forward and backwards infinitely in time. We're at a particular point in that process of waking up which is very significant, it's maybe the most significant point in the whole process on this planet, because it's the dawning, the awakening of consciousness. And when I say this point in time I'm talking about the last 6,000 years really, which is already just a drop in the bucket when we talk about the history of the human species let alone the history of the progenitor species to humanity. So we're living in an incredible moment when we're really waking up for the first time and becoming self-reflective, and asking the question as to what our place in the universe is, and the history of progressive revelation and the history of modern science in that sense are completely hand-in-hand in this process.
[1:19:57] [Host] Well thank you so much. I think we will close off the discussion here. A big thank you again to Dr. Phelps, and thank you again also to everyone for adding to the discussion that was a really nice robust conversation we had afterwards. Thanks a lot. So our speaker next week is Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros and his topic is Spiritual Solutions to Global Economic Problems from a Bahá’í Perspective. And again these talks are every Saturday at noon Eastern time so please invite all your friends and family and if you are new to the Bahá’í faith or you would like to be on our mailing list and you are not already we've put a link to our contact form in the chat below, so please fill that out. So now we're just going to close with a quotation by Bahá’u’lláh, the prophet founder of the Bahá’í Faith set to music.
[1:20:51] [Singing] Intone, O My servant, the verses of God that have been received by thee, Intone, O My servant, the verses of God that have been received by thee as intoned by them who have drawn nigh unto Him, that the sweetness of thy melody may kindle thine own soul, and attract the hearts of all men, that the sweetness of thy melody may kindle thine own soul, and attract the hearts of all men.
[1:21:48] [Host] Thank you everyone and we'll see you next Saturday.
