The Theory of Everything

Avoiding the G-factor creates the need for circumventing a fundamental element without which our discussion shall become increasingly difficult. This is not to suggest that our secularist scholars are denying a recurrently palpable element of truth for scrupulous reasons, and this is not to vindicate the fundamentalists either. The latter are indeed the ones to be blamed for what they suffer in the hands of the world’s empiricist framers of ideas. Science activists listen to the transcendentalists but do the transcendentalists return the favor? Their supposed closeness to the chamber of truth seem to have blocked off their minds from any possible chance to listen and they are no better for it. What results is a deep crack in the house of knowledge and a foreclosure to any hope of our decision-makers to take us closer to any form of ‘subutopia’ through the adoption of more inclusive game theories.

What really is the clog in the wheel of their progress? The desire of each worldview to maintain its territorial integrity? We should know that no fool thinks himself or herself one, at least, none would admit to it publicly (there is a Yoruba adage that unfortunate persons know they are unfortunate but only wait for whom would dare say it to their face). Some fundamental physicists believe in the force of gravity so much that they are incensed by any attempt of the religious man to credit it to a being. If the physicist- even the physicist thinks this high of Newtonian concepts, how much more the people who see the hand of God in their lives on daily basis. How do medics feel when they learn that a patient who should have been saved through a minor surgical operation dies unnecessarily by choosing to seek cure in a church and not the hospital? They become more suspicious of spirituality of course, forgetting that there are several cases where the prayer man takes the shine. The great paradox here is that God allows even the best miracle dispenser to visit the hospital occasionally. What do we learn from this? Even the Judeo-Christian scripture is apparently averse to the “don’t worry, be religious” position of the extreme transcendentalists. In the scripture, God allowed the earth to bring forth seedlings only after the emergence of the first man. God allowed him a try at creativity, making him to discover his world in bits, hardly interfering in the course of natural events. I am beginning to suspect that He wants us to find the truth through science, our own minds and the scripture, all tied together in dialectics.

Religion had shared a precarious relationship with philosophy all through history and now that philosophy appears to have taken the back seat, religion has assumed an even more momentous collision with science than it had done with the former. Nations are left with choosing from an array of discordant ideas. Modern adherents of Christianity, having seen the course of history, now prefer to abandon the term ‘religion’ for a more personal and pragmatic word such as ‘a way of life’. They couldn’t have been cleverer. The word ‘religion’, as illustrated in Charles Barret’s Understanding Christianity has an etymology that is traceable to something like ‘tying together’. I disagree with Barret in his latter allusion to some apologists’ opinion that religion does not belong to the same venture with science. As the name suggests, religion is innately concerned with the business of tying every life experiences together for the purpose of affirming the supremacy of acclaimed deity. Going by that definition, we should expect religion to be ever ready to answer the questions of natural and social sciences as it is meant for tying them together.?

If I may ask; how many people are prepared to digest Principe’s highly technical book, How reality came to being, or how many are ready to reconcile statistical figures that accrues from various data agencies on daily basis? Allow me turn around to pose similar questions to the naturalistic fellows. Can they really explain the force that must have set the first ball rolling? Can they argue without faltering that the several claims of miraculous healings are false? Do philosophers not cringe when they are faced with unsolvable science and do scientists not marvel at the intellect of the philosopher, how they have anticipated even what science is yet to explore?

Some modern day Christians are absolutely right in their choice of word for they are obviously unwilling to tie any two things together. There are too many things to be tied. The naturalistic scientists too are correct in their open-minded approach to the reality of parallel universes and finite existence of our universe, both of which postulate spirituality indirectly.

?If ‘religion’ must be reduced to culture, then it would be abandoning its foremost purpose, for it is for the aim of tying physics, biology, economics, and indeed everything together that it is originally meant. I concur this is not an impossible mission, especially because of the Unity of Experience which we had affirmed earlier in our discussion. Even though we love to flaunt our modesty and claim that our scope is limited as the religionist, or scientist or philosopher, we hardly remain within our bounds, in practice. We always seek to explain everything with the moderate level of information available to us. We are therefore religious beings, not necessarily in the sense of people who reveres a deity but people who seeks to tie everything together. We shall discuss in the next few lines, how we have endeavored to tie a few relevant things together in this book to arrive at our ‘game theory’.