In his interview with NBC Dateline in October 2009 Dan Brown admitted: “Noetic science really is the reason this book took me so long to write.... I’ve said before I’m a skeptic. And I hear about these experiments that are being done that categorically and scientifically prove that the human mind has power over matter.... I spent a lot of time researching Noetic science and really had to get to the point where I realized, ‘You know what? The world’s a stranger place then we thought.’ And the human mind really does have the ability to affect matter.”
But the fascination with science and the conflict of the scientific and spiritual were already well apparent in earlier works. In his London trial Brown recalled:
I began reading books on science and religion, including The God Particle, The Tao of Physics, The Physics of Immortality, The Quark and the Jaguar, and others. The recurring theme that excited me was the idea that science and religion were now dabbling in common areas. These two ancient enemies were starting to find shared ground, and CERN was at the forefront of that research. This was how I ended up writing Angels & Demons—a science vs. religion thriller set within a Swiss physics laboratory and Vatican City. The grey area that interested me was the ongoing battle between science and religion, and the faint hope of reconciliation between the two. This was my “big idea” and my “grey area.”
Dan Brown’s new novel is an attempt to find a way to reconcile the gap between science and religion, between the world that we perceive through our senses and the world of the spirit or beyond our vision or touch. What many may call the New World Order, a new revelation or enlightenment, is in fact as old as recorded history itself. The separation of scientist, philosopher, and priest is an aspect of our modern world, but an artificial one that learned men and women ignored over the past. We need only to examine the multifaceted writings of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, or Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (all of whom are cited in The Lost Symbol) to realize that the boundaries placed on our knowledge and sensations were ignored by many great thinkers. In the twentieth century, Albert Einstein surprised some by his own utterances on spiritual matters.
The Da Vinci Code gave new life to a number of works that had been published, read, or overlooked and then largely forgotten, such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Lost Symbol will surely raise curiosity and interest about a number of topics and institutions that, while new to most readers, have actually been in existence for at least thirty years. The entire realm of parapsychology and New Age wisdom is likely to see increased interest in the coming months and years. Brown, who had always been critical of the religious interference or attempts to stifle scientific thought, seems to have found a synthesis, that area where mind meets matter, where the physical phenomenal world gives way to another spiritual, astral, noumenal world.