The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God Read online

  THE FORBIDDEN UNIVERSE

  Lynn Picknett and

  Clive Prince

  In loving memory of

  Lily Iris Prince (1922–2010)

  David William Prince (1922–2009)

  Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God; like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outstrip all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand God. Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; be everywhere at once, in land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once – times, places, things, qualities, quantities – then you can understand God.

  ‘Mind to Hermes’ (Corpus Hermeticum Treatise XI)

  Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part 1: The Occult Roots of Science

  1 Copernicus and the Second God

  2 The Hermetic Messiah

  3 Galileo and the City of the Sun

  4 The False Rosicrucian Dawn

  5 Signs, Symbols and Silence

  6 Isaac Newton and the Invisible Brotherhood

  7 Egypt’s True Legacy

  8 Lament for Hermes

  Part 2: The Search for the Mind of God

  9 The Designer Universe

  10 Stardust is Everything

  11 Darwin’s New Clothes

  12 Mind Matters

  13 Escaping from Flatland

  Appendix

  Notes and References

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Also by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  In September 2010 the London Times carried the banner headline ‘Hawking: God did not create Universe’, conveying a sense of finality, as if one man – no matter how distinguished – had finally answered arguably the greatest question of all time. In fact, to us the most remarkable thing about this was that Britain’s leading broadsheet thought this topic worthy of their front page. Although it was publishing extracts from his latest book, The Grand Design, the readiness with which The Times accorded Hawking not only the headline, but also a lengthy article and most of the accompanying magazine, shows just how big the debate between religion and science has become.

  An even more strident anti-God voice is, of course, that of Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionist and crusading atheist, whose The God Delusion (2006) polarized the controversy and gave rise to a flurry of books either attacking him or turning him into a demi-god in his own right. This even led to the bizarre sight of London’s big red buses carrying posters that declared, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’, followed swiftly by the other side’s call to arms, ‘There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life’. Seeing these buses sail past in the capital of arguably the most secular country in the West was indeed a curious sight. The controversy has become so cool that it has even found its way into the routines of the edgier comics such as Eddie Izzard and Ricky Gervais, both of whom are vociferously and colourfully atheist.

  The debate is by no means simply confined to personal belief or philosophical interest. Religion is now also a hot topic for politicians and social workers, as the gulf widens between the secular and religious mindsets. It seems that virtually every day the media carries some manifestation of this tension, from the French ban on the wearing of the Muslim burqa to the fundamentalism that fuels the War on Terror.

  When the argument about the existence of God is framed, as it usually is, in terms of dogmatic organized religion, the Dawkins’ school seems to be well ahead. When he is arguing with a Christian fundamentalist or a fervent Catholic it is hard not to agree with him. But when he extends his reasoning to anything that touches on the mystical, magical or transcendental, that is where we part company.

  There are several major problems with the position advocated by Dawkins and his even more vociferous fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great (2007). The first is that, taking advocacy of rationalism and science to its logical conclusion runs the risk of scientism – science as an ideology instead of an objective method for evaluating and improving the natural world. This would create a society in which every aspect of life – not just technology, medicine and so on – is assessed and governed by science. However, as very few people have either the time or the inclination to keep up to date with cutting-edge science, they would have to take the pronouncements of scientists on trust – or faith. Which is exactly how priests rose to power, by claiming an exclusive insight into God’s laws beyond the reach of ordinary folk. We would be back where we started; scientists would be the new priesthood, and scientism would have become the new religion.

  More importantly, it seems to us that a sweeping dismissal of anything remotely spiritual or mystical actually ignores a major part of what it is to be human. The Dawkins/Hitchens school fails to distinguish between, on the one hand, the religious impulse that is innate to human beings and, on the other, the systems of authority and control that the organized religions have become.

  The debate is almost always portrayed with just two alternatives, scientific atheism and organized, dogmatic religion. But something is missing: the profound sense of the ‘Other’, or the transcendental – what may be termed the mystical, or even magical – that underpins, but is not the same as, religious sensibilities. And, as this book hopes to demonstrate, this is by no means incompatible with a truly scientific worldview.

  There has never been a culture – from rainforest tribes to the greatest civilizations such as Rome, ancient Egypt or even the modern West – which did not begin with an understanding of the world based on a belief that it is both purposeful and meaningful, arising from a supernatural ordering of things. It, and everything in it, are here for a reason. This way of looking at the world around us is not learned, but instinctive; it comes naturally to the individual. And this yearning for the transcendental is not rooted in organized religions; they and their priesthoods might exploit this innate impulse, but they did not create it.

