The G.O.D. Experiments by Gary Schwartz

I finally finished reading The G.O.D. Experiments by Gary Schwartz -- it was squeezed in between Quarking at the Observer, much proofreading I've been doing for my court reporter friend, Lois, and the study of Metaphysics II which is a course I'm taking at church.

Gary Schwartz is a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona and describes himself as "an agnostically raised scientist with an open and inquisitive mind who is following the data where it takes him."

Most of the book just affirms that there's an intelligence underlying the universe. Like a good little agnostic, Schwartz doesn't call that intelligence "God," but rather G.O.D. for a Guiding, Organizing, Designing principle. His book is an easy read and fun to argue with; it provided lots of suggestions for additional reading and made me think I should look into the work of a Stanford professor named William Tiller.

Schwartz's reference to the idea of "The All is in the Small" rang true to me. It fits the concept I was taught many years ago in geology class: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." We know scientifically that everything is made of atoms whose nuclei include subatomic particles. Given what quantum mechanics is saying about the impossibility of observing those particles without having an effect on them, it is not (in my judgment) a great leap of faith to think that those particles have consciousness. I call that consciousness "God" and because the particles are the basic stuff (as far as we know) of which everything is made, I believe that God and the universe are one. Unity!