Huston Smith wrote the best seller “The World's Religions” (book 17). He also did a 5-part PBS special on religions with Bill Moyers. Smith is an internationally recognized expert, having spent his life learning Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the “Chinese Religious Complex.” (For his books I've read, click on his name.)

This book is in two parts – Part 1 covers the last several decades of science-religion issues; he says our misreading of science has put us in a “tunnel” due to our media, universities and law ignoring the spiritual life. There was little new for me in Part 1, with which I fully agreed. But Part 2 is a very insightful building of a worldview that has science and spirit in a proper relationship. He writes very clearly, using simple language. He brings the world’s major religions together in an amazing way (in his Fig 2) and relates the four levels of Fig 2 to four religious personalities – atheist, polytheist, monotheist, and mystic. I found the last few chapters both fascinating and inspiring. However, there are some parts in which his limited knowledge of physics, especially special relativity and light, led him to say things that are essentially meaningless - more "poetic" than real. But this has little impact on the general multicultural and broad religious views that are what make this book so very powerful and insightful. His essential "convergence" of the world's religions is especially well done. In this he has great credibility since he has lived in and absorbed the essential truths of many of the world's faiths. Huston Smith was my main inspiration to write book reviews (in spite of my being able to use only my thumbs in typing). That's why this review was my first. I hope his worldview will excite you as much as it did me!

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Discussion added on 12/07/10 (revised from Nov '02 discussions with friends):

Why Religion Matters is a great read. I found Ch 12-16 to be the most thought provoking chapters I’ve read on religion. I’m tempted to jump right to them, but I’ll follow the author’s order. But first, I need to thank my very good friend Frank for giving me this book. He and others asked me to expand in detail upon the above very brief review and on their comments and questions, which I’m happy to do.

Part One, Modernity’s Tunnel, is about half the book. There was little in this part I hadn’t read before. He defined well various philosophical and theological terms. He also got a lot off his chest – I don’t fault him for doing so because he is correct and has earned the right to do so. What I mean is the general trend over the past several decades for the American people, press, academia, and law to downplay mythos (religious, transcendental or spiritual matters) while playing up logos (materialism, rationalism and scientism). [In brief, scientism is the belief that truth can be known only be scientific methods.] Science grew rapidly during this time at an almost inverse rate at which mythos shrunk. This is a fact and I agree with Smith it is to be lamented. His “tunnel” concept is a bit stretched and oversimplified, but he uses it well in making the case of too much logos and not enough mythos. I am very glad that he defined the new word scientism for what I have called “misplaced ideas of science and its place” in my own worldview (which has room for body, mind, soul, and spirit). Smith’s “hits” on the universities, media, and law (Chapters 5-7) are correct – I think they reflect the attitudes of the majority of Americans in the past several decades.

Smith’s science is generally sound but has some major misconceptions. He opens Part Two with Ch 8 and states “Light is a universal metaphor for God.” But he then tries to make light (or photons, light’s quanta) a universal metaphor for all interactions of physics, which will lead you astray. He uses the word light “in its broadest sense” to mean energy – in particular physical interactions in which energy is exchanged. But the four fundamental physics forces – gravity, electromagnetism (EM), weak, and strong – are so very different that light cannot properly represent them all. In particular, he says “Quantum mechanics … Planck’s Constant is its measure.” is way, way off for the subatomic weak and strong forces, where the minimum energy packet is the rest mass of the exchanged massive particle, is many billions of times larger than Planck’s Constant. But light, with photons of zero rest mass, is indeed “dazzling,” so I can see why he wants to use only the physics of light, as he (only partially) understands it.