  Ours is the first civilization where a significant number of people have attempted to break away from such a worldview. But, as Richard Dawkins laments, it is a slow and difficult struggle, precisely because such thinking is second nature to our species. It is so universal, so taken for granted, that it seems to be hardwired into us.

  Indeed, while we were writing this book, new evidence emerged, in the work of developmental psychologist Professor Bruce Hood of Bristol University, who concluded at the 2009 meeting of the British Science Association that ‘superstition is hardwired’, being there from the beginning:

  Our research shows children have a natural, intuitive way of reasoning that leads them to all kinds of supernatural beliefs about how the world works. As they grow up they overlay these beliefs with more rational approaches but the tendency to illogical supernatural beliefs remains as religion.1

  Hood demonstrated just how hard that wiring is. For example, his study of a group of staunch a
theists revealed that even they found the idea of receiving an organ transplant from a murderer utterly abhorrent – a completely irrational reaction. Another researcher, American anthropologist Pascal Boyer, concludes:

  Religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the work of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions.2

  Hood and Boyer are not talking about deeply mystical and religious feelings but something much more common. Yet, while recognizing how fundamental magical thinking is to human beings, they fail to explain the big question of why this should be so.

  Similarly, the Dawkins school pays little attention to this mysterious human propensity for a belief in the supernatural and the magical. As it is the very antithesis of scientific, rational thought they don’t even give it a nod. But this is dodging a major question. Even if it is all just superstition, surely investigating such a basic instinct with an open – a truly scientific – mind would reveal something important about humanity? If, as Dawkins insists, God is a delusion, why should we be programmed to be quite so delusional?

  As a specialist in the genetic basis of human and animal behaviour, Dawkins has attempted to explain the ubiquity of religion as a by-product of a useful evolutionary trait, suggesting that human beings have evolved an instinct to obey the commands of elders because, as children, we need to do so to remain safe in a dangerous world. We are programmed to believe what we are told by those we look up to in authority. However, as this instinct remains into adulthood we stay susceptible to the pronouncements of authority, and so priests effectively become our surrogate parents, our holy fathers.3

  Although this makes some sense, it disingenuously addresses only one aspect of religion: why human societies almost always develop religious institutions and priesthoods – the exploitation of magical thinking, not the reason it exists in the first place. Dawkins’ scenario would work equally well without religion – if people are programmed to accept authority, then kings and dictators would do just as well, without an appeal to a higher but invisible being.

  Science has yet to provide an answer to the basic question of why humans are hardwired to believe. And it is an exquisite irony that one of the products of this magical mindset was science itself. It is, as we will see, what motivated all of the great pioneers of the scientific revolution.

  As readers of our previous books will realize, anything that is forbidden has an instant appeal to us. So the discovery that there is a forbidden science was just too tantalizing to ignore. Its focus is an ancient mystical and cosmological system that has always clamoured for our attention, from our first research into Leonardo da Vinci and the Turin Shroud, and our discoveries about the heresy that upholds John the Baptist as the true Christ, which we explore in The Templar Revelation (1997) and The Masks of Christ (2008). Lynn’s Secret History of Lucifer (2006), which explores forbidden paths to both mystical and scientific enlightenment, also lit the way to this book.

  As we hope to demonstrate, the greatest inspiration of luminaries such as Copernicus and Isaac Newton was almost lost over the centuries. Although the usual explanation for this decline is that scientists simply became too mechanistic – Dawkins would say too sophisticated and intelligent – to think in transcendental terms, we argue that this is not the case, and that there was another reason entirely … In fact, this venerable philosophy has much to reveal not only about the origins of science but, we contend, is also increasingly relevant for today’s scientists.

  This extraordinary tradition is set out in a collection of texts that have had the greatest impact on western culture of any book apart from the Bible, and the greatest impact on the modern world than any book including the Bible. Surely that in itself is a major reason for rediscovering these ancient secrets. And the best part is that they are not merely ancient, not just some historical curiosity – they even have something important to teach science of the twenty-first century.

  Lynn Picknett

  Clive Prince

  London, 2010

  Introduction

  1 Quoted in Leake and Sniderman.

  2 Quoted in ibid.

  3 Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 200–8.

