This article follows on from part 1, part 2, and part 3. These were all extracted from a longer article on the theme of the reunification of science and religion, and then edited, for those readers who are only interested in this specific topic. I am now going to continue with further reflections not from that original article.

    I’ve reached the point where, even though Big Bang Theory might be true — many eminent cosmologists believe it — I think I have shown that it is based on some very poor scientific thinking. The most obvious example of this is the claim that Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the redshift demonstrated that the universe is expanding when Hubble himself rejected this claim (as mentioned in part 2). Can bad arguments lead to a correct theory? Perhaps, but probably unlikely.

    It’s now time to consider alternative ideas. According to various spiritual traditions there are several levels of reality in the universe; seven is the usual number given. The names given are not always the same, but the overall scheme is easily recognisable. Some of the levels in relation to humans have been called soul, causal, mental, astral, physical, and so on. (I’ve discussed this in two articles¹. What follows