I like what he says in Ch 9 & 10, especially p 151: “For science is never enough, not even natural and social science together. To inspire conviction, hope needs to be anchored in the very nature of things.” I love this quote; many scientists would too, if they have both logos and mythos in their hearts and minds as do I. In Ch 11 on the EPR experiment Smith states as a ‘fact’ that it “establishes that the universe is nonlocal.” This is not a fact but a minority opinion held by about 5% of physicists. I’m in the 95% group. I think I need to go into detail to explain EPR, which will take several paragraphs to do. I feel this is necessary because Smith strongly favors nonlocality. However, I’ll stick these paragraphs at the end so you can skip it if you wish (or if you already know about EPR and nonlocality).

Although Smith seems to love nonlocality, he points out (p 178) that Stapp and Chew admit they are physics mavericks. Smith says nonlocality helps “bring physics out of” the tunnel. I think many physicists are out of Smith’s tunnel without nonlocality. Smith’s reference to John Polkinghorne is an apt one and Smith’s summary is right on the mark. [I’ve read Polkinghorne’s “Faith of a Physicist” (book 2) and two other books by him.] Other cosmologists have independently calculated similar probabilities about the extraordinarily precise “fine tuning” in the early universe – this may not “prove” that the hand of God was involved, but I think it greatly weakens the arguments of pure chance, irregardless of atheists like Stephen Hawking.

In Ch 12, Smith does a very good job in defining science in terms of what it can know and what it cannot know - or what science cannot “get its hands on.” His definition of science is so strict that much of accepted science – that consisting not of controlled laboratory experiments but of observation followed by deductive reasoning (such as is necessary for astronomy, archeology, and evolution) – remain speculative except for their ability to predict unobserved events. He would be right if we limit science to lab experiments. I don’t see the reason he discussed David Bohm, whose Quantum Mechanics (QM) writings proposed “hidden variables” – things that affect the QM Wave Function that intrinsically cannot be measured. Bohm never proposed any change in QM that satisfied himself, much less others, so it never led to anything. Why bring it up here?

Fig 1 is right on the mark, as is Smith’s discussion of it. I especially like his concise summary: “Science deals with the natural world and religion with the whole of things, as this diagram (Fig 1) suggests.” I very much like his idea of a center and his ideas for its two arms. In Ch 13 Smith has some great lines with his reference to Kierkegaard. In my own words, if we were merely puppets on strings, allowed to do only what God willed, we would have little value either to ourselves or to God. I believe God gave us free will and the knowledge of good and evil to see what we would do with the choices before us. I think He wouldn’t have bothered with humans that have no free will. Puppets were not at all what God sought!

Ch 14 is truly inspiring! Smith pulled together so much here. His “This World” of body and mind (visible and invisible) and “Other World” of soul and spirit (knowable and ineffable infinite) seem to me to be right. Fig 2 puts this together with the world’s major religions so well that I find Fig 2 awesome. And Fig 3 illustrates an idea I’ve held and others touched upon but did not expressed very well. These two figures give proof to the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” His choice of words God and Godhead reminds me a bit of Emerson’s Soul and Oversoul, but Smith explains so much more in Ch 14 than Emerson ever did. In Ch 14 Smith concludes with a moral that I think he has clearly shown “true or not, the traditional worldview is transparently intelligible.” He has made it transparent to me like no one else ever did! However, his next sentence should not have been “The scientific worldview is not” but “The scientism worldview is not.” I think the latter is what he meant to say here.

Ch 15 is also extremely thought provoking. His association of the four “spiritual personality types” with a one-to-one correspondence with the four worlds in Fig 2 seems to be oversimplified. I can only accept this correspondence with a big grain of salt. The atheist association with the innermost world of Fig 2 is dead on. But I have some difficulty with his polytheist association. Smith says Catholics in the small towns of southern Italy are “operatively” polytheistic. (The same could be said of most Catholics in Central and South America, too, and for the same reason.) But I’m unwilling to say this about all Catholics – I think they can distinguish between God and their saints, statues or icons), so I think they are monotheistic at heart. Being monotheistic myself, I agree with his association with monotheism with the third world (and, of course, the inner two worlds) of Fig 2.

