The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [79]
4. Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe, New York: Riverhead Books, 2006. Also, see their website: http://viewfromthecenter.com/index.html
5. Primack and Abrams, ibid., p. 174.
6. About 4% of the total energy density in the universe (as inferred from gravitational effects) can be seen directly. About 23% is thought to be composed of dark matter, and the remaining 73% is thought to consist of dark energy. See, for example, David Cline, “The Search for Dark Matter,” in Scientific American, February 2003.
7. In physical cosmology, dark energy is an exotic form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe. See, for example, P. J. E. Peebles and Bharat Ratra (2003), “The cosmological constant and dark energy,” Reviews of Modern Physics 75: 559-606. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.75.559.
8. See the overview by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, “Why This Universe? Toward a Taxonomy of Possible Explanations,” in Skeptic, Volume 13, Number 2, 2007. Also, Alex Villenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, New York: Hill & Wang, 2006.
9. See: Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe, San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997. Also see Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006.
10. Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe (1997) and Entangled Minds (2006), op. cit.
11. See: Andrew Greeley and William McCready, “Are We a Nation of Mystics,” in The New York Times Magazine, January 26, 1975. [Elsewhere Greeley states that “. . . as much as one-fifth of the population has frequent mystical experiences.” See: Andrew Greeley, Ecstasy as a Way of Knowing, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974, p. 57.] Also reported in Brain/Mind Bulletin 12:7 (March, 1987), p. 1; and Andrew Greeley, “The Impossible: It’s Happening,” Noetic Sciences Review, Sausalito, California, Spring, 1987, pp. 7–9. A regional poll conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area gives more conservative, but still striking, results. It found that 27% said they had experienced being “very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift people out of themselves.” Reported in San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, April 24, 1990. A survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked a sampling of persons in the United States whether they had ever had experiences that could be interpreted as “mystical.” They discovered that among the random sample, 55% said they had experienced “a feeling of deep and profound peace,” 43% said they felt “love is at the center of everything,” 29% described an experience “of the unity of everything and my own part in it,” and 25% had the “sense that all the universe is alive.” This poll indicates that the experience of intimate union with all of creation is far more widespread than commonly acknowledged.
12. It is important to clarify the two different meanings that are given to the phrase intelligent design. I refer often, in various ways, to the intelligent design that is expressed so clearly and beautifully throughout nature and the universe. However, an appreciation of the intelligent design of the universe should not be equated with the theological view of the same name. Specifically, many Christian fundamentalists believe that “intelligent design” offers an alternative explanation to biological evolution. In this view, an outside force created, all at the same time, the diversity in plants and animals that we see in the world today without the need for any evolution; therefore, the exquisite design of the universe is not a result of 14 billion years of unfolding in freedom but rather has been externally directed and created all at once by an external deity. The view