Spirituality In Politics

  • Home
  • Intro
  • Articles Index
    • Introductory
      • 1. Metaphysics in a Spiritual Society
      • 2. The Spirit of Guidance
      • 3. Divination
      • 4. Raynor C. Johnson: The Imprisoned Splendour
    • Articles 2: Headline Policies for a Spiritual Society
      • Education
        • The Importance of Fairy Tales
        • The Importance of Fairy Tales, Part 2 – Fairy Tales and Feminists
        • Fairy Tales and Feminism – the Story of Psyche
        • Fairy Tales and Feminism — the Story of Psyche, Interpretation
        • Save Our Fairy Tales — Concluding Remarks
    • ARTICLES 3: MORE DETAILED IDEAS
      • Politics from a Taoist Perspective – Arguing for the Centre
      • Politics from the Centre — Is that the only way forward?
      • Changing the World – Spirituality or Socialism?
      • The Superorganism – a Challenge to Materialist Science
      • Is the Earth a Superorganism?
      • Humanity as Part of the Superorganism
    • Articles 4 The Role of the Citizen
      • The Role of the Citizen in a Spiritual Society
      • Reflections on Eastern and Western Spirituality
    • The Superorganism Question and the European Union
    • A Vision for a Spiritual United Kingdom Outside the European Union
    • Consciousness
      • Is the Self an Illusion – Series Introduction
        • Is the Self an Illusion? – Neuroscience, Gurdjieff and Buddhism
        • Is the Self an Illusion? – The Opposing Viewpoint
        • Is the Self an Illusion? — Yes and No
        • Is the Self an Illusion? — Summary and Conclusions
      • The Hidden, Deeper Self - Introduction
        • The Hidden, Deeper Self - Freudian Slips
        • The Hidden, Deeper Self - Dreams
        • The Hidden, Deeper Self – Synchronicity
        • The Hidden, Deeper Self - Automatic Writing
        • The Hidden, Deeper Self – Divination
    • Why Christianity Must Change or Die – Introduction
      • Christianity Must Change or Die — Gnosticism and Carl Jung
      • Significant Moments in Church History – Introduction
        • Number 1, The Council of Nicaea, 325AD
        • Number 2 – The Anathema Against Origen, 553 A.D.
          • Reincarnation and Christianity
    • Was Jesus Divine? – Introduction
      • Was Jesus Divine, the Son of God? – 1. The Adoptionist Problem
      • 2. The Jewish Messiah
      • 3. The Eschatological Prophet
      • 4. Shakespeare’s Heretical Play
      • 5. The Resurrection of Jesus – part 1
      • Was Jesus Divine, the Son of God? - Summary and Conclusions so far
      • 6. Was Jesus Married?
      • 7. Was Jesus Married? — part 2
      • 8. Was Jesus Married? — part 3
  • Blog Introduction
    • Blog Index
    • Religion and Spirituality
    • Politics
    • Science
    • Mythology
    • Miscellaneous
  • Contact

Religion and Evolutionary Biology — Part 2

16th September 2020

Image for post

Image for post

    This follows on from part 1, which it may be helpful to have read, in order to put what follows in context. It is part of a conversation on Medium.com between myself and Mitchell Diamond, author of Darwin’s Apple: The Evolutionary Biology of Religion. He has responded to part 1 (click here), so this is my further response, which includes his main points.

    He unsurprisingly identifies himself as “a materialist, empiricist, rationalist”, as evolutionary biologists tend to be, and says that his writing is directed “to those who embrace such an idea. For those who don’t agree, don’t bother reading my writings”. He would therefore seem to be only interested in establishing a clique of fellow believers, without having to consider any flaws in their way of thinking.

    As I’ve argued frequently in the past, as have others better qualified than me, Darwinian evolutionary theories appeal to rational, materialist atheists precisely because they reinforce their philosophy. The most famous example is Richard Dawkins, who said that Darwin enabled him to become an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”. His desire to be an atheist overrode any considerations of how credible the theory was. This is not how science should proceed. It should start from the evidence, the ‘facts’ insofar as these can be ascertained, and then try to derive theories and a worldview from them. One should not start from a preconceived philosophy, and then only contemplate theories which fit it.

    In part 1 I said that “evolutionary biologists are, on the whole, fairly clueless about the implications of quantum physics for our understanding of reality”. Diamond agrees that he doesn’t know much, if anything, about this, and asks me whether I understand. I have not even one basic qualification in physics, and am baffled, like most people, by the equations and mathematics. I can, however, understand when physicists write in plain English about the implications of their findings. For example:

  • that matter, as we perceive it, is an illusion (Sir Arthur Eddington and many others) — which is an interesting thought for materialists to contemplate.
  • that the universe appears like “a great thought” (Sir James Jeans) — who or what is doing the thinking is a great question for atheists.
  • that the apparently material universe emerges from other levels of reality (David Bohm).

    I can also understand Bruce Lipton when he describes how he started as a biologist with little interest in physics, but then realised the error of his ways. He says that “quantum physics is relevant to biology and that biologists are committing a glaring, scientific error by ignoring its laws”. “We biologists almost universally rely on the outmoded, albeit tidier, Newtonian version of how the world works”¹. (‘Newtonian’ here obviously has some connection with a “materialist, empiricist, rationalist” worldview.) It is therefore fairly obvious why Darwinian evolutionary biologists choose to remain oblivious to quantum physics; it propels a torpedo through the philosophy of materialism, their close ally.

    Continuing on that theme, it is also worth noting that modern physicists are often critical of Darwinian evolutionary theory, because of its inadequacy, for example Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self, Paul Davies in The Cosmic Blueprint, and Amit Goswami in Creative Evolution.

    There are many other scientists who find Darwinian theories inadequate. For example, check out www.thethirdwayofevolution.com — I especially like the ideas of Stephen Talbott.

    As Diamond has revealed, he is only writing for those who already agree with him. This reminds me of the expression about those who cannot see the forest for the trees. It’s possible to become so fixated by some small area of interest, that one fails to see the bigger picture. That is why we should consult science as a whole, and other disciplines like philosophy, not focus on one specialisation, if we want to understand reality. If I were engaged in a serious intellectual project, a major part of my life, I would want to make sure that I was starting on secure intellectual foundations, not on possible illusions. Diamond seems to think otherwise.

    He also says: “The notion that the scientific method may not be valid because it’s a recent invention is silly”, which isn’t what I said. What I actually wrote was that “the scientific worldview described above has emerged only in recent times… It is reasonable to ask therefore whether modern science is as true as its advocates believe it to be, or whether it is a temporary aberration”. He has failed to notice that I was criticising the scientific worldview (of materialism), not the scientific method, about which I have no criticisms at all. I only criticise its misapplication, when the claim is made that only materialist science via the scientific method can explain the nature of reality. Materialists often get confused between the worldview and the method because they think that they are more or less synonymous.

    On the same theme Diamond says that I want to “refute the scientific worldview”. I did use that phrase, but he failed to notice my quote marks around the word ‘scientific’. To my mind this suggested that the so-called scientific worldview was not really scientific in the proper sense of the word, rather is often falsely equated with rational materialism, i.e. a philosophical viewpoint. Again, I was trying to point out that for scientific thinkers like Diamond ‘scientific’ and ‘materialist’ are more or less synonyms, which is an error.

    He then falls back on the silly argument that because science and the scientific method has brought us wonderful developments in medicine and technology, this somehow validates his materialist worldview. As he says, it is just the part of science that rejects religion (by which we mean a spiritual worldview, not any particular religion) that is the issue. Wonderful developments in medicine and technology have nothing whatsoever to do with the question we were originally discussing, the truth or otherwise of religious/spiritual beliefs.

    My opening observation in my previous response was that he was presenting what was merely his opinion as a fact: “God(s) are a creation of the human mind.” He agrees this is the case, but says that I have misrepresented his meaning by extracting this one phrase from the relevant paragraph. I assume he is referring to “ I’m not against people having these beliefs…”. Since he thinks these beliefs are illusions, it’s hard to see how that makes any difference. In everything I write I am careful not to present what I believe as facts; I don’t see why others can’t do the same.

    This time he does concede that his conclusion is merely his opinion, that “the human predilection for religion is real and is an evolutionary adaptation”. He is, however, completely convinced that this opinion is correct, and will be proved beyond doubt at some point in the future. This is hardly surprising, given that he is a dedicated “materialist, empiricist, rationalist”. As he is only interested in communicating with those who agree with him, he will remain oblivious to all the scientific arguments against what he believes.

===========================================================================================

Footnote:

1. The Biology of Belief, Hay House, 2008, see the whole of chapter 4, quote p69

· Evolution, Religion and Spirituality, Science

Religion and Evolutionary Biology

7th September 2020

    I have recently been engaged in a brief conversation on Medium.com with Mitchell Diamond, author of Darwin’s Apple: The Evolutionary Biology of Religion. It began with my response to this article of his. It isn’t important to have read that to understand what follows, as it was discussing some of the finer points of the debate from the evolutionary perspective. It does, however, bring up once again the big question of religion and Darwinian evolutionary theory.

    Evolutionary biology is one of the main stalwarts of the modern ‘scientific’ worldview, which runs something along these lines. The universe began with the Big Bang. In the early stages there was no life or consciousness. Eventually galaxies, stars, planets formed. Inexplicably, living organisms emerged at some point out of inorganic matter. There was still nothing like what we moderns would call consciousness, which therefore must have ‘evolved’ at some later stage through natural processes; it must be a by-product of the brain. At some point in the distant past human brains decided that there was a supernatural world, inhabited by various beings: deities, angels, demons, and so on. Since these do not exist, science has to explain how such illusions arose and, given that they are illusions, why they have persisted.

    One example of such thinking is Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: the Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors¹. The publisher’s blurb on the back says: “Why are there religious beliefs in all cultures? Do they have features in common and why does religion persist in the face of science? Pascal Boyer shows how experimental findings in cognitive science, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology are now providing precise answers to these general questions, and providing, for the first time, real answers to the question: Why do we believe?” There is also praise from one of the usual suspects, Steven Pinker: “In these pages, Pascal Boyer offers a deep, ingenious, and insightful analysis of one of the deepest mysteries of the human species”.

    Mitchell Diamond also subscribes to this viewpoint; in his most recent response to me he said that “God(s) are a creation of the human mind”. He is therefore engaged in evolutionary biology’s attempt to understand how such illusions arose and persisted.