In Ch 15 I just cannot understand his “mystic” (There is Only God) personality. What really bothers me here is his assertion that “evil drops from the picture and only good remains.” I believe evil does indeed exist. Are mystics blind not to see it? It seems to me his mystic can only see the Other World and not the This World wherein evil lives. His mystic reminds me of the three-monkey statue (one covering its eyes, one its ears, and one its mouth) representing “See no evil, Hear no evil, and Speak no evil.” And Smith says “To be infinite, God must include all possibilities.” My question is, “Doesn’t all necessarily include evil?” Smith says “Can there be an understanding of life so staggering in its immensity that, in comparison to it, even gulags and the Holocaust seem like dropped ice-cream cones?” My answer is that “I do not believe there can or should be such an ‘understanding’!”

Ch 16 deals with spirit. Certainly spirituality deals with the tacit knowing or unconscious knowledge and that “When capitalized, Spirit is a synonym for God.” I question his “Mystics champion identity (between God and Spirit); monotheists insist that a distinction remains.” I was brought up Episcopalian, so I was taught that the Holy Trinity means that Father, Son and Spirit are all one God, which is monotheism with a capital M. Any distinctions between the Three of the Trinity are not fundamental but are only different ways we humans can think about an ineffable God – different faces or incarnations of God. Is this what he means by distinction? Smith says “Spirit is taken to be fundamental to the world.” and “… in this scenario intelligence is present in those microscopic entities at the very start – there is a Buddha in every grain of sand.” He goes on to quote Freeman Dyson “it appears that mind, as manifest by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.” I had never considered this thought, since most atoms are part of non-living entities, and I’ve always associated mind with life, and soul with sentient life. I’ll give a couple more quotes here, then I’ll give an idea Smith “inspired” in me: “field theory now reigns” and “Scientists would give their eye-teeth to know what the non-material component of photons is. For religionists, it is Spirit.” This gave me the idea of Spirit as an omnipresent “field” that interacts with the soul, and through the soul, the mind.

The field concept is familiar to physicists, but I’ll briefly explain it. The field concept is fundamental to physics. A gravitational field G is the force-per-unit-charge (in newton/kg) that exists at every point in space-time; a mass m ‘feels’ this field with force F=mG. An electrostatic field E (due to a non-moving charge) is the force-per-unit-charge (in newton/coulomb) that exists at every point in space-time; a charge q feels this field with force F=qE. These fields are invisible but they tell you both the strength and the direction (since F, G and E are vectors) of the force that would be felt by an object that has a property (like m or q) that ‘feels’ the field. In a similar physicist’s way of thinking, I can imagine Spirit as an invisible omnipresent field that interacts with one’s soul (and thus mind). The fields G and E are mathematically simple. I don’t think anyone should try to express Spirit as a field with a mathematical form, although the idea of a Spirit field that is uniform – the same value everywhere in space-time – is very appealing to me. God gave us the ability to conceive of the fields of physics (since they reside in This World) and determine their mathematical form by thought and experiments. Spirit belongs to the Other World, but penetrates inward into This World. My concept of Spirit as a transcendental field gives my mind something more to “hang my thoughts on” than I had before reading this book.

Concerning what he had to say about hell as a “cleansing station” on the way to heaven, this idea is not new to me, so I’ll only comment that I agree. My only comment on his epilogue is that I like his four points of a “religious sense.”

Finally, at the end of Ch 16 Smith says something that surprised me, although maybe it shouldn’t have. The partial quote is “mystic that I am by temperament, though here below not by attainment.” Does this mean that he desires to become a mystic (as he has defined a mystic in this book)? Has he already reached the point where he sees no evil? I find the latter hard to believe, since I don’t think he could have said what he did in this book if he were so “above it all” that evil was not real to him. You can see that his not recognizing evil really, really bothers me.

