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We know from the psychokinetic studies conducted by Robert Jahn of Princeton that people can influence random number generators in a rather surprising way, even at a distance. And since quantum events and random number generators are not unlike the quantum events occurring in physical, chemical, and biological systems, there’s already a precedent in experimental data for this kind of mind over matter.

InNatural Grace andThe Physics of Angels, your two books co-written with Matthew Fox, you explore the relationship between science and spirituality. In what ways do you see these two areas of discourse intersecting, and what do you see resulting from their fusion?

There are many areas of potential intersection. One is the cosmological, because when science is talking about creation, it’s getting into a realm that has been very much the preserve of religion for a long time. I’m not thinking simply of "Where did the big bang come from?" If we focus too much on the initial moments of creation, about which we know practically nothing, we get into a situation rather like that of the 18th-century Deists, who thought of God making the world machine and starting it up and then standing back and letting it go on by itself.

I’m more interested in the ongoing creativity, which is expressed in the evolutionary process—and the evolutionary process must have inherent creativity. We know that our universe is creative at all levels, physical, biological, mental, cultural, and so on. So, what is the source of this creativity? Well, it’s really a metaphysical question, and materialist science has no suggestion other than chance, which really means that it’s unintelligible, we can’t think about it. However, this does overlap with traditional areas of theological and spiritual enquiry. Therefore this is one area of discussion.

Another is the nature of the soul, the psyche, consciousness—a question about which science until very recently has had almost nothing to say, but which is obviously crucial to our understanding of ourselves and of nature. Matthew Fox and I suggest further areas to consider, such as the question of prayer and how it works. If people praying for things to happen on the other side of the world have a statistically measurable effect on what happens, you’ve got a kind of action at a distance, which is in the purview of science to investigate. This is precisely what people who pray claim can happen. So there are opportunities for discourse. As science breaks out of its narrow mechanistic view and approaches a more holistic view of nature, fruitful interaction between science and the spiritual will become more possible.

You mention that The Physics of Angels was inspired by the similarity of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ descriptions of angels as without mass or body, and the modern view of science that particles of light—photons—also have neither mass nor body.

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