Copyright © 1993 by Kevin J. Sharpe.
This page copyright © 2000 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights
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David Bohm's World: New Physics and New Religion
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993).
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The title of this book indicates my intent: the conceptual world of David Bohm has long interested me and, in exploring it and trying to understand it, I have come across ideas which are fascinating and highly relevant to our modern world. I approached Bohm initially from his physics but found a man with a magnificently broad range of intuitions, developed ideas and systems, which spanned from physics to biology, from education to philosophy of science, from history to religion. I will be presenting some of these, concentrating on those to do with physics and with religion. Bohm's physics and his religion appear to be closely related and intertwined.
My intention in the first few chapters is to explore Bohm's physics and that of his co-workers – whom I have labeled the Birkbeck School after the college of the University of London in which Bohm and some of his fellow thinkers hold or have held positions. Then I shall look at his metaphysical and religious ideas.
A great deal of popular interest in Bohm and the new physics (i.e., the physics of the twentieth century arising out of quantum theory and the relativity theories) has risen of late from those with a mystical and Eastern religious perspective; Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics is a good example.[1] However, much of this interest is impaired by excessive and uncritical journalistic enthusiasm. My aim is to approach Bohm's writings critically, weighing its positive and negative points.
The viewing of the world not as an atomist machine but as organic or as an organism has a long history in the various cultures of the world.[2] In biology, for instance, an organicist would claim that life cannot be reduced to physico-chemical terms, as a mechanist might assume. Ian Barbour's encyclopedic work, Issues in Science and Religion, contains a useful survey of organismic models and model-making.[3] There appear to be three major clauses in the organismic approach:
We are quite used to some of the slogans of the organismic approach: "the whole is more than the sum of its parts," for instance. An organism is an integrated system of parts which dynamically interrelate, and where changes in one part affect the other parts. Particular properties emerge in the higher levels of an organism which cannot be predicted from the properties of its components. Barbour restates the ideas of C. D. Broad: "the wetness of water or the smell of ammonia could not be deduced from the atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen"; such properties as these could not be predicted from even a complete knowledge of the behavior of the component parts.[4]
Furthermore, a type of realism is being assumed in this type of statement and, indeed, throughout this book. In considering the deeper philosophical issues concerning organicism, one could ask whether it is a claim about reality itself or is rather about the investigatory method used or about our subjective appreciation of reality. The first of these is being assumed. The wetness of water, that is, has something to do with water itself and not merely with our appreciation of it; it is more than something in our minds.
The organismic view can be opposed to the mechanistic approach. In the latter an entity comprises parts which are the same in or out of it; according to the former the parts of an organism acquire properties by being in it which are absent when the parts are taken in isolation. Physics is often taken as the epitome of mechanistic thinking, as the pinnacle of taking the world as machine-like bits whose parts are mutually independent, and its success when adopting this mode has been astounding. But it is not without its critics.
Bohm's name is often associated with the perpetration of organismic thinking and theory-making within physics.[5] He has mounted successive and related offenses since the 1950s in particular within quantum theory, but with considerably wider ramifications for the whole of physics and for our general understanding of reality the human process of knowing.
This book will survey the physical theories of Bohm and reactions to them, and examine his underlying metaphysical and religious beliefs. It is hoped that an appreciation might be gained from this as to how far Bohm has been able to develop organismic physical theories acceptable to the community of physicists, and to what extent they might have relevance for religious thinking.[6]
[1] Capra 1977a.
[2] See, for example, Birch 1979: 56-7; Hartshorne and Reese 1953; and Jaki 1966: Chap. 1.
[3] Barbour 1966: 326-7.
[4] Barbour, ibid.
[5] See, for instance, Birch and Cobb 1981: 132-3.
[6] Smith 1982: 668.