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Discussion of EPR and Nonlocality: (most non-physicists should stop reading here)

Historically, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen didn’t like QM because of its indeterminacy so they cooked up a thought experiment about a “correlated pair” to challenge or discredit QM. When EPR-type experiments were finally done many years later, it didn’t (it essentially couldn’t) prove either side. First I’ll give you an analogy. Suppose you flip a normal coin, catch it in one hand then immediately cover it with the other hand so nobody sees which way it landed. We might say there was a “50-50” chance of it having heads up (+) or heads down (-) . In probability language, for a single coin toss, the probability of (+), called P(+), is 1 or 0 (heads up or down) and P(-) = 0 or 1 (heads down or up). Everybody, without exception (including E, P and R), would say that if P(+) = 1 then P(-) = 0, and vice versa. For the coin, its head and its tail form a correlated pair - if one is up, then the other must be down. This is obvious - remember, no cheating by using two-headed or two-tailed coin.

However, on the subatomic scale of QM, EPR maintain that there is a difference. They propose the decay of a spin-0 particle into 2 spin-1/2 particles. Conservation of angular momentum (which all physicists know is never violated) says two spin-1/2 particles form a correlated pair: one has spin up (+); the other has spin down (-). Until the particles in the correlated pair are observed (measured with spin-sensitive instruments) their spin states are unknown, therefore they are in a what QM calls a “mixed spin” state. EPR says measuring particle 1 then “collapses” its spin WF into either (+) or (-) and particle 2’s spin WF must instantly collapse (w/o being measured) into the opposite state. This is where EPR gets flaky – its implies nonlocalty, which means that the info about particle 1 is instantly “sent” to particle 2, no matter how far apart they have gone before they are measured. (They assume, of course, that the spin-1/2 particles suffer no interactions between creation and measurement.) Instantaneous info transfer (thus some form of energy transmission) would greatly exceed the speed of light. We all (especially Einstein!) know this can’t happen, thus EPR conclude that there is something wrong with QM (in its “older” interpretation).

Current QM thinking (95% group) says differently – that the correlated particles are each given a definite spin at the moment they are created, but we can’t learn what the spins are until one of them is measured. Using {A} to mean square root of A, the spin WF can be written for particle 1 as S(1)={A}(+)+{1-A}(-) and for particle 2, S(2)={1-A}(+)+{A}(-). These spin states S(1) and S(2) are written correctly for QM mixed states. But, since the constant A can only have two values (1 or 0) the spin states are simple: if A=1, then S(1)=(+) and S(2)=(-) or, if A=0, then S(1)=(-) and S(2)=(+). (If they were uncorrelated, then S(2) would have a constant A’ in place of A, and A’ would be independent of A.) Most (95%) of us believe that the value of A is fixed at the instant the correlated pair are created and, because of the conservation of angular momentum, can’t change unless there is an interaction before measurement that changes the particles angular momentum states. However, EPR (and 5%) believe that the value of A is only fixed at the instant one of the pair is measured – with the implication of nonlocality (instantaneous info transfer) discussed above.

Comparing this to the coin toss analogy, the 95% viewpoint is what we all believe about a coin toss – that the coin lands in either (+) or (-) and that we just learn which it is (i.e., whether A is 1 or 0) only when we uncover the coin. I don’t know of anyone who believes that the coin is in a mixed state (of heads up and tails up) until someone looks at it, with the resulting necessity of the bottom side of the coin instantly “collapsing” its mixed state into the state that is the opposite of the top side. This is a question of belief, not of physics - physics cannot tell us the state until it is measured. (We can’t learn whether A = 1 or A = 0 before measurement.) The 95% worldview is for continuity – that A keeps its value set at correlated-pair creation at all times between creation and measurement. We see no physics need for instantaneous info transfer (or a “collapsing” WF) and the violation of light as a universal speed limit. To me, if one understands what is happening to the correlated pair, then QM, the conservation of angular momentum and the fixed speed of light together tell us that ‘nonlocality’ is just a delusion – it isn’t necessary to assume a “collapse of the WF” and the “instantaneous transfer of information” between the two particles.