Many people think that mind and matter are two aspects of the fundamental stuff of the universe. They are “complementary” aspects of it, to borrow the metaphor coined by Niels Bohr to describe features of atomic physics. Indeed Professor Stout, professor of logic and religious exegesis at St. Andrews in the 1920s, gave his Gifford Lectures on this very topic; and he argued that the reason why nobody had ever found the relationship between mind and matter was simply that they were aspects of the same thing. I agree. So to assume, in addition to the two basic assumptions of science, that you can safely disregard any spiritual content in the matter you are investigating may be to introduce the greatest error into your investigation. It will not invalidate the results of your titration experiments in inorganic chemistry; but where life is involved it may emasculate your results. When you will to get up out of a chair, I understand that the brain sends a message to the muscles, by means of an electric current. But where did this current come from? Is not this creation out of nothing? This awareness does not enable one to feed 5000 with five barley loaves and two small fishes; but it could be a first step in understanding New Testament style healings. The German theologian David Friedrich Strauss was execrated for saying the Gospel healings are legend: that they never happened. He preached that the God-Man relationship was available to us all. Wonderful stuff. But he could not stop there! He was imprisoned by the success of 19th century science. He could not accept events that seemed to breach the laws of science; nor see these healings as events within the laws of an enlarged Nature. His understanding of science was too limited. By performing healings outside everyday experience, you could say Jesus ennobled Nature’s Evolution, so that it became God’s Evolution. He did not revoke or defy the rules of Nature’s Evolution. And Harry Edwards, the healer well known in Surrey in the 1950s & 60s, felt able to end his book on Spiritual Healing by saying that 2000 years had to elapse before we could appreciate that the Gospel healings manifested the same power of healing that we are witnessing today. He clearly accepted the Gospel healings as genuine. Jesus was able to do it by his extraordinary strength of character and knowledge of human nature; we have to be more pedestrian and more humble. But Strauss was as wrong as anyone could be!
When large masses of material are heaped up together, as in great architecture, or on a larger scale in Nature, it is obvious that an atmosphere is created by matter. Even more so with experiments on living material is it illegitimate to rule out any spiritual element. All living creatures seem to want to live; and to that end, when injured try their best to heal themselves. And what this indicates is that your assumption may be invalid, and your vision distorted.
Expressing the same thought in practical, professional terms; I found as an advocate that often you could only see how to conduct a prosecution so that it would result in a conviction, if you had the morale to believe that victory was possible. Otherwise you failed! It is a phenomenon that it affects us all.
We all have to limit our vision to do our jobs properly. But you want to be able to recover the wider vision in between times. So how is this flexibility to be achieved? If you want to view “things” in as true a perspective as possible, in my opinion, you must try to view things through the eyes of a creator, so far as this is possible. And if you want to have this flexibility of being able to view things in the short term, and in the long term, without being trapped in either, then surely you need an indwelling with the Creator? He is never trapped.