The Physics of Angels. Rupert Sheldrake

reflect on the last three centuries of Western civilization? Some amazing knowledge has come forward during this period, and some amazing and healthy empowerment too. But there has also been a dark side. Arrogance has brought about so much of our ecological despair today. The Faust myth is a statement about the misuse of knowledge, power, and arrogance in our effort to know the universe. Do the shadow angels not represent the shadow side of Western civilization, a side that has taken arrogance and the misuse of knowledge and power as a normal way of life?

      Rupert: I would like to take up your point about the close links of angels to cosmology. The association of angels with the heavens is what came to me first of all. I grew up in Newark-on-Trent, a market town in Nottinghamshire, England, where there’s a magnificent medieval parish church. In the roof of the church, as in many late-medieval churches, the beams are supported by carved angels. And in the great Gothic cathedral of Lincoln, only fifteen miles from Newark, there’s a part of the cathedral called the angel choir. High up are these angels playing musical instruments—the celestial choirs. To see them you have to look up, so from childhood this is my image of the angels. They are associated with the stars. And this is what I’d like to talk about first, the cosmological aspect of the angels and particularly their association with the heavens.

      In the Middle Ages, as in all previous ages, it was generally believed that the heavens were alive, the whole cosmos was alive. The heavens were populated with innumerable conscious beings associated with the stars, the planets, and maybe the spaces in between. When people thought of God in heaven, they were not thinking in terms of some vague metaphor or some psychological state, they were thinking of the sky.

      “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Nowadays, I suppose, many Christians assume that this is a merely metaphorical statement, nothing to do with the actual sky. The heavens have been handed over to science; the celestial realm is the domain of astronomy. And astronomy has nothing to do with God or spirits or angels; it is concerned with galaxies, the geometry of the gravitational field, the emission spectra of hydrogen atoms, the life cycles of stars, quasars, black holes, and so forth.

      But this isn’t how people used to think. They thought that the heavens were full of spirits and of God. And indeed if you think of God as omnipresent, everywhere, divinity must be present throughout the whole universe, of which the earth is but an infinitesimal part.

      Through the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the universe was mechanized, and at the same time the heavens were secularized. They were made up of ordinary matter gliding around in perfect accordance with Newtonian laws. There was no room in them for angelic intentions. Angels have no place in a mechanistic world, except perhaps as psychological phenomena, existing only within our imaginations.

      But this mechanistic worldview is now being superseded by science itself. Recent scientific insights are leading us toward a new vision of a living world. This is a key theme of my book Science Set Free (called The Science Delusion in the UK).

      The old mechanical universe was a vast machine, gradually running out of steam as it headed toward a thermodynamic heat death. But since the 1960s it has been replaced by an evolutionary cosmos. The universe began very small and hot in the primal fireball, less than the size of a pinhead, and has been expanding ever since. As it grows, it cools down. More and more structures, forms, and patterns develop within it. At first, there were no atoms, no stars, no galaxies, no elements like iron and carbon, no planets, no biological life. As the universe expanded, all these things came into being somewhere for the first time, and were then repeated countlessly in many places and times. This growing, evolving universe is nothing like a machine. It is more like a developing organism.

      Instead of nature being made up of inert atoms, just inert bits of stuff enduring forever, we now have the idea that atoms are complex structures of activity. Matter is now more like a process than a thing. As the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper has put it, “Through modern physics materialism has transcended itself.” Matter is no longer the fundamental explanatory principle but is itself explained in terms of more fundamental principles, namely fields and energy.

      Instead of living on an inanimate planet, a misty ball of rock hurtling around the sun in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion, we can now think of ourselves as living in Mother Earth. The Gaia hypothesis puts into a contemporary scientific form the ancient intuition that we live in a living world.

      Instead of the universe being rigidly determined, with everything proceeding inexorably in accordance with mechanical causality, we have a world to which freedom, openness, and spontaneity have returned. Indeterminism came in through quantum theory in the 1920s. More recently, chaos theory has confirmed that the old ideal of Newtonian determinism was an illusion. Science has been liberated from the idea that we live in a totally predictable and rigidly determined universe.

      Instead of nature being uncreative, we now see it as creative. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave a scientific formulation to the idea that plants and animals are brought forth by Mother Nature herself. But for a long time, physicists denied that evolution had any part to play in the cosmos as a whole. They went on believing that it was an uncreative machine until the 1960s. But we have now come to see that creative evolution is not confined to the realm of biological life; the evolutionary development of the entire cosmos is a vast, creative process.

      Instead of the idea that the whole of nature would soon be fully understood in terms of mathematical physics, it turns out that 96 percent of the matter and energy in the cosmos is “dark matter” and “dark energy,” utterly unknown to us. It is as if physics has discovered the cosmic unconscious. We don’t know what this dark matter and energy is, or what it does, or how it influences the way things happen.

      Moreover, the evolutionary cosmology throws the old idea of eternal “laws of nature” into doubt. If nature evolves, why shouldn’t the laws of nature evolve as well? How could we possibly know that the “laws” that govern you and me—the crystallization of sugar, the weather, and so on—were all there at the moment of the Big Bang? In an evolutionary universe, it makes more sense to think of the laws of nature evolving too. I think it makes even better sense to regard the regularities of nature as more like habits. And the habits of nature evolve. Instead of the whole universe being governed by an eternal, mathematical mind, it may depend on an inherent memory. This is the basis of my hypothesis of morphic resonance, memory in nature.³

      Nested hierarchy of morphic units. The diagram could represent, for example, cells in tissues, in organs, in organisms; or planets in solar systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters.

      Finally, instead of everything being explained in terms of smaller bits and ultimate particles, we can now think of the universe holistically, organized in a series of levels of organization in a nested hierarchy or holarchy. At each level, things are both wholes and parts. Atoms are wholes consisting of subatomic parts, themselves wholes at a lower level. Molecules are wholes made up of atomic parts; crystals are wholes made up of molecular parts. Likewise, cells within tissues, tissues within organs, organs within organisms, organisms within societies, societies within ecosystems, ecosystems within Gaia, Gaia in the Solar System, the Solar System in the Galaxy, and so on—everywhere there are levels within levels of organization, each system at the same time both a whole made up of parts and a part within a larger whole.

      At each level, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I suggest that this wholeness depends on what I call a morphic field, an organizing field that underlies the system’s structure. Morphic fields are structured by morphic resonance. They have memory within them. Indeed, they are the bearers of the memory inherent in nature.

      At each level of organization, morphic fields animate the organisms, giving them their habits and their capacity to organize themselves. In this sense, molecules, stars, and galaxies are alive, not just microbes, plants, and animals. And if they are alive, are they conscious? Do they have minds or intelligences associated with them?

      Consider levels of organization such as Gaia, or the solar system, or the galaxy. If the fields that organize them are associated with spirit, intelligence, or a consciousness, then