edgar-mitchell

View From the Velvet Blackness 19
We have seen men catapulted into outer space without knowing what they
would find there; we’ve seen men climb mountains of the moon, where
they beamed the picture back to millions of magic boxes in living rooms,
taverns, shops, and kitchens around the world. Whoever said the Age of
Miracles passed long ago hasn’t been paying attention.
What our children won’t see is the trajectory of this evolution, its defining
arc; that story must be recorded for them in the living pages of
books or other media. There will be no horse-drawn plows or penny farthings
in the coming centuries. Our lives will eventually pass, recorded
only on celluloid and the page, silicon, or digitally, as a kind of artifact—
cave drawings from the 20th century. Religions of the world will loom,
then fade—or remain, depending upon their ability to adapt to the everchanging
notions about reality they were created to discover.
Even in our time, we still cling to the idea of the supernatural, the
demonic, the divine. We use it when science seems to offer no acceptable
explanation. In medieval times there was no science, only religion. Since
Rene Descartes, each belief system has been allowed to proceed down a
separate, noninterfering path. And for 400 years they have enjoyed a peculiar
independence, as Descartes believed thought and matter were of
two different realms. This dualistic philosophy has allowed Western science
and religion to evolve as we now know them. The Church has left
science to the scientist, the scientist has left religion to the theologian, and
they have more or less peacefully coexisted (with a few notable exceptions)
ever since.
It isn’t an overstatement to say that Descartes opened the way for Newton
and the early classical scientists, then much later Planck, Einstein, Bohr,
and finally the new model of quantum mechanics. It is this revolutionary
scientific model that finally penetrated the veil of religion by demonstrating
that the act of observation could affect the observed. These realms of
thought must not merely coexist in the mind of the scientist and the theologian,
but must be allowed to become integrated—simply because they
are so obviously intertwined. Sooner or later this reconciliation is inevitable,
as the scientific method has shown itself powerful enough to discover
its own flaws. I have come to believe evolution has progressed such
that we must now assume a large measure of conscious control in our own
evolutionary process, as human volition is in fact a fundamental characteristic
of nature.
I am one of a growing handful of human beings to have seen the Earth
from the point of view of an extraterrestrial. In the heavens there is no up
and down, no east or west. Earth is but a beautiful blue speck in the midst
of a vast emptiness marked by luminous celestial bodies. We inhabit but
one of those celestial bodies; one of the most organized—for all we know.