    This statement is presented as a fact. I hope it is obvious to any reader, however, that it is merely an opinion, expressing a philosophical viewpoint. He tacitly acknowledges this because he continues “but god cannot be empirically proven”. If something cannot be proven one way or the other, then the question being addressed is not a scientific one. If a philosophical opinion is presented as a scientific fact, then it is rather a matter of faith, therefore tantamount to theology. It is one of the major errors of modern ‘science’ that what is actually a matter of faith is often presented as fact, seemingly without the scientists concerned noticing what they are doing.

    The scientific worldview described above has emerged only in recent times, a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. For thousands of years previously, the religious worldview dominated. It is reasonable to ask therefore whether modern science is as true as its advocates believe it to be, or whether it is a temporary aberration.

    Many critics are beginning to say something along those lines. I would argue that there is much wrong with the conventional ‘scientific’ worldview, but the most important issue is the problem of consciousness. According to orthodoxy, consciousness must have somehow emerged from the brain, but no one has any idea how this is possible, hence the term the ‘Hard Problem’. This has led philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Philip Goff to write books with challenging and provocative titles like Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False² and Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness³. Goff believes that some form of panpsychism is the only possible philosophical solution to the difficulty.

    Panpsychism is the view that everything in the universe is in some sense conscious. (This is not the place to go into a discussion of exactly what that might mean, and the different interpretations.) This was, of course, the viewpoint of many, perhaps all, ancient religious traditions; they taught that mind came before matter, even that mind creates matter, therefore that there is nothing in the universe that is not some form of consciousness. Neither is this viewpoint restricted to these spiritual traditions; it can also be found among modern scientists, for example, Professor of Physics Amit Goswami, who wrote The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World⁴. (As an aside, it’s worth noting that evolutionary biologists are, on the whole, fairly clueless about the implications of quantum physics for our understanding of reality.)

    This discussion enters a whole different level when we go beyond the problem of consciousness, and consider the existence of supernatural beings. All religions believe in them, which is why modern physicalist science rejects all religion out of hand, and feels the need to find explanations for it. In my first response to Mitchell Diamond, I said: “The one thing evolutionary biologists never seem to consider is that religion, or at least some of it, was true for ancient peoples because it reflected their experience”. By this I meant that these people were literally aware of the reality of the spirit world. I was surprised, therefore, when I received Diamond’s response: “I agree, but I’m not sure what that has to do with evolutionary biologists’ understanding”. I then replied: “Evolutionary biologists seem to assume that religious/spiritual ideas are false, and therefore feel the need to explain how they arose and survived during the process of evolution. I was arguing that such ideas arose because they were expressions of the direct experience of early peoples”. I was thinking along the same lines as Jonathan Black who, in a book describing the beliefs of spiritual traditions and esoteric secret societies down the ages, wrote: “In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us”⁵.

    Diamond then responded: “Yes, religious ideas were expressions and experiences of early people, but I do feel that still begs the question of why they arose and persisted”. He obviously has a different understanding of the word ‘experience’ from me. I obviously know that the senses are not completely reliable, and that hallucinations are possible. In general, however, if I have an experience of something, then that is the only proof I need of its reality. A scientist explaining to me on theoretical grounds that what I saw with my own eyes was an illusion is not going to convince me. Nor would it have persuaded, I hope, ancient peoples.

    The real question is not how religious ideas arose and persisted; it is rather why in modern times we are no longer so directly aware of the spiritual realms, and find it reasonable to reject them. My explanation is that, in the distant past, ego-consciousness was not so highly developed as it is now, was not separated from the realms of the unconscious psyche and their inhabitants. For whatever reason, ego-consciousness has now developed and strengthened to the point where we are cut off from these realms most of the time. They are accessible, however, in altered states of consciousness. Entering such states may be the best way we have in modern times of refuting the ‘scientific’ worldview.

================================================================================================

Further reading:

    The idea that matter precedes consciousness can be called the bottom-up approach, and the reverse top-down. Gerald R. Baron has been writing an excellent series on Medium.com discussing this theme. (Click on the link.)

================================================================================================

Footnotes:

1. Vintage, 2002

2. Oxford University Press, 2012

3. Rider, 2019

4. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1995

5. The Secret History of the World, Quercus, 2010, p58

· Evolution, Religion and Spirituality

The Bible and Science

21st August 2020

Image for post

Image for post

    This article is partly a response to a recent one on Medium.com by Joe Love, which was in turn a commentary on an article by Steven Ball, a Christian physicist. It is closer, however, to being my own thoughts on the topic under discussion, which is the supposed conflict between the modern scientific understanding of the universe, and the biblical account.

    Love believes that this conflict is illusory, and is aiming to reconcile the Bible with science by arguing for Old Earth Creation. He says: “I have great news for believers in science and believers in God. You are on the same team”.

    Old Earth is a sensible alternative to Young Earth Creation which, working on the assumption that the Bible is infallible, and counting up the years of the genealogies recorded in the Old Testament, comes to the conclusion that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, whereas science has arrived at the figure of about 4.5 billion years, and approximately 13.5 billion years for the universe as a whole. The most famous example of this nonsense was the calculation done by Bishop James Ussher who, despite being a prolific scholar and Primate of All Ireland, therefore presumably intelligent, nevertheless decided that the creation had taken place on October 22nd 4004 BCE.

    Merely agreeing with science that the Earth is much older than the Bible appears to claim, does not of course resolve the dispute. Love’s argument, following Steven Ball, runs something like this:

  • the Bible is the inerrant Word of God as revealed to humanity
  • science aims to discover the laws and principles of the universe, which originated with God
  • therefore the Bible and science must be in agreement
  • if they appear to be in conflict, it must be because we are failing to understand something.

    All we have to do, therefore, is to make sure we understand correctly. That is what I shall attempt to do in what follows, although I may arrive at conclusions different from those of Love.

    There are two major problems in his argument, the assumption that Christians have actually understood what the Bible is saying in the first place and, more obviously, the assumption that both the Bible and science are correct and therefore have to be reconciled. Why not at least consider the possibility that one or both might be wrong?

    Before I get round to some of my own thoughts, it’s worth noting that Love says some strange things, and I’m glad I didn’t have the Christian upbringing that he did.

  • He describes the supposed conflict thus: “Battle lines have been drawn. You either stand with the bible, and with God, or you stand with those seeking to tear down belief in God’s Word”. Do the majority of scientists, even if some of them are atheists, really think that their primary motivation is “to tear down belief in God’s Word”; surely they are merely trying to draw conclusions about the universe from the available evidence, as they see it.
  • Do we really have to stand either with the Bible, or with (atheistic) science? Why can’t we criticise both?
  • “You are easily convinced; the bible is either all truth or all false”. Why are you so easily convinced? Why not say, the Bible was written by human beings, therefore contains their thoughts and beliefs; there may be some truth in it, provided you interpret it correctly, alongside things that are possibly false?
  • “Suddenly you find yourself struggling to reconcile the faith you’ve been taught with the evidence you are presented”. Why should you have to do this? Why can’t you challenge the faith you’ve been taught? Why do you assume your teachers are infallible? Why not start from a clean sheet, with no preconceived ideas, and attempt to assess the evidence, and perhaps come to the conclusion that the Bible is sometimes wrong? Or even, why not consider the possibility that both your faith and science might be sometimes wrong, instead of right?

=============================================================================================

    Love tends to quote the Bible as if it were ultimate truth, instead of the thoughts and opinions of potentially fallible human beings. If the Bible is ‘infallible’, and ‘the word of God’, why have Christians felt the need to mistranslate it?

    For example, as any biblical scholar will tell you, the Hebrew word translated as God in Genesis 1 is Elohim, which is a plural word. It is less often stated that the verb which follows it is singular. So an accurate translation might be ‘God in its plural form’ (It’s difficult to know which pronoun to use, because the later, most confusing section 26–30 says “God created humankind in his image”, even though his command had said “in our image, according to our likeness” — plural again.) Some time ago, however, I read a preface to a translation of the Bible (from memory I think it was an edition of the Good News Bible), where the translators said that they were aware that Elohim is plural, but that they had translated it as ‘God’ in order to conform with the Christian monotheistic tradition. They obviously meant well, but what they were actually doing was deliberately mistranslating the original text, in order to help Christians feel comfortable, and not have to face problematic questions about their beliefs.

    Historically, the Church has a bad record when it has tried to challenge developments in science — remember Copernicus, the trial of Galileo, the sun orbiting the Earth. As a consequence, it seems that some Christians are now frightened by science, panicking at each new development, and thinking that it has to be accommodated within their worldview.

Image for post

    Darwinism has been perceived to be the main problem, the suggestion that living organisms have originated and evolved through natural processes without any divine, or otherwise supernatural involvement. This would obviously be a fatal blow to biblical literalism, if it were true, since it is in direct conflict with Genesis 1, where living creatures are said to have appeared because it was the will of God.

    Because Darwinism has been widely accepted as scientific truth, the Christian Churches have felt the need to accept it without too much protest.

    The Roman Catholic Church first addressed the issue in 1950 when Pope Pius XII stated that there was no conflict between evolution and Christian faith. Since then no Pope has said anything significant to distance himself from this position, and several statements have confirmed and indeed strengthened it. In October 2014 the current Pope, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, went so far as to encourage Catholics to believe in Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang. His statement seemed to leave room for a divine creator, but that role would have been restricted to before the birth of the universe. This is therefore tantamount to deism, even though the official name for the Catholic position is, I believe, theistic evolution.

    Such statements have pleased some, believing that the Church should move with the times, and not challenge the scientific consensus. Others have disagreed, because they thought the Church was falling away from a literal interpretation of Genesis. I would argue that the scientific consensus and a literal interpretation of Genesis are both wrong.

    The Church of England is no better. I was once fortunate to be able to pose the question directly to the top man Rowan Williams, at the time the Archbishop of Canterbury, on a radio phone-in¹. I had emailed my question in advance: “Richard Dawkins is fond of saying that even the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope accept evolution. This seems slightly surprising since one would assume that a man of religion might favour something along the lines of Intelligent Design. Please would you clarify the extent to which you accept evolution with special reference to natural selection, and the random, blind forces which are assumed to lie behind it”.

    He responded: “First of all, I have no problem at all with evolution. It’s a very credible theory about how things got to be the way they are. And I guess, like probably the majority of modern Christians, I’d say that God should make a world designed to evolve, designed to develop in that way, causes me no difficulties at all. You find that sort of view advanced even in the first centuries of the Christian Church — God makes the world that has the capacity to change, and develop”. Here, like Pope Francis, he would seem to be implying deism, which I found strange for someone in his position.

    He continued by saying that “the Intelligent Design idea seems sometimes to talk as if the original design was a little bit faulty, and God has to keep on stepping in to make a little link, rather than putting it all into the works at the beginning”. I read a lot of Intelligent Design literature, and I don’t remember ever reading anything like that, therefore wondered whether he had really understood the arguments. He then continued by offering, in my view, a faulty account of some of the history of evolutionary theory. I was not impressed.

    Without any inspiration forthcoming from their leaders, Christians have responded with books like: Developing a Christian Worldview of Science and Evolution, by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey², and Creation or Evolution, Do We Have to Choose? by Denis Alexander³. A long time has passed since Galileo, however. Is it not time for the Churches to stand up and be counted, to be willing to challenge the theories of modern science, not passively accept its findings? On the question of Darwinism, the Discovery Institute in Seattle has taken up this challenge, with the theory of Intelligent Design. Their arguments may not be infallible, but they are far more impressive than those of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, whose book Critique of Intelligent Design⁴ is one of the worst I’ve ever read of this polemical type. Their arguments are laughable, despite the praise heaped upon the book by several university professors quoted inside the front cover. Their subtitle Materialism versus Creationism From Antiquity to the Present, shows how clueless they are, not even being able to distinguish between Intelligent Design and Creationism.

    The second problem for Christianity, although less damaging than Darwinism, is Big Bang theory. Because it has been almost unanimously accepted by cosmologists and physicists, again it seems that we have to have a Christian response in order to accommodate it. One example would be Genesis and the Big Bang: the Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible by Gerald Schroeder⁵.

    I have written at length about the problems with Big Bang theory in previous articles⁶. I have absolutely no qualifications in physics or cosmology, so obviously I am wary of making definitive claims, and consider my point of view to be not conclusive, but worthy of further consideration. I believe the question is still open, and that, if Big Bang Theory is in any sense true, it would have to be accommodated within the spiritual understanding of how the material universe came into being. There are many accounts in the various traditions. Here I’ll use the version of Jonathan Black, who claims to represent the viewpoint of various secret esoteric societies down the ages⁷. I don’t believe that this differs significantly from other spiritual traditions and religions.

    According to Big Bang theory, the universe began from nothing (an infinitely dense singularity), with the potential for matter to form. According to Black, however, “All religions taught that mind came before matter. All understood creation as taking place by a series of emanations” (p68). The material universe is therefore “a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind”. Black says that these should be understood “as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it”. “At the lowest level of the hierarchy… these emanations… interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter” (p39, p40). These different levels are what we find in Genesis 1 — the higher and lower waters, and the dry land.

    On the same page he said: “Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids”. These correspond with the three levels just mentioned.

    The whole process is described as one impulse “squeezing out of one dimension into the next” (p30). This is consistent with Genesis chapter 1, where God makes dry land form out of the lower waters, and the findings of quantum physics. One could argue that Genesis 1 is in accord with science, but not necessarily with Christian thinking.

    As Black said, his account is the viewpoint of all religions, and I believe it to be the truth. Two questions arise:

    Can Big Bang theory be made to conform with this account? I don’t think it can, although it is strangely a kind of caricature of the spiritual understanding — the infinitely dense singularity expanding outwards needs only to be replaced by the infinite Cosmic Mind expanding outwards and downwards through the various levels. It’s also worth noting that many myths describe an original void, which is surely what the ‘universe’ must have been before the initial expansion, according to Big Bang theory.

    Black says all religions. It is easy to see how his account would fit with Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and esoteric systems like Theosophy or Rosicrucianism, for example, but not so easy to see how it fits with Christianity. However, we perhaps have to distinguish between Christianity as it once was, and what it has become, especially under the influence of modern Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. In the early days, there was a strong Platonic influence, and Plato would have subscribed to something like the account above. If one takes the biblical text literally, as Evangelicals and Fundamentalists tend to do, then a problem arises. If you believe that God created the material universe, as Genesis 1 appears to say, then you will believe firstly that the material universe actually exists, and secondly that this was an event which happened some time in the past.

    According to modern science, however, neither of these two statements are true. Quantum physicists say that there is no such thing as matter — it is an illusion — and that the universe, as we perceive it, is being thought into existence, some saying many billions of times per second (I have discussed this idea in an earlier article).

==============================================================================================

    If the Bible is God’s word, then surely it has to be interpreted correctly. Yet some Christians, so it would seem, have no idea what the Bible is saying. In order to demonstrate that point, I’ll go into one bizarre example at some length. Again we meet a familiar problem, taking literally something which is clearly not intended in that way. In what follows, this stupidity is taken to extreme lengths.

    Genesis chapter 1 (v 6–7) says: “And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky”.

    Alan Hayward, in Creation and Evolution: The Facts and the Fallacies⁸, offers the following commentary: “It has become almost a recent-creationist dogma that ‘the waters which were above the firmament’ of Genesis 1.7 formed a vast canopy of water vapour above the earth’s atmosphere. This, they say, was all precipitated in the days of Noah, thus causing the Flood… The idea was popularized by Whitmore and Morris in their classic, The Genesis Flood. They have so much to say about it that there are about twenty page-references to it in their index. Yet they do not offer a single calculation in support of their idea. If they had, they would soon have discovered that it was insupportable”.

    Hayward goes on to explain the scientific flaws in their argument. Far from shutting up the Creationists, however, this merely inspired another one to come up with a revised version of the theory! This was Dr. Joseph Dillow who “has appreciated these difficulties. He spent years trying to produce a detailed scientific explanation of the vapour canopy theory, and recently published his findings in a book of nearly 500 pages”.

    Hayward then goes on to demolish his arguments, and concludes: “The supposed vapour canopy has been much talked about in recent-creationist circles, but very seldom thought about. A little thought soon shows there could never have been such a canopy, unless it was sustained by one long, continuing miracle. And that, of course, would be contrary to the teaching of ‘Flood geologists’, since they invented the canopy in the first place to explain how the Flood could have occurred by ‘purely natural processes’ ” (p151–152).

    Hayward, having established that the vapour canopy is scientifically indefensible, goes on to show “that their scriptural justification for such a belief is also dubious”. This “is a new interpretation of those passages. Even the great canopy enthusiast Joseph Dillow admits that ‘the usual and oldest view is that the reference is to the clouds in the sky’. He mentions that Calvin’s commentary on Genesis teaches this. To forsake this well-established and obvious explanation of the passage in favour of a new and exotic one needs some justification. What other Scriptures are there which can be brought in as evidence? The fact is that there do not seem to be any” (p179–180).

    All this prodigious time and effort spent on defending a ridiculous theory could have been avoided if the Christians concerned had interpreted the passage as it was intended to be understood, symbolically rather than literally. Even this earlier ‘obvious’ explanation of clouds would seem to be wrong, as it is also literal.

    Even if we put to one side the thought that the text was once ancient Hebrew, and has passed through the hands of many interpreters and translators, so that we cannot be sure that the original intended meaning has been preserved, it still seems obvious that in Genesis 1, v 1–10, the words heavens, earth, waters, sky, dry land do not mean what we now understand by these terms. A clear indication of this is the very opening where it says that when the original ‘earth’ was created, it was ‘a formless void’. How could that be, according to any modern understanding of the world ‘earth’?

    One thing we can all agree upon is that Genesis 1 is a very cursory account of what was presumably a very complicated process; it is not exactly a detailed thesis. Despite the brevity, it still manages to be confusing, and it is hard to find a coherent interpretation of the chapter in its entirety in the modern translations.

    It seems to me that there are three distinct sections, verses 1–10 which describe the processes leading up to the emergence of the material universe, 11–25 which describe the evolution of the Earth before the appearance of humans, then 26–30 when humans arrive on the scene. They become progressively more confusing.

    As one example of the inconsistency in the text, up to verse 10 the word ‘dome’ seems to refer to a boundary between different regions of the non-material realms (“the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome”). In verse 14, however it seems to refer to what we now call the sky: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night..” These lights are presumably the stars, in which case the text then seems to contradict itself, “…and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth”. It can hardly be said that the distant stars achieve this feat, it is rather the more local Sun which does this.

    In any case, it is verses 1–10 that are worthy of most attention, since they contain an important portrayal of the nature of the universe:

  • a directing creative principle, standing behind everything
  • light as the basic building-block of the multi-levelled universe
  • different levels of reality: the higher waters (spiritual realms, the heavens), and lower waters (psyche, astral levels) separated by a boundary, a line of demarcation (the dome)
  • the material universe (dry land), which emerges from the lower waters.

    Let’s remind ourselves of the many hours wasted by those Creationists arguing for the water vapour canopy theory, because they failed to understand this obvious symbolism of the text. It is not the Bible that is false in this passage, rather the bizarre interpretation that some Christians have given to it. Thus the Bible and Christianity are not necessarily the same thing. There is the text of the Bible, and how it has been interpreted.

    On that theme, I’ll conclude with a quote from Carl Jung, following a profound personal experience, describing his father, a Protestant clergyman, who had serious religious doubts, but seemed unable to discuss them with his son: “He had taken the Bible’s commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfil without reserve the command of God”⁹.

    I hardly need to add that this God also stands above all scientific theories.

==========================================================================================

Footnotes:

1. BBC Radio5live, interviewed by Simon Mayo, December 16th 2009

2. Tyndale House Publishers, 2001

3. Monarch Books, 2008

4. Monthly Review Press, 2008

5. Bantam, 1992.

6. See under ‘OLDER’ on the Science section of the Blog Index page.

7. The Secret History of the World, Black Quercus, 2010

8. Triangle, 1985, my copy with revisions 1994

9. The full story can be found in chapter 2, School Years, in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Collins Fount, 1977. I have also mentioned this in another article, click here.

· Religion and Spirituality, Science

What Does It Take to Get Through to a Sceptical Scientist?

20th June 2020

    I recently published an article on Medium.com, click here, as part of an ongoing conversation between myself and Isak Dinesen on the themes of Atheism and Spirituality. (Please understand that my title here is in no way intended to refer to her, rather to those discussed below.) She calls herself a spiritual atheist, and does not believe in the existence of deities, angels, or any other type of supernatural being, since science finds no evidence for them. She therefore has said: “My universe is safe from the whims of unseen non-material influences”. My response to this was: “I would prefer to say that the universe she has chosen to believe in, and the one she personally experiences, fortunately for her, may appear to be safe in this way”. Here I was referring to the phenomenon of demonic possession (for which I believe there is compelling evidence, as described in this article). That explains this response from Jack Preston King: such people “build around themselves a mental structure that makes sense and is reliable and comforting, but it’s a house of glass. All it takes is one real demon jumping out of the bushes for their whole world to be shattered. They build their identity around protecting themselves from the mystery of the world”.

    So, what we are talking about here is the contrast between the theories that one can build up in one’s mind about the nature of reality, which is what scientists do, and actual experiences which contradict these theories. There is an obvious problem when the persons involved have persuaded themselves that the theories they have constructed represent ultimate truth. They therefore tend to deny the reality of the contradictory experiences, especially when they happen to other people.

    I’ll begin with an example which gives a general outline of the problem, a belief-system impervious to evidence. The late Colin Wilson was a writer sympathetic to the paranormal. In the preface to his book Afterlife¹ he tells this interesting anecdote. He had been researching some cases of poltergeists, with a view to writing a book. He then had a conversation with his publisher, who was highly sceptical: “He began to raise all the usual objections: inaccurate reporting, mischievous children, seismic disturbances, lying witnesses… I countered each objection by describing some other case in which it could not possibly apply, and he immediately thought up some new objections. After half an hour or so, I saw that nothing I could say would change his mind. As far as he was concerned, ghosts and poltergeists were a regrettable remnant of mediaeval superstition, and that was that… I had spent months studying hundreds of cases… And unless my friend could be persuaded to spend a few weeks studying the same cases, he would continue to believe that each one could be explained away as fraud or deception”.

    Here, in trying to convince a sceptic of the reality of the paranormal with arguments, Wilson was banging his head against a brick wall. A personal experience, however, can sometimes do the trick. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer opens her book Extraordinary Knowing² with a personal anecdote. She had bought an extremely valuable harp for her daughter, which was stolen. She pursued unsuccessfully all normal channels to try to locate and retrieve it. Eventually, in desperation, she consulted a dowser. With the aid of a street map, and entering an altered state of consciousness, he managed to tell her the address where the harp was located. Within three days, after offering a reward on some posters, she had the harp back.

    Before this incident she described herself as a “sceptical, highly trained scientific professional”. Her reaction was to say, this changes everything. This incident completely transformed her worldview, replacing her ‘scientific’ preconceptions. She then turned her life over to researching the paranormal, including writing the great book mentioned above.

    Sometimes, however, it seems that such a powerful experience makes absolutely no difference at all. I’m currently reading, Real Magic by Dean Radin³, who is one of the great scientists of our age, daring to investigate fields where others fear to tread, risking hostility and ridicule from the ‘scientific’ community for his efforts. The following account is taken from his first chapter.

    Michael Shermer is a longstanding, vociferous sceptic about the paranormal. However, in his October 2014 column in Scientific American, he said: “Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are… anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have”.

    He was planning to marry his fiancée, who had been close to her grandfather, who had died when she was 16. One thing of his she had kept was a 1978 transistor radio. “Shermer tried to get it to work. He put in new batteries, looked for loose connections, and tried smacking it on a hard surface, It still wouldn’t work. So he gave up and placed it in the back of a desk drawer in their bedroom”. At the wedding, his wife “was feeling sad that her grandfather wasn’t there to give her away. After the wedding ceremony, something strange happened. They heard music. They traced it to the desk drawer in the bedroom. It was the grandfather’s radio, playing a love song.

    “They were stunned into silence. Finally (his wife) whispered, ‘My grandfather is here with us, I’m not alone’. The radio continued to play that evening, fell silent the next day, and never worked again. Shermer’s reaction: ‘I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my scepticism to its core’. As a result, he wrote… : ‘(If) we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious’ ”.

    Two years later, however, he had returned to his previous dogmatic scepticism. In the same journal he wrote: “Where the known meets the unknown we are tempted to inject paranormal and supernatural forces to explain unsolved mysteries. We must resist the temptation because such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle”. Radin continues: “Shermer justified his confidence by citing Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, because Carroll concluded that the laws of physics ‘rule out the possibility of true psychic powers’. Why? Because, Shermer continued, ‘the particles and forces of nature don’t allow us to bend spoons, levitate or read minds’. Schermer “concluded with certainty that searching for paranormal or supernatural forces ‘can never succeed’ ”.

    As an aside, my conclusion from the above is that the laws of physics must be inadequate, if it is claimed that they give a complete picture of the true nature of the universe. They do not take into account the nature of the psyche. The belief that the laws of physics rule out parapsychology obviously derives from the philosophy of materialism. The reality of ESP, as Radin has persuasively argued over many years, offers evidence that this philosophy is false.

    He comments about Shermer that “when one encounters a belief-shattering event, it’s not uncommon to promptly forget about it, or even to deny that it ever happened. Psychologists use the term repression to describe such cases”. Another similar psychoanalytic term is defence mechanism. The psychological syndrome that modern sceptical scientists suffer from could be called the pathological fear of the irrational. They feel comfortable only in the ordered, logical world of the rational mind they choose to inhabit. They insulate themselves by denying that paranormal forces exist. Or, to repeat Jack Preston King’s words: such people “build around themselves a mental structure that makes sense and is reliable and comforting… They build their identity around protecting themselves from the mystery of the world”.

    On this theme Elizabeth Mayer says: “The human psyche is organized to escape the experience of fear. We use a vast array of defenses to channel, transform, suppress, and regulate fear. When those defenses work best, they operate unconsciously. People cannot explain why they carry out behaviour which stems from workings of the unconscious mind. When they try, they often make up plausible but incorrect explanations’ ” (p102). One good example of which would be many of the ‘laws’ of science, especially Sean Carroll’s understanding of the laws of physics.

    Those of a scientific mindset often accuse believers in the paranormal and supernatural of being deluded, i.e. having psychological problems. Perhaps the opposite is the case, and that it’s actually the scientists who need therapy.

Footnotes:

1. Grafton Books, 1987

2. Bantam, 2008

3. Harmony, 2018

· Science

The Supernatural Origin of the Natural-part 2

9th May 2020

    This follows on from part 1, and is the second in a series in response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium, which claimed that the ‘supernatural’ is a figment of humans’ imagination. My series will be a defence of the concept of the supernatural. My belief is that the material universe emerges from other levels of reality, often, though not necessarily, conceived of as being ‘higher’, which is why I call them supernatural. In this article I offer evidence for their existence, and later in the series I’ll discuss what might be found in them.

    This understanding can be found in many ancient traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Old Testament Judaism, Gnosticism — and also in modern esotericism, for example Theosophy, and various secret societies. Jonathan Black is a spokesman for their worldview, as explained in part 1, and I especially like how he expresses this idea: “For many of the world’s most brilliant individuals the birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained in just such a way. They have envisaged an impulse squeezing out of another dimension into this one — and they have conceived of this other dimension as the mind of God”¹. (In the Black quotes in part 1, he elaborates on this understanding, showing that he means several dimensions.)

    So is this some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo? Actually no; it is what quantum physicists have been saying for nearly a hundred years. They are at the vanguard of those scientists who reject the old materialist, mechanistic worldview which emerged from the ‘Enlightenment’, and quantum physics has been described as the best ever theory of physical reality in the history of science

    I assume that Wade knows about quantum physics but does not mention it in his article. In our correspondence he has mentioned: astronomy, geology, paleontology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, embryology, genetics and genomics, geology, radiochemistry, population biology, island ecology, and planetary science. However, as Plato might say, those working in these fields probably don’t realise that they are merely looking at shadows on a wall, and cannot see the (supernatural) source of those shadows. To push the comparison further, quantum physicists seem to represent that one prisoner in Plato’s allegory who has realised what is going on, and who is trying to wake the others up to the reality of the situation. They remain impervious to all attempts to persuade them, however.

    Here are some relevant quotes from quantum physicists down the years, beginning with the early pioneers:

  • Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders, said: “Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. The smallest units of matter are not physical objects… They are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”².
  • Max Planck, sounding remarkably like the Jonathan Black quote above: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter”³.
  • Sir James Jeans: “Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter — not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts”⁴. (Jeans uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as the epigram for his book.)

    Also one of the early pioneers, Sir Arthur Eddington is especially important on these questions. He gave the Swarthmore lecture in 1929, the title of which is highly significant, Science and the Unseen World⁵. What is the unseen world if not the supernatural? The title of his fourth section is ‘Both a scientific and a mystical outlook are involved in the “problem of experience” ‘. (I think it is reasonable to equate ‘mystical’ with ‘supernatural’.) On that point, he considers the question, “is the unseen world revealed by the mystical outlook a reality?”, and thinks that it is better put “Are we, in pursuing the mystical outlook, facing the hard facts of experience?” His answer is: “Surely we are. I think that those who would wish to take cognisance of nothing but the measurements of the scientific world made by our sense-organs are shirking one of the most immediate facts of experience, namely that consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense impressions. We may the more boldly insist that there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted” (p 26–27).

    Earlier in the lecture he had said: “That environment of space and time and matter, of light and colour and concrete things, which seems so vividly real to us is probed deeply by every device of physical science and at bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow (referencing Plato there). None the less it remains a real world if there is a background to the symbols — an unknown quantity which the mathematical symbol x stands for”. Here I would equate the ‘background to the symbols’ and the ‘unknown quantity’ with the supernatural.

    Eddington continues, clearly saying that consciousness is not generated by the brain: “We think we are not wholly cut off from this background. It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism or at least not by symbolism of the numerical kind to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself” (p23).

    Among a later generation of quantum physicists we find:

  • Fritjof Capra who, having understood the implications of the revolution in physics, wrote The Tao of Physics, comparing its findings to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen.
  • David Bohm, whose concepts of explicate and implicate orders clearly refer to the material world and the hidden background out of which it emerges⁶.
  • Danah Zohar likewise: “The quantum vacuum… is the basic, fundamental and underlying reality of which everything in this universe — including ourselves — is an expression”. The quantum vacuum “can be conceived as… a sea of potential… The vacuum is the substrate of all that is”⁷.

    Here this vacuum begins to sound more and more like an infinite God: “At the subatomic level of elementary particles, there is no death in the sense of permanent loss. The quantum vacuum, which is the underlying reality of all that is, exists eternally” (p124).

    And here she dares to use the actual word: “If we were looking for something that we could conceive of as God within the universe of the new physics, this ground state, coherent quantum vacuum might be a good place to start” (p208).

    It’s interesting to note that in the spiritual traditions mentioned above, the ultimate ground of being is described as a void or nothingness (vacuum?).

    And here is some idle speculation — I’m just letting my mind wander. If Zohar is correct in saying that elementary particles do not die, perhaps also they were not born. In which case, can it be true to say that there was a Big Bang? Perhaps the universe is eternal. If not, where were the particles at the singularity? Along the same lines, if the apparently expanding universe at some point begins to contract again, as some cosmologists have speculated, if particles do not die, then where will they go to at the Big Crunch, as the universe returns to a singularity? I assume that the quantum vacuum (God?) will remain, no matter what.

    In conclusion, to sum up neatly all the above quotes, here are the physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben: “We know that there is something beyond spacetime; we just don’t know what it is. Because Beyond Space-Time is non physical, unmeasurable… But what is beyond space-time is within everything”. That sounds like a pretty good description of the supernatural and its relationship to the natural to me. They continue: “Can it connect with us and influence us within space-time? Is it pure CONSCIOUSNESS?”⁸. 

    If it is pure consciousness, this would corroborate and vindicate what all the ancient spiritual traditions have been saying for thousands of years.

======================================================================================================

Click here for part 3.

Footnotes:

1. The Secret History of the World, Quercus, 2010, p30

2. quoted by Ken Wilber in Quantum Questions, Shambala, 1984, p51

3. lecture given in Florence, quoted by John Davidson in The Secret of the Creative Vacuum

4. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, my edition 1947, p137

5. transcribed into book form by Quaker Books, 2007

6. The best example from his writings on this theme is Wholeness and the Implicate Order.

7. The Quantum Self, Flamingo, 1991, p207–8

8. Space-time and Beyond, Bantam, 1983, p56

· Religion and Spirituality, Science

The Supernatural Origin of the Natural—part 1

7th May 2020

    This brief series of articles will present an alternative viewpoint, therefore is in a sense a response, to a recent one on Medium.com by Ted Wade with the two items in his title reversed. The purpose of his article is to deny the existence of the supernatural, and to provide a psychological explanation for humans’ belief in it. This is a common theme among modern ‘Enlightenment’ scientists, and the background which leads to this way of thinking runs something like this.

    The universe began with the Big Bang. In the early stages there were only physical and chemical processes going on: the interactions of particles, the formation of primordial elements. There was therefore no consciousness present. Eventually stars, galaxies, and planets formed. At some point, primitive life-forms emerged on our planet out of non-life. As these life-forms became more complex, brains gradually developed in them, and at some later stage primitive awareness evolved as a by-product of these brains. We eventually arrive at the ape-like ancestors of humans, which were presumably too primitive to have fantasies of elves, unicorns, demons, gods and goddesses etc. These creatures eventually evolved into primitive humans. At some stage in this process a human self-aware consciousness developed out of the more primitive awareness of animals, and these humans did start having these fantasies. Since they are all illusions, and there is no such thing as the supernatural, we therefore have to come up with some explanation as to how and why this happened.

    This would seem to be the starting point for Wade’s article. I’m assuming the above to be at least an approximation of the belief system upon what he writes is based, although I haven’t checked the details with him. Interested readers can consult his article for the details of his argument. Essentially, however, it offers a psychological explanation (Theory of Mind) for why primitive humans started to imagine supernatural entities, with particular reference to Julian Jaynes (author of the well-known book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, although this is not mentioned specifically by Wade). One of the main features of his explanation, as is common in such analyses, is the false attribution of agency to phenomena like the weather.

     Wade is in the tradition of authors like Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark), and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). An even better example, and the closest to Wade’s thinking, albeit by a lesser-known author, is Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors, by Pascal Boyer¹. Digressing slightly for a moment, I’ll mention a few things about this book, since they reinforce Wade’s position, and therefore help to clarify the viewpoint that I shall be arguing against.

    The publisher’s notes on the back cover say: “Why are there religious beliefs in all cultures? Do they have features in common and why does religion persist in the face of science? Pascal Boyer shows how experimental findings in cognitive science, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology are now providing precise answers to these general questions, and providing for the first time, real answers to the question: Why do we believe?”

    There is praise from some of the usual suspects:

  • Steven Pinker: “… a deep, ingenious, and insightful analysis of one of the deepest mysteries of the human species. …the most important treatment of the psychological basis of religious belief (since William James)” .
  • E. O. Wilson: “An excellent book in the spirit of the French Enlightenment, broadly learned and with modern behavioural science added” .

    And also from novelist Ruth Rendell: “The wisdom in its pages will be revelation to any seeker after truth. …it lets daylight in upon magic… If faith is the last refuge of the would-be believer, Religion Explained takes it away but puts something better in its place, enlightenment and understanding” .

    So there we have one side of the argument about the supernatural; it is all an illusion. This worldview is summed up well by Steven Pinker who once wrote: “The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures…are factually mistaken”².

    On the whole it’s not possible to change the mind of anyone convinced of the truth of ‘Enlightenment’ science, so here I’m merely going to offer readers an alternative understanding. I believe it to be true but, because on the whole it lies outside the realm of normal scientific investigation, I’ll leave it to the reader to judge which version is more credible.

    Since his article, I have been corresponding with Ted Wade. One thing I’ve been trying to establish is a mutually acceptable definition of the terms ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’, therefore ascertaining what is considered to be above nature. Since he thinks that the supernatural is merely an illusory fantasy created by humans, it’s hard to make much progress on that one. So I’ve focussed on a definition of ‘natural’, and suggested that this should mean anything occurring within the space-time universe; anything beyond that would be existing at a different level of reality, and therefore ‘supernatural’. He has rejected this, however, saying that if there is anything outside the space-time universe, then that is merely the ‘natural’ waiting to be discovered by science.

    I’m therefore going to have to make up my own definitions. I’m going to reject his objection just mentioned, and say that anything which seems to exist beyond the space-time universe is supernatural. Another way of saying this is, anything that modern science doesn’t believe in, and considers impossible according to its accepted understanding of life, and laws of nature. One example of such phenomena would be discarnate entities which, if real, would exist at various levels of reality outside space-time, for example:

  • spirits of various kinds, whether formerly human and now in the afterlife, or otherwise
  • demons
  • elemental beings, otherwise known as nature spirits, e.g. fairies, elves
  • gods, goddesses, angels, and any other such high-level beings.

    According to my definition, there are some borderline phenomena that, if proved true, would have to be considered natural, since they happen to humans while in the space-time universe, for example ESP. There is, however, currently no explanation for this according to the laws of physics as understood by the paradigm outlined above. Another borderline phenomenon would be out-of-body experiences. Are they supernatural? They do suggest that consciousness is not dependent upon the brain, but nevertheless remains aware of the material world. So has consciousness moved to a different level of reality? Should this be considered a supernatural phenomenon or not?

    Because these questions are difficult to answer, I’m going to concentrate on two simpler ones: are there other levels of reality beyond the space-time universe, and do discarnate entities exist? I’ll deal with these in the following articles in the series. Here I’ll just make some preliminary remarks.

    There has been a longstanding battle between science and religion since the start of the Enlightenment. I’ve outlined the scientific understanding above. In what follows, I’ll be presenting an alternative spiritual or religious understanding, which is what I believe to be true. It is essentially what can be found in the various branches of the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that, despite their surface differences, at their core all religions are saying the same thing. Examples would be: Hinduism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Taoism and Gnosticism.

    It’s worth noting that this alternative understanding, which follows below, can also be found in a book by Jonathan Black (which is a pseudonym, real name Mark Booth) called The Secret History of the World³. He claims that it is an account of the understanding of the universe, a “secret philosophy”, according to various Mystery traditions and secret societies, especially Rosicrucianism, which goes back many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. This is knowledge which they have attempted to keep away from the general public, but which he claims has been subscribed to by various figures, including some acknowledged geniuses, down the course of history. He mentions, among others: Dante, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Newton, Goethe, Beethoven. (It’s a very impressive list. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether this is true or not.)

    Even though Black calls it knowledge kept secret by various societies, some of what he says, at least in a simple form, can be found in published texts, including the scriptures of the spiritual traditions mentioned above. In his introduction he cites as some of his sources “cabalistic, hermetic and neoplatonic streams that lie relatively close to the surface of Western culture”, Sufi elements, and “ideas flowing from esoteric Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a few Celtic sources”. He says that this teaching will “fly in the face of common sense”. This presumably explains why science has felt the need to come up with an alternative; Black says that a scientist will not like his secret history at all.

    This is a worldview, therefore, that has been known and survived for thousands of years. It is good to know that it is still alive and well among educated, highly intelligent modern people. How these ancient sages discovered it is an open question; it may have been in deep meditation, through a psychic ability such as clairvoyance, or through altered states of consciousness as a result of psychoactive substances — for example soma, kykeon, amanita muscaria. Or perhaps they were just messengers from a high level, sent down to teach humanity.

===================================================================================================

THE ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDING

    Any argument, whether scientific, philosophical, or otherwise needs to be built on firm foundations; the quality of the conclusions will depend upon the truth or otherwise of the starting assumptions. In this current debate, that means examining how true the worldview of modern science outlined above actually is. Even though it is widely accepted, there are still some difficulties, or leaps of faith involved. For example, there is no real explanation as to how living organisms could emerge from inorganic matter, or how consciousness emerged from the brain. (The latter is still called the Hard Problem, and philosophers and scientists are tormenting themselves trying to come up with a solution.)

    Perhaps more controversially, despite the general acceptance among scientists of the truth of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolutionary theories, there are still good reasons to doubt them. In the specific context of this discussion, there is a problem with the Big Bang theory if there is an accompanying assumption that at the beginning and during the early stages of the universe, only unconscious particles existed. Such an assumption would lead to some of the later problems just mentioned.

    According to the alternative understanding:

  • the ultimate source of the material universe is a Cosmic Consciousness (what we might call a Divine Mind), and it comes into being through a process of progressive densification of this spirit/consciousness, which creates different levels of being, the lowest being the physical universe we know⁴. As Jonathan Black puts it: “According to the cosmologists of the ancient world and the secret societies, emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood… as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it. These emanations have also always been thought of as in some sense personified, as being in some sense also intelligent” (p39). (The personification would explain the belief in deities.) In similar vein he says: “Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids”.
  • there is nothing in this multi-levelled universe, therefore, that is not a manifestation of this Divine Mind; there exist only various forms of consciousness. This solves the problem of how life ‘emerged’ from non-life. It didn’t; everything is alive, a form of consciousness. This understanding also offers a solution to the so-called Hard Problem. How does the material brain produce consciousness with subjective experiences? (You need to explain this if you subscribe to the scientific paradigm outlined above.) Answer, it doesn’t — when a problem seems insoluble, it’s always a good idea to stand back and consider, are we asking the right question?
  • even if the evolution of life-forms took place in any way close to the conventional understanding (and it is not certain that it did) — single-celled organisms through to humans — it could only have been guided by supernatural intelligences, not by a blind, unguided process of natural selection. (It is interesting to note that, as frequently mentioned in evolutionary literature, Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. However, the writer either doesn’t know, or omits to mention, that Wallace went on to believe in Intelligent Design and God as the underlying evolutionary principle, as is clear from the title of his 1914 book The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.)

    Ted Wade has raised the evolution question in our correspondence. He says: “Evolution by something like natural selection is supported by the fossil record, embryology, genetics and genomics, geology, radiochemistry, population biology, island ecology, planetary science. The list goes on and on. Nothing about our knowledge of the living world makes sense without an origin in an evolutionary process”. I think this statement was intended to persuade me of the correctness of his argument, in which case it wasn’t necessary because I couldn’t agree more. Only biblical Creationists try to deny an evolutionary process. This statement, however, has made the debate very vague, when it needs to be very precise. ‘Evolution’ means merely change over time. An evolutionary process of some kind is not the same as saying evolution by natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations, which is what the neo–Darwinian synthesis claimed. And what does “something like” natural selection mean? I agree that an alternative to natural selection is behind the evolutionary process. But is that something very close, another similar ‘natural’ explanation? (I’m not sure what that would be.) Or is it something outside what evolutionary biologists normally allow, something supernatural?

    As I said above, I’ll address the question of whether there are other levels of reality beyond the space-time universe in later articles. I’ll discuss this from the point of view of quantum physics in part 2, and I’ll discuss Jungian synchronicity as potential evidence in part 3. Then in part 4, I’ll discuss whether discarnate entities exist.

==================================================================================================

    In these earlier articles I’ve discussed at greater length some of the issues raised here:

    I discussed in detail the problems associated with the Big Bang theory in a talk I gave in June 2019. There are two versions on Medium.com; links can be found, click here. The relevant material begins about halfway through. I extracted the Big Bang material, published it in separate articles, and then added new material in this series:

Part 1. What the ‘Experts’ Say

Part 2. Was There a Big Bang? — Probably Not

Part 3. a follow-up to parts 1 and 2

Part 4. An Alternative Spiritual Explanation

Part 5. A further article, restating some of the above, in the light of four articles in New Scientist magazine, click here.

Part 6. Further material in the light of a response I received to part 5, click here.

===

    A more accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness, I believe, is provided by the Transmission Model of William James. Click here.

===

    I discussed Alfred Russel Wallace, and how his views on evolution have been misrepresented. Click here.

===

    The physicist Paul Davies has serious reservations about neo-Darwinism, as outlined in his book The Cosmic Blueprint, and leans in the direction of what I would call a supernatural explanation, although he would see it as a need to expand the boundaries of science. I’ve discussed his ideas, click here. 

=========================================================================================

Footnotes:

1. Vintage, 2002

2. “Science is Not Your Enemy”, The New Republic, August 19th 2013, p33

3. There is an earlier edition of this under the name Mark Booth. My copy is an updated edition under the name Jonathan Black, Quercus, 2010. It is described as an ‘International Bestseller’. Publishers often say that, of course. If true, however, it would suggest that such ideas are being spread more widely.

4. If the Big Bang theory is in any sense true, it could only be true if understood from within this alternative understanding. Strangely, the conventional version of the theory is a kind of weird caricature of this, the infinitely small singularity being the equivalent of the ultimate nothingness (void) of the spiritual traditions — Brahman in Hinduism, the Tao in Taoism, the Ayin of the Kabbalah etc. — which expands outwards, and densifies, until it eventually becomes the material universe, the “Ten thousand things” as the Tao Te Ching puts it.

· Religion and Spirituality, Science

The Secret Life of Plants, and the Revival of Animism — part 1

1st May 2020

    “The idea that plants have feelings and emotions goes back thousands of years. Evidence of this belief can be found in Hindu scriptures. In more recent years Darwin noticed the astonishing similarity between the radical — the root tip — of a plant and the brain of primitive animals. The radical seems to sense or feel its surroundings in order to make decisions necessary for the plant’s survival”¹.

=================================================================================================

    This article is the latest in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins who, in collaboration with Christopher Bird, wrote The Secret Life of Plants² in 1973. (For a guide to the earlier articles, see under Science on the Blog Index page.) The purpose of the series is to seek to revive the ancient worldview of animism, and make it science. At the same time, it is another episode in the saga of the ongoing battle for truth in science, which to me means constantly struggling against the misguided philosophy of materialism. In the next few articles, I’m going to discuss some scientists whose work suggested that there is something very strange going on in the life of plants, at least from the perspective of conventional, materialist science.

   

    The first of these is Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858–1937)³. It’s worth pausing for a moment to ask yourself whether you have ever heard of him. I’m guessing that not many of you will have. I hope that I’m not exaggerating but, given that in his field he might be considered the equivalent of a Newton or an Einstein, one of the questions I shall be addressing here is why that might be. He should be a household name.

    I’ll begin by describing the reputation he gained during his lifetime, why he was, and why he should still be, taken seriously. He was a formidable figure, graduating in physics, botany and chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and then appointed Professor of Physics at the Presidency College, Calcutta. His career as an experimental scientist followed, which I’ll describe below. In 1917 he was given a knighthood, and in 1920 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in recognition of his scientific work. “The acclaim which came in the British Isles was repeated in Vienna where it was the consensus of eminent German and Austrian scientists that ‘Calcutta was far ahead of us in these new lines of investigation’ ”. In 1926 he was nominated a member of the League of Nations Committee on Intercultural Cooperation, other eminent members of which included Albert Einstein.

    It seems that his reputation was held back to some extent by racism, white European scientists being unwilling to contemplate that an Indian could be so far ahead of them. He was, however, revered in the USSR, even after his death:

  • He was heralded “as introducing a new epoch in the development of world science by Kliment Arkadievich Timiryazev…”
  • “The USSR’s plant men were so impressed by the achievements of this Indian scientist that they were going to mount a research campaign based directly upon his long-ignored conclusions”.
  • At a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR, “three leading academicians summed up for the huge crowd assembled the fantastic breakthroughs which the Indian had made not only in plant physiology but in physics and in the vital and until then unheard of links between them”.
  • In 1964 “the Soviet Union honoured this neglected scientist by publishing in two handsomely illustrated volumes his selected works”

                                                                                                                                                                                                BOSE’S SCIENTIFIC CAREER

    His first significant achievement was that he demonstrated wireless transmission in 1895, before Lodge and Marconi. He then investigated metal fatigue, and “discovered that certain metals could recuperate, if given a rest. Graphs of fatigue and recovery, he pointed out, showed striking similarities between metal and animal tissues; in both ‘fatigue could be removed by gentle massage or by exposure to a bath of warm water’ ”. This sounds disconcerting to the rational mind, hard to believe, and poses the question, are metals really inanimate? However, “Bose was actually able to demonstrate that his ‘treatment’ worked”.

    He then turned his attention to plants, and showed “that plants react to ‘irritation’ or to ‘blows’ in much the same way as animals”. How could this be, given that plants “were held to have no nervous system, (and) were universally reckoned as unresponsive”? The evidence, however, suggested otherwise:

  • He found that plants did actually have a nervous system. “He felt that some plants seem to be midway between higher and lower animals in the evolution of their ‘nervous system’ ”. Furthermore they had an array of emotional responses: “Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless other appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals”.
  • “Experimenting first with horse-chestnut leaves and then with carrots and turnips, Bose found that they responded to various ‘blows’ in much the same way as had his metals and muscles, and that plants were clearly sensitive down to their roots”.
  • He consistently pointed to a real continuity between various plant and animal tissues, and “was able to show the similarity in behaviour between skins of lizard, tortoises and frogs and those of grapes, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables”. “Even more heretically, he held that the isolated vegetal nerve is indistinguishable from an animal nerve”.
  • He found that “trees have a circulatory system… similar to blood pressure in animals, and a tube which duplicates a heart. ‘The more deeply we perceive’, said Bose, ‘the more striking becomes the evidence that a uniform plan links every form in manifold nature’ ”.
  • He discovered that plants could be as successfully anaesthetised as animals. He gave a plant chloroform, which stopped all growth. As soon as the plant was revived with an antidote, or when the narcotic vapour was blown away by fresh air, it once again began to move, just as an animal would. “Using chloroform to tranquillize a large pine tree, Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without the usually fatal shock of such operations”.
  • “Like human beings, plants became intoxicated when given shots of whisky or gin, swayed like any bar-room drunkard, passed out, and eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover”.
  • He found that too much carbon dioxide “could suffocate them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen”.
  • A cabbage leaf went through “violent paroxysms as it was scalded to death”. Experimenting with heat and cold, “one day he found that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered in a way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. At death the plant threw off a huge electrical force”.
  • “In his work with the sensitive plant Mimosa pudica, Bose showed that plants could be even more sensitive than men”.

    In order to make such observations, he had developed sophisticated monitoring devices to measure the growth and behaviour of plants down to their minutest detail, including the crescograph, which was capable of magnifying the life processes of plants ten million times (according to Whitman; Tompkins/ Bird say one hundred million times, which seems less likely, and which I therefore assume is a mistake).

                                                                                                                                                                                                      WHAT WAS THE RESPONSE?

    Here are two quotes from those who believed in him (there were obviously many others, as can be judged from the honours awarded to him):

  • At the meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR mentioned above, one speaker said: “The green world of plants, seeming to us so immobile and insensitive, came miraculously to life and appeared no less, and often even more, sensitive than animals and man”.
  • The philosopher Henri Bergson said, after hearing Bose lecture at the Sorbonne: “The dumb plants had by Bose’s marvellous inventions been rendered the most eloquent witnesses of their hitherto unexpressed life-story. Nature has at last been forced to yield her most jealously guarded secrets”.

    These are two responses from the orthodox scientific viewpoint of the time:

  • The journal Nature said of his first book Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation: “The whole book abounds in interesting matter skillfully woven together and would be recommended as of great value if it did not continually arouse our incredulity”.
  • Of his second book Comparative Electro-Physiology the reviewer in Nature said: “The student of plant physiology, who has some acquaintance with the main classical ideas of his subject, will feel at first extreme bewilderment as he peruses this book. It proceeds so smoothly and logically, and yet it does not start from any place in the existing ‘corpus’ of knowledge, and never attaches itself with any firm adherence. This effect of detachment is heightened by the complete absence of precise reference to the work of other investigators”.

    This is not, of course, how the scientific process is normally conducted — no peer-review, no other investigators. As Tompkins and Bird point out, that was because there weren’t any, and that the reviewer “had no way of knowing he was dealing with a genius half a century ahead of his time”. (Following on from my thought above, it’s worth noting that both Newton and Einstein, especially the former, worked in complete isolation, and felt no need to collaborate with others in order to develop their revolutionary ideas.) Given that nothing much has changed since their book, we may now say that he was actually 100 years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, this is how progress in science is often obstructed; firm experimental evidence is ignored for no good reason in favour of retaining an out-of-date worldview.

                                                                                                                                                                                                      IMPLICATIONS OF HIS WORK

    These are clear from the above, but just to summarise, Bose had demonstrated:

  • that even metals seemed in some sense to be ‘alive’.
  • that plants exhibited the same reactions and emotions as animals and humans, and could therefore be considered alive.

    This is close to the ancient worldview of animism, and the modern spiritual belief that the whole universe is a living organism:

  • “All his life Bose had emphasized to a scientific community steeped in a mechanistic and materialistic outlook, the idea that all of nature pulsed with life and that each of the interrelated entities in the natural kingdom might reveal untold secrets could man but learn how to communicate with them”.
  • In retirement, he said: “In my investigations on the action of forces on matter, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of contact emerging between the Living and the non-Living. Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant world? … This means that we should abandon all our preconceptions most of which are afterwards found to be absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears the plant’s own signature”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

    The scientist Bose unashamedly related his findings about plants and the world in general to the ‘mystical’ ideas of Hinduism. For example, at an address to the Royal Institution in 1901, having described his extensive experiments and results, he ended by saying:                                                                         “I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar indeed that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here the physical ends, and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist. …                                                                              “(I perceived) one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things — the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us — it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: ‘They who see but one, in the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth — unto none else, unto none else!’ ”.

    During his lifetime this did not always seem to have been a problem. This lecture was warmly received, notably by Sir Robert Austen, “one of the world’s authorities on metals, (who) praised Bose for his faultless arguments, saying: ‘I have all my life studied the properties of metals and am happy to think that they have life’ ”. Bose’s “views went unchallenged, despite the metaphysical note at the end”. It was obviously considered inappropriate at that time to include such a statement when publishing a scientific address, but Sir William Crookes “urged that the last quotation should not be omitted”.

    On another occasion the Times, sounding strangely more like the Hindu Times, wrote: “While we in England were still steeped in the rude empiricism of barbaric life, the subtle Easterner had swept the universe into a synthesis and had seen the one in all its changing manifestations”.

    Tompkins and Bird say in relation to this association with Hinduism: “Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose managed to accomplish the essential requirement of the twentieth century: an amalgamation of the wisdom of the ancient East with the precise scientific techniques and language of the modern West”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                THE LATER REACTION

    After his death, however, the groundless preconceptions contrary to facts started to kick back in, and there was a backlash from the ‘scientific’ community. They were still asking, “how could a plant, with no nervous system of the animal kind, react to irritation or blows in the same way as an animal?”, even though Bose had demonstrated that plants do have a nervous system, or its equivalent. Bose’s explanation had not been physical, but psychological, which materialists found unacceptable, and he had drawn comparisons with the ‘mystical’ Hindu concept of a pervading unity. “This was anathema to conventional botanists, physiologists and psychologists alike. They could not very well overturn Bose’s findings. Instead, “his work was treated as if it never existed”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     FURTHER QUESTION

    I don’t know whether Bose himself went so far as to consider this, but it is a reasonable question: if plants respond to the environment, react in the same way as animals and humans; if they show reactions and have the same emotions as animals and humans, do they have some sense of self-awareness like animals and humans?

    Can plants communicate with each other? Recent research suggests that they can. Do they know that they are doing this? Research in Russia, following on from Bose’s work, showed that plants do have an ‘awareness’ of being cut!

                                                                                                                                                                                                        CONCLUSIONS

  • Bose had “carried scientific research into areas unexplored before, and used impeccably scientific methods to back his findings”.
  • His results “were so well demonstrated and presented that, at the time, they convinced his fellow-scientists. Yet they were so disconcerting that they were not followed up, and are today rarely mentioned in academic journals”.
  • He “found out more about plants than anyone before and perhaps since, but remains almost unmentioned in classical histories of subjects in which he specialized”.
  • “Nearly a half century after his death, the Encyclopedia Britannica could only say of his work in the field of plant physiology that it was so much in advance of his time that it could not be precisely evaluated”.

    Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this was because those who followed were afraid of the implications if they were to evaluate it; the whole philosophy of (atheistic) materialism might be completely overturned.

    Are children now taught in biology lessons that plants are much more like humans that we might usually suppose, that they have emotions, react to pain, and suffer when they die? If so, I’m not aware of it. (Vegetarians and vegans seem blissfully unaware of this. What would they eat if they knew?) Fortunately others are now covering similar ground, and the torch which Bose lit, but which was sadly extinguished, is now being reignited by figures like the ecologist Peter Wohlleben and the scientist Monica Gagliano.

    Please don’t believe anyone if they tell you that science is always a search for, or is gradually finding, the truth about the universe. The highly influential enthusiast for ‘scientific’ progress Steven Pinker says: “The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures…are factually mistaken”⁴. Really? I don’t think so. If he chooses to live in a fantasy world, that’s up to him. It is closer to the truth that modern science is only slowly catching up with the wisdom of the ancients. But this is how science and the search for truth often operates. It is the preconceptions and psychological reactions of ‘scientists’ that determine what is allowed. And when they are afraid of what they might find, the work of a genius like Jagadis Chandra Bose is thrown upon the rubbish heap.

==============================================================================================

Bose: “This vast abode of nature is built in many wings, each with its own portal. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist come in by different doors, each one his own department of knowledge, and each comes to think that this is his special domain unconnected with that of any other. Hence has arisen our present division of phenomena into the worlds of inorganic, vegetal and sentient. This philosophical attitude of mind may be denied. We must remember that all inquiries have as their goal the attainment of knowledge in its entirety”.

===============================================================================================

Footnotes:

1. John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants, Star Books, 1975, p41

2. USA 1973, in Great Britain Allen Lane, 1974. My copy Penguin 1975.

3. My sources are:

  • as footnote 2, p77–96
  • as footnote 1, p41–45
  • Brian Inglis, The Hidden Power, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p13–14.

Everything in quotation marks comes from one of these.

4. “Science is Not Your Enemy”, The New Republic, August 19th 2013, p33

· Science

The Secret Life of Plants — part 2

17th April 2020

    This article is the second in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins and others like him on the subject of plants. It follows on from an introduction, part 1, and an appendix to part 1. I’ve reached the point where the possibility of the existence of nature spirits, otherwise known as elemental beings, has to be contemplated, no matter what modern Enlightenment science tells us, in order to explain the behaviour of plants (and much else besides).

    Belief in nature spirits is an ancient tradition found all over the globe. It is the basis of animism, described as the “ancient philosophy that views everything in Nature as having an indwelling spirit/soul, including the plants, rocks, waters, winds, fires, animals, humans, and other life forms. Animism is the foundation of shamanism and has been considered the earliest form of human religion on planet Earth”¹. It will be interesting to see whether the earliest form of human religion has stood the test of time.

    Some examples are:

  • the ancient Greeks, who believed in dryads, nymphs, satyrs,
  • Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), where there are yakshas (male) and yakshini (female), described as “a broad class of nature-spirits… connected with water, fertility, trees, the forest, treasure and wilderness”². There are also nature spirits in the Japanese religion of Shinto, where they are called kami. Shinto is animistic; it is “shamanic and regards all things as alive, aware, sentient, and of spirit — just like us”³.
  • the Hebrew apocryphal tradition, where the Book of the Secrets of Enoch “states that everything from blades of grass to herbs in the field have special spirits”⁴,
  • so-called pagan traditions, including Druidism.

    Moving on to more modern times, esotericists believe that there are various elemental beings, existing in a different level of reality: these are called gnomes (earth spirits), undines (water spirits), sylphs (air spirits), and salamanders (fire spirits). (These terms refer to the ancient concept of the four elements, not what we understand by earth etc.) An outstanding example would be the 16th century Swiss healer Paracelsus, whom Manly P. Hall has described as “the Swiss Hermes, and the greatest physician of modern times”, and who says that he “has given us the most complete analysis of these strange creatures who live, move, and have their being unseen and unrealized by mortal man. Though we daily see their works, we have never learned to know the workers who, day and night, function through Nature’s finer forces”⁵ .

    Here I’m going to pose the question, considering that now most people find such ideas ridiculous, why did the ancients actually believe?

    We assume perhaps that people have always experienced the world in the same way that we do (saw through similar eyes, heard through similar ears), but formerly misinterpreted it, naïvely believing that hidden agencies were at work behind the weather, and so on. This is not necessarily true. It is reasonable to assume that through the centuries, consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious psyche, have themselves evolved. My assumption is that ego-consciousness has gradually become stronger, and that in the past the boundary between psyche and the material world was less pronounced. We might perhaps say that daily life once had more of a dreamlike quality. This would mean that, if nature spirits, or for that matter any spirits, do actually exist, then people in earlier times might have had a direct experience of them, and that is why they believed in them.

    It is not just me who thinks that. Jonathan Black is the author of The Secret History of the World⁶, which is a compendium of knowledge which “has been taught down the ages in certain secret societies” (p17), “common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world” (p25). His book “is the result of nearly twenty years’ research” into esoteric texts. More significantly, however, he was “helped to understand these sources by a member of more than one of the secret societies, someone who, in the case of one secret society at least, has been initiated to the highest level”. Black “had been working for years as an editor for one of London’s larger publishers”. One day this man walked into his office; he “was clearly of a different order of being” (p 23-24). They became friends, and this man became Black’s mentor, educated him in these secret teachings.

    That background information is my attempt to suggest that Black should perhaps be taken seriously. This is what he has to say about my idea: “In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us” (p58). They were not necessarily imagining these things; they were possibly literally aware of the reality of nature, and other, spirits.

    So, belief in spirits is alive and well even in modern times, among the self-appointed guardians of secret ancient knowledge. ‘Science’, of course, thinks that it knows better. However, it insists on only taking into account the material world, what can be appreciated by the five senses. As ego-consciousness has become stronger, we have become progressively cut off from the spirit world. That does not mean, however, that it has ceased to exist. Someone who thinks along the same lines is the prolific writer on spiritual and esoteric subjects V. Susan Ferguson. In an article inspired by the esotericist René Guénon, she talks about our ongoing “descent into matter and limited five-sense perception, which blocks our understanding of the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe”.

    Here she could easily be talking about modern science: “The people who have become prominent in all fields of modern life simply are no longer capable of understanding the real underlying metaphysical principles that are the substratum of the temporal illusory earth we stand upon. Thus the various and always changing theories that become the basis of our lives are profoundly flawed, unsound, and subject to collapse… The intelligence that is now held in high esteem is of the lowest order — regardless of how many corporate global policy institute think-tanks these modern era PhD priests are ensconced within”⁷.

    Someone who understood this very well was the poet William Wordsworth. (It seems that poets often know better than scientists.) These are some lines from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. He says that in early childhood we are still in touch with our origins in higher worlds: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” But then, as we grow up and become more accustomed to the material world, we lose touch with this: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”. He laments this: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more”.

    This may not be exactly what Wordsworth meant, but one interpretation of this could be the ego’s loss of connection with the psyche and its contents — it is often children who believe that they can see fairies. (Manly Hall says that “these little people are often seen by children, who remain clairvoyant up to about the seventh year”⁸.)

    It seems obvious that nature spirits cannot be physical, otherwise everyone would see them all the time. Why is it then that certain people can sometimes apparently see them? Is it something special about the observer? Or do the spirits have the ability to become sometimes slightly more physical, dense enough to be seen? We might perhaps then call them interdimensional beings.

    Modern educated Westerners may associate a belief in fairies etc. with primitive, simple-minded, poorly educated country folk. I would suggest, however, that the opposite is the case. In modern times there are two classes of believers (and there is a strong overlap between them).

    The first is that group of gifted adults who still seem able to see; we call them psychics, clairvoyants, or sensitives. They operate from a place higher than the rational mind, which is what I take Wordsworth to mean when he says prison-house. They are not trapped within the prison of scientific materialism. This may be a natural gift, or it is perhaps an ability that can be acquired through spiritual training. Here is an example of such a person⁹.

    The man in question was Geoffrey Hodson “with the gift of clairvoyance who claimed to be able to see fairies”. He was “a member of the Theosophical Society, a student of Buddhism, a practitioner of yoga, and a man who at first had regarded fairies as merely the products of the imagination, (but) had come to view them worthy of consideration thanks to an unexpected occult experience…”

    (I hope readers will be familiar with the case of the Cottingley fairies. If not please take a few minutes to do some internet research.) Hodson was invited by Edward Gardner who, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had been investigating the case, to visit Cottingley. Doyle considered him to be an “honorable gentleman with neither the will to deceive nor any conceivable object in doing so”. When he went to the glen with the two girls, he said that it “was swarming with many forms of elemental life, including wood elves, gnomes, and goblins, with even the rarer undines floating on the stream”. He said that the girls’ descriptions were essentially correct, but that “their powers of clairvoyance were more limited than his”.

    The second type of believers are great esoteric or spiritual teachers. An obvious example would be Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy.

    He would agree that these entities can be seen or sensed by clairvoyants, but not by humans in their everyday state of consciousness. We are talking here about the gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders mentioned above. He mentioned and discussed them in “Right and Wrong Use of Esoteric Knowledge”, a lecture delivered at Dornach, 18, 19 and 25 November 1917¹⁰.

    These elemental beings, or nature spirits, also figure strongly in Theosophy, founded by Helena Blavatsky and others in 1875. Tim Wyatt is a modern Theosophist, and has written a summary of Theosophical teachings, more immediately accessible than some texts, called Cycles of Eternity¹¹. He says that the elementals are the builders of the material world: “Elementals and nature spirits belong to the three elemental kingdoms below the mineral. They build and preserve all the other four kingdoms of nature below the super-human” (p28). (This sounds very similar to the quote from V. Susan Ferguson above: “… the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe”.)

    None of the above, of course, proves the existence of nature spirits. However, the observations that I quoted in part 1 by Tompkins and Bird, and those by Inglis in the Appendix, suggest that there is some kind of psychological or mental life going on in plants. These invisible elemental beings are one possible explanation, especially in the context of this quote from Wyatt, that could resolve the questions that these authors are posing.

Footnotes:

  1. Selena Fox, https://www.circlesanctuary.org/index.php/about-paganism/guide-to-nature-spirituality-terms
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaksha
  3. https://positivearticles.com/shinto-and-the-spirits-of-nature/
  4. I don’t have a copy of 2 Enoch to hand, but I’m quoting John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants, W. H. Allen & Co., 1975, p162, who is himself quoting Dorothy Retallack, The Sound of Music and Plants, DeVorss and Co, 1973, p57
  5. Unseen Forces, Philosophical Research Society Press, 1936, available in the Kessinger Legacy Reprints series, p 3
  6. Quercus, 2010
  7. Click here for a link to her article.
  8. as footnote 5, p8
  9. The following account comes from The Secret Life of Nature, Peter Tompkins, Thorsons, 1997, p11f
  10. see lecture 2, https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA178/English/RSP1966/WroRit_index.html
  11. Firewheel Books, 2016

· Science

The New Paradigm in Science — Strong Emergence

17th April 2020

    I recently read an interesting article on Medium.com by Paul Austin Murphy on the concept of emergence in science, specifically on the ideas of the physicist Sean Carroll in relation to it. There are two types of emergence theorised, weak and strong. Here is how Carroll defines the latter: “In strong emergence, the behaviour of a system with many parts is not reducible to the aggregate behaviour of all those parts, even in principle”. In simpler language, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot be explained by them. It is debated whether such systems exist, but many scientists believe that they do.

    It is difficult, if not impossible, to account for the cause of the emergent property. This idea is therefore in direct conflict with the principle of reductionism, which has been a long held assumption in science, and by implication materialism, which assumes that complex systems have been built up gradually from simpler forms, and therefore in theory should be able to be explained in terms of them.

    I’m not going to go into a discussion of the validity of the concept here; there is plenty of material readily available on the internet. I’m more interested in how this concept of strong emergence is viewed by scientists. Wikipedia puts it quite mildly:

  • “Strong emergence is a view not widely held in the physical sciences”.

  • “The plausibility of strong emergence is questioned by some as contravening our usual understanding of physics”¹.

My purpose in writing this article is rather to bring to your attention this striking quote in Murphy’s piece from the American philosopher Mark Bedau, which puts it much more strongly:

    “Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing”.

    All this suggests to me that the concept of strong emergence may be at the cutting edge of a scientific revolution, a new paradigm breaking through, hopefully something that may eventually consign materialism to the dustbin of history. Scientists may be reluctant to accept it for precisely that reason; as Bedau put it, it is something uncomfortably like magic. We know, of course, that most scientists do not like feeling uncomfortable; they are much happier in their rational, logical, material world. It is, however, often uncomfortable anomalies that lead to great breakthroughs in science.

=============================================================================

Footnote;

1. https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/829759

· Science

The Secret Life of Plants — part 1, Appendix

13th April 2020

    This article follows on from the first one in a series discussing the writings of Peter Tompkins and others like him on the subject of plants. There I made reference to the extraordinary behaviour of carnivorous plants:

  • “The sundew plant will grasp at a fly with infallible accuracy, moving in just the right direction towards where the prey is to be found. Some parasitical plants can recognize the slightest trace of the odour of their victim, and will overcome all obstacles to crawl in its direction”.
  • “Insect-devouring sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal, or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick to sense the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat”¹.

    This brief Appendix contains some further material on that topic.

======================================================================================================

    Carnivorous plants have also attracted the attention of Brian Inglis. In The Hidden Power² he discusses the work on plants of Joseph Sinel, who came to the conclusion that “things can be perceived without the use of any of the five senses”. Inglis thinks that there must be some kind of psi faculty at work (p17).

    He asks, how is it that “the common insectivorous bog-plant sun-dew, whose sticky hairs ordinarily are upright, ready to seize any fly alighting on them, turns upside-down when insects are unavailable, as if seeking nourishment in the bog below”? Details of experiments follow, the conclusion being that the sun-dew has “a sense of direction; it could tell what is, or is not, edible, the leaves ignoring inedible substances put on the needle. To Sinel this, too, looked like ‘an incipient faculty of “clairvoyance”…’ ”.

    Inglis continues: “The ability of the Venus fly-trap to snap shut when a fly is inside has attracted some attention from physiologists, puzzled by the plant’s ability to exert what resembles a powerful muscular reaction, such as closing one’s fist, with no muscles to account for it”.

    As you would expect, conventional scientists attempted to come up with a materialist, reductionist explanation: “The need to offer a ‘natural’ explanation led to what the New Scientist, in a note on the subject in 1981, described as ‘the classic textbook model of rapid changes in motor cell turgor’, based on the fact that plant cells maintain their shape through ‘turgor’ — water pressure. The trap, according to the model, was closed simply by rapid jettisoning of water from the appropriate cells”.

    This had sounded plausible, but a flaw in the argument was pointed out by Stephen Williams of Lebanon Valley College, Pennsylvania: “The major cells far from getting smaller as they jettisoned their load, actually increased in size”. He suggested electrical signalling as an alternative. This is possible, but Inglis asks the very reasonable question: “Even supposing this to be correct… on receipt of the signal, how is the trap closed?” (p18)

    Inglis then says: “A number of orthodox commentators, looking at what has been discovered about insectivorous plants, have admitted that they are ‘not satisfactorily accommodated in the omnibus of evolutionary doctrine’… They are not accounted for by invoking psi, either; but at least psi would make them easier to explain” (p18).

    If conventional science, and even psi cannot account for the behaviour of plants, do we have to turn to some kind of ‘supernatural’ explanation, a psychological level of plants, or even the existence of nature spirits?

    I’ll discuss that question in the next article.

===================================================================================================

Footnotes:

1. The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Allen Lane 1974, my copy Penguin 1975, p10 and p11

2. Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1986

· Science

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 7
  • Older Posts

Recent Posts

  • Happy Birthday to Alfred Russel Wallace
  • Reincarnation and Birth Defects
  • In Defence of Spirituality, Whatever Jules Evans Might Say
  • Reincarnation and Birthmarks — More Thoughts
  • Richard Dawkins. Scientific Truth? Or Just a Compulsive Liar?

Copyright © 2021 · Simply Pro Theme by Bloom Blog Shop.