Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions by Christopher G. White (review)

As Christopher White points out at the beginning of his marvelous book, only 20 to 30 percent of Americans regularly attend church or synagogue, while an astonishingly high percentage believe that there is an afterlife (70 to 85 percent). They also believe that a god exists who responds to prayer (80 to 90 percent), and that angels and demons interact with humans (70 percent). If attendance at religious institutions cannot account for this, what can? White's answer is science—something of a paradox for those accustomed to view the modern world as disenchanted, and religion and science as archenemies. The professor of religion at Vassar College argues that from the nineteenth century until today, "Scientific ideas have not just fostered secularity and religious decline but have also been used to help people believe in the existence of unseen, heavenly realms and recover an imaginative sense for the supernatural" (3).

White's book offers a stimulating historical narrative that traces the ways that individuals jumped into the gaps left by science to explain how seeming impossibilities might be understood. The concept of the universe as a closed system, governed by unchanging laws, emerged at the end of the seventeenth century. This challenged traditional religious ideas about divine providence and led to the conviction that all knowledge had to be based on empirical observation of the natural world. Subsequent scientific discoveries left many things unexplained, however. For example, Albert Einstein showed that nature behaved in confounding ways: clocks ticked more slowly the faster they traveled; events that were simultaneous to one observer were not to another; gravity caused time to slow down; space could be bent and distorted by large objects; energy and mass were interchangeable. Perhaps most bewilderingly of all, theories of quantum mechanics could not be reconciled with theories of general relativity, which implied there were two sets of laws and mathematical equations, one for large bodies and another for subatomic particles. Modern physics consequently brought back those "mysterious incalculable forces" that Max Weber thought had been banished forever. Modern science nurtured an explosion of popular metaphysical speculations dealing with free will, the mind/body problem, the mystery of consciousness, and the possibility of multiple coexisting universes in the work of many artists, writers, philosophers, and speculative scientists, not to mention science fiction authors and devotees of New Age religions. These are the topics White examines in detail.

The author stresses the psychic turmoil individuals went through as they imagined new ways to reconfigure old religious traditions that had lost their relevance. They were not the happy bricoleurs as they have often been portrayed: "People who lived through these types of situations and had the courage to face them were not usually freewheeling iconoclasts who joyfully mixed and matched traditions; they were figures who struggled to prevent their lives from collapsing and falling apart" (14). This is an important point and reinforces the idea that emerged during the secularization debates of the 1970s—namely that religion and forms of spirituality will never entirely disappear because science will never answer all of life's great existential questions.

White's first chapter is devoted to Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1936), an English theologian who devoted his life to recovering from his doubts about Christianity and helping others to reimagine Christian traditions in new ways that fit with modern conceptions of science and nature. His scholarly volumes on theology and biblical criticism have been largely forgotten, while his sci-fi novel Flatland (1884) was not. Flatland used mathematical and geometrical ideas to suggest how one could reasonably imagine the existence of supernatural entities and how these entities might appear on the lower plane of human existence.

Abbott's speculations sparked enormous interest, deeply influencing Charles Howard Hinton (1853–1907), the subject of the next chapter. Hinton took Abbott's speculations about a higher fourth dimension a step further, attempting to visualize this dimension through his...