PREFACE

The world of David Bohm has long interested me. I have explored it and tried to understand it. I find it engaging and important for our modern world. Initially, I looked at Bohm's physics, but I found a person with a broad range of intuitions, developed ideas and systems. He spans physics to history, education to philosophy of science, biology to religion, art to linguistics.

In all these fields, Bohm opposes seeing the world as a machine. He particularly challenges physics, the champion of mechanistic thinking. Physics usually assumes that what makes up the world are machine-like bits of independent parts which behave the same in or out of something. It has had great success with this philosophy.

The organismic view opposes the mechanistic approach. It has a long history in various cultures. In his useful survey, Issues in Science and Religion, Ian Barbour says it contains three beliefs:

(1) the organism is a whole, an integral whole;

(2) a hierarchy of levels makes up the organism;

(3) the organism influences its parts.

We are familiar with many of its slogans. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts" is an example. An organism is an integrated system of parts, each of which relates with the others in a constantly moving way. Changes in one part affect the other parts. By being in the organism, the parts gain properties that are absent when they are out of it. Which means properties emerge in the higher levels of an organism that we cannot predict from its parts. Barbour quotes the ideas of C.D. Broad: we cannot work out "the wetness of water or the smell of ammonia...from the atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen." We could not predict such properties even knowing in detail how each part behaves.<1>

There is, further, a type of realism in Broad's statement. There are three alternatives. The organismic approach could be a claim about the world itself. It could be about the method used in investigations. It could, thirdly, be about the mental processing of information coming through our senses from the world. Bohm assumes the first of these; I do too. The wetness of water has something to do with water itself and not merely with our appreciation of it. Wetness is more than in our minds.

Bohm champions organismic thinking within physics. He has mounted successive and related offenses since the early 1950s within quantum theory.<2> His ideas also have results for the whole of physics, for our general understanding of the world, and for the process of knowing.

This book will survey the physical theories of Bohm and reactions to them. I show how far Bohm has developed organismic physical theories that physicists could accept. The book will also examine his underlying metaphysical and religious beliefs and explore the relation between science and theology. I find Bohm's physics and metaphysics relate to and mingle with each other. I conclude by looking at the theological potential of Bohm's beliefs.<3>

There is much popular interest in Bohm and the new physics arising from quantum and the relativity theories. Often the attention comes from those with a mystical or Eastern religious perspective. Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics is a good example.<4> Excessive and uncritical enthusiasm typifies this interest. My aim is to approach Bohm's writings critically, weighing its positive and negative points.

I wish to thank Robert Cohen, Harry Oliver (my advisers at Boston University),<5> Robert Russell, and Ian Barbour for their comments. Peer support is important to me. So is family support; in particular, I wish to thank my wife, Mary.

Two papers of mine contain early versions of portions of the text. I acknowledge the permission of the Joint Publication Board of Zygon to reprint them here.<6> "Relating the Physics and Religion of David Bohm," by Kevin J. Sharpe, Zygon, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 105-122, c 1990 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon. "Relating Science and Theology with Complementarity: A Caution," by Kevin J. Sharpe, Zygon, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 309-315, c 1991 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon.