There seems little experimental evidence for observing anything like antigravity at the astronomical scale, though – unless it is connected to the so-called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ or the ‘cosmological constant’ and the red-shift ‘expansion of the universe’. However, the equations haven’t yet been made to mesh with the data. Why there should be a fundamental force of attraction that has no opposite remains a mystery.

I guess we have different intuitive conceptions then; to me, gravity and love are both forces of attraction; what we are drawn toward. Obviously by being drawn toward something we also give up some freedom of motion. But there are always balancing forces; only a black hole has gravity *and nothing else*. And it is possible, in this world, to ‘love too much’, in a controlling, destructive way.

But gravity itself is not a destructive force, rather it is one that creates structure. If we had no gravity in this universe, everything would explode; there would be no Earths, no biospheres, no safe place for life anywhere. There would be no Sun or stars, because their fires are formed by their gravitational attraction. Nothing as we know it could exist.

I’d be tempted to say ‘love’, since it attracts everything equally and endures over infinite distances and times, eclipsed by lesser forces at short range but outlasting them in the end. But I’m not sure that there necessarily has to be an exact correspondence between the spiritual and physical universes, if the spiritual one is greater and includes the physical just as a sort of shadow or dream.

“If you had a case of remote viewing, how could you ever measure the speed of the transfer from the incidence to the viewer, because these cases are rare and you have no idea when and where one will occur? You’d have to be with your measuring instruments at both the place of the happening and the receiver’s end.”

I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking here.

The term ‘remote viewing’ was coined by Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff’s Stanford Research Institute study in the 1970s (documented in the book ‘Mind-Reach, later popularised in the 1990s as the ‘STAR GATE’ project’).

Since ‘remote viewing’ in the sense they used the word is a repeatable scientific protocol for the study of clairvoyant experiences, ‘cases of remote viewing’ are very much *not* rare and can in fact be produced on demand. Targ and Puthoff were both physicists and from the beginning the standard scientific model of psi or extra-sensory perception was that it was an unknown sensory mode but picking up information transmitted via the normal known physical channels: some kind of radio or other electromagnetic waves, transmitted by known particles. Therefore, psi would obey the Standard Model and Relativity, especially in the limits they place on the speed of transmission of information, and the inability to, for example, see into the future (events that relativity describes as being ‘outside the light cone’).

What the remote viewing research proves is that this is *not* the case: although psi is a tricky thing to repeat and seems to often produce ‘garbled’ or confusing information, as if it is a very quiet sense picking up all sorts of noise, nevertheless where it appears to works, it seems to work equally well regardless of any of the normal ‘physical’ limits on the transmission of information. No kind of electromagnetic shielding had any effect, distance was not a factor, and seeing into the future or the past was equally as easy as seeing events happening within the light cone.

It is this complete disregard for ‘normal physics’ that makes many skeptics utterly reject psi (or prayer, or miracles, or any other kind of paranormal or ’supernatural’ communication) as possible, because in their minds physics *is* by definition all that can possibly be.

The question is not so much really to ’search for spiritual laws and principles’, because if you believe in a living infinite sentient God then it would seem that His universe cannot be reduced to any mere formula, but more how to reconcile our sense that the universe is fundamentally ordered and principled (and that we can learn those orders and principles, as science demonstrates) with the rather shocking discovery that many of those orders and principles *simply don’t apply* in some domains.

Feeling that there are ‘laws that don’t apply everywhere’ leaves many scientists with a very bad taste in their mouth – accepting that, they say, is like accepting utter and complete chaos! People will believe in purple unicorns! We’ll have no basis to understand *anything*! It’ll be riots and witch-burnings in the streets and a thousand years of darkness!

So for that reason psi (and the miraculous) tends to be suppressed by science, and religion reduced to a sociological category, because there is this sense that fundamentally the miraculous *can’t* be understood, that it is hostile to all rational thought and in fact is a kind of metaphysical corrosive that would melt an advanced civilisation into ashes.

I don’t believe that’s actually the case. I’ve witnessed the miraculous and I believe my brain is still intact. But I do want to be able to talk *about* the miraculous in as scientific a way as I can, and reduce this huge fear that intelligence itself will crumble into chaos if we open our minds to what is actually the truth.