Book Excerpt
This passage comes from the book The Quantum and the Lotus by Mattieu Richard & Trihn Xuan Thuan. It’s a comparison of modern physics and Buddhist beliefs. In this chapter, they are talking about the existence of a Creator or a God:
Omniscience, omnipotence, and so on are the qualities of a God. And it’s true that we tend to identify this principle of creation with a Creator God. Physicists don’t talk about God, however; rather, they refer to physical laws. The properties of those laws are strangely reminiscent of how God is generally described, and this leads many people to see a relationship between them. The physical laws are, for example, universal and are applied everywhere in time and space, from the tiniest atom to the largest galaxy. They’re absolute, since they don’t depend on the person that discovers them. The fact that discoveries are often made by individuals does not mean that the individuals have created the truths they find. The truths are there to be found. The physical laws are also timeless, because even though they describe a world governed by time and constantly changing phenomena, they themselves never change. We live in a temporal universe ruled by atemporal laws. The laws are also omnipotent, because they apply to everything everywhere. Finally, they’re omniscient, because they act on material objects without having to be “informed” of the particular states of these objects. They “know” in advance and “legislate” just the right instructions to “command” the behavior appropriate to those states. And so the characteristics of physical laws are the same as God’s.”
So far this book is really interesting, if not really deep. It’s written as a running dialogue between the two authors. One is a Buddist monk and the other is an astrophysicist. If you guessed which one is which….well…guess again because you’re wrong. If you have any sort of grounding in modern physics and are interested in how these ideas mesh with Buddhist thought (a la The Tao of Physics) pick this book up.
