[spirited irish]

I think that many people who entertain or even embrace New Age beliefs and practices for a time do so as searchers for spiritual meaning. Yet they are usually left unsatisfied and frequently turn to conventional religion. Some may do so after bad, even alarming or dangerous experiences with occult practices and beliefs.

Agreed. Yet many 'modernized' churches are of no help to those who have had frightening experiences. If such people are to find a church home there needs to be a wholesale return to a supernatural worldview in its entirety.

Remarkably, the most recent Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three researchers who spent their careers investigating and disproving the possibility that quantum entanglement can be explained by one or more "hidden variables." In essence, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows consciousness to be real, with a major, even superior role over matter.

When Atomism--physical matter bumping around in a void---began its reign in Ancient Greece and Rome, Plato foresaw the misery, nihilism, and social destruction unleashed by a philosophy that reversed the order of spirit before matter.

In our own time we can clearly perceive the madness, nihilism, and evils unleashed by this ancient but revamped and revised pagan philosophy.

It appears to me that there are two streams of thought/action deriving from the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the reality of consciousness.

1. An embrace of mystical pantheism

2. Embrace of the supernatural God (John 1) Who created all matter, both physical and nonphysical

[Rockingham]

Remarkably, surveys of academics show that physicists these days tend to have a relatively high number of conventional believers among them. Contrary to Plato, in modern physics, the more things get broken down to their smallest parts, the more inescapable consciousness becomes.

Granted, a vulgar understanding of modern science may seem to support materialism or pantheism, but the common coin of New Age thinking is against that. Near-death and other out of body experiences, past life hypnotic regression, and the most credible mediums yield a fairly coherent account of human life as immortal, purposeful, and accountable to a Supreme Being.

Research now underway is placing such beliefs on a more solid footing, with the scientific credibility of replicability the goal. And there is a fair prospect that over the next few decades, physics and mathematics may develop a coherent and scientifically reliable model of that realm of existence where consciousness resides.

If so, it may be that New Age beliefs, Christianity and other conventional religious faiths, and modern physics will reach an accommodation of sorts in which they recognize the immortality of the human soul and that a Supreme Being exists. Plato and Descartes may also get restored to the highest rank of philosophy.

Call me an optimist, but I think that would be considerable improvement over the current intellectual climate.