"If man's personality can experience the universe, there is a divine mind and an actual personality somewhere concealed in that universe."

   "There is a divine mind somewhere concealed in the universe." Thousands upon thousands of the philosophically minded would have made a similar assertion over the ages. In this century, many quantum physicists have expressed this same thought, but not simply as a phenomenon of rational thinking.

   Rather, it is because of their experimental work and the hard evidence gained from empirical testing that they have been led to speculate on the reality of an intelligence, perhaps operating in another dimension of space and time, that appears to participate in ordering the outcome of  experiments done at the atomic level or below.

   Two of the greatest, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, both Nobel laureates, called this "out there somewhere" intelligence, "the Central Order of Things." Others have used terms such as "Universal Consciousness" for this hypothetical intelligence.

   Naturally there have been many who have sought what they would term a rational explanation for these results--one closer to the norm of materialistic, mechanistic thought. David Bohm, for example introduced the concept of a "pilot wave" as a substitute for "Universal Consciousness," but ended up giving this wave semi-miraculous properties. Woj Zurek invented the term "decoherence" which he attributes to environmental factors in order to account for a set of properties that are normally associated with mind and intelligence.

   The mechanistic interpretation of all natural phenomena goes back to antiquity. The modern trend is often attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace (d. 1827) and his statement, "if at one time we knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behavior at any other time in the past or the future."

   Taken to its logical conclusion the Laplace concept means the whole future of the universe and all things therein, down to the very finest of details including our thoughts and our dreams, are completely pre-determined by the past. It also means we have no control over anything we say, do, or think.

   For many years now, this materialist-determinist philosophy has shaped attitudes in the Western world. The concept even demands that criminals are not held responsible for their actions, they do as they do because they cannot do otherwise. It follows that to inflict serious punishment upon criminals is as inhuman as the crimes they commit. But surely a determinist would have to argue that criminals are punished because the society in which they live cannot do otherwise, and not because of any free will choice.

   For those who carry the materialist-determinist logic through to its end point, meaning, value, purpose, and any such entity as a "Universal Intelligence" are but the fantasies of deluded minds. Thus their world is a clockwork universe in which hope has no meaning and from which there is no escape. Such considerations led French philosophers and authors like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre to postulate the philosophy of the absurd, from which arose the view that life itself is not only absurd but an obscene joke.

   In some ways, this way of thinking is the logical outcome of applying the methodology of empirical science to areas of human activity in which it is simply not applicable. As it was proposed by David Hume (d.1776), the scientific method requires that something makes sense when and only when its truth can be demonstrated by appropriate empirical testing--otherwise it is non-sense, "fit only to be committed to the flames." This attitude is responsible for the fantastic technical progress of recent centuries--but it ignores as irrelevancies such things as beauty, compassion, love, mercy, art, music, ethics, religion--all those attributes and activities that elevate mankind above his animal heritage.

   "God exists." By the method of Hume, this thesis is an untestable hypothesis, so is nonsense,