Augustine Pamplany CST
George Wald (1906-1997) received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his original findings on the biochemical processes involved in vision. He was an American scientist. He obtained his Ph.D from Columbia University and had been professor of biology at Harvard from 1948 to 1977.
Wald could be counted among those scientists who moved from atheism to theism on account of their science. He had written that in 1954 when he was still an atheist that “we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!” However, he changed in position in the 1980s and his writing show closeness to a religious bend of mind. In 1984 he wrote, “In my life as scientist I have come upon two major problems which, though rooted in science, though they would occur in this form only to a scientist, project beyond science, and are I think ultimately insoluble as science. That is hardly to be wondered at, since one involves consciousness and the other, cosmology.”
He recognized that consciousness cannot be fully explained by science. “I believe consciousness to be a permanent condition that involves all sensation and perception. Consciousness seems to me to be wholly impervious to science.” His reflections on the emergence of life in the universe is more articulate of his faith in God as he thinks that the properties of universe are such that the Mind may have been primary to the universe existing from the beginning. “It has occurred to me lately – I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities – that … Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create.”
George Wald addressed the First World Congress for the Synthesis of Science & Religion in Bombay, in 1986. He said, “I come toward the end of my life as a scientist facing two great problems … one involves cosmology, the other, consciousness. …A few years ago it occurred to me that these seemingly very disparate problems might be brought together. That would be with the hypothesis that Mind, rather than being a very late development in the evolution of living things, restricted to organisms with the most complex nervous systems – all of which I had believed to be true – that Mind instead has been there always, and that this universe is life-breeding because the pervasive presence of Mind had guided it to be so … when I speak of Mind pervading the universe, of Mind as a creative principle perhaps primary to matter, any Hindu will acquiesce, will think, yes, of course, he is speaking of Brahman. That is the stuff of the universe, mind-stuff; and yes, each of us shares in it.”