  PART ONE

  The Occult Roots of Science

  CHAPTER ONE

  COPERNICUS AND

  THE SECOND GOD

  There are three key events that science historians cite as landmarks in the long journey from superstition to intellectual enlightenment: Copernicus’ proposal of the heliocentric theory (1543), the prosecution of Galileo by the Church for promoting that theory as fact (1633) and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687), which established key physical laws, primarily those of motion and gravity. As a leading historian of science put it: ‘The series of developments starting with Copernicus in 1543 and ending with Newton in 1687 maybe be labelled the Scientific Revolution.’1 However, these great leaps forward were not made because Copernicus, Galileo and Newton elevated pure reason above religious irrationality, but because they were all inspired by the same unashamedly metaphysical and magic-oriented philosophy – one that also excited and motivated other great minds of the time, including our own special hero Leonardo da Vinci.

  To today’s materialist-rationalists, the unpalatable fact is that a magical mindset not only bubbled along through the Renaissance, but it was magic that inspired and drove the whole of that era’s explosion of thought and achievement. In a very real way, magic made the modern world.

  The event that is considered the watershed moment, the beginning of the parting of the ways of science and religion, is the proposal of the heliocentric, or ‘sun-centred’ theory of the cosmos, which posited that the Earth circles around the sun and not, as had been thought, the other way around. The radical new notion was proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) as the Polish canon Mikolaj Kopernik styled himself in the manner of contemporary scholars.

  Until then astronomy and its esoteric twin astrology had traditionally been based on the belief that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. It was a natural assumption, since the sun, moon and stars appear to move around us in regular cycles, while the world we stand on seems to be static. The only complication with this system was presented by the movement of the five planets visible to the naked eye, which despite demonstrating a pattern, did not appear simply to circle the Earth. In the second century CE the Greek-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemaeus, who is known as Ptolemy, devised an Earth-centred model with a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for the movements of the planets. He was the single great astronomical authority until Copernicus took centre stage.

  Strangely, for such a monumentally influential figure, very little is known about Copernicus the man, although the outline of his life is well documented. He was born in Torun in Poland in 1473 to a copper merchant, hence the name. His father died when Copernicus was young, leaving an uncle, who was a canon, to raise him. After studying church law, he extended his stay in the stimulating environment of Renaissance Italy by studying law and medicine at Padua in the Republic of Venice. A gifted artist and draughtsman, his real passion was astronomy, to which he devoted much of his free time.

  When his uncle became a bishop, he secured Copernicus a job as a church administrator, or canon, in the town of Frombork. He lived out the rest of his life, based in a tower – now known as Copernicus’ Tower – in the courtyard of the cathedral. His remains were only discovered under the cathedral as recently as 2000. As an ordained clergyman Copernicus was forbidden to marry, but it seems he may not have been totally celibate, according to rumours linking him to his housekeeper. This did not go down well with the Church authorities.

  His duties gave him enough leisure time for his passion for astronomy, which he indulged in his tower. Like many astronomers at the time, Copernicus was dissatisfied with the fixes and fudges that were needed to make Ptolemy’s system w
ork, and so set out to address the problem. But unlike the vast majority, the results Copernicus achieved would change astronomy for ever.

  Copernicus developed his radical new theory in the first decade of the sixteenth century, but refrained from going public for many years, contenting himself instead with scholarly discussions and penning an account for private circulation in the early 1510s. He only published what he termed his ‘new and marvellous hypothesis’, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) at the end of his life – the last page proofs were delivered to him on his deathbed in 1543. The popular science writer Paul Davies calls the book ‘perhaps the very birth of science itself’.2

  Contrary to common belief, Copernicus did not delay publication until death made him safe from the Vatican’s wrath. He was only reticent about going public because of the academic controversy his theory would generate, and only agreed to write his book under pressure from colleagues who were excited by his theory. Even Pope Paul III had listened enthusiastically to a lecture on the subject given by his secretary, the German scholar Johann Widmannstetter, ten years before On the Revolutions was published. A cardinal who attended the lecture, the Archbishop of Capua, was one of those who urged Copernicus to write and publish his theory. So much for today’s perception of the Church’s hostility.

  On the Revolutions put forward three new controversial ideas: That the Earth moves in space, revolves on its own axis and that it and the other planets circle the sun. Copernicus pointed out flaws in the old Ptolemaic system and set out the observations that led him to propose a new model of the universe. On the thirty-first page he reveals his groundbreaking, even shocking, proposition in the form of a diagram that shows the planets, in their correct order, circling the sun. And just four lines beneath the all-important diagram he makes an extraordinary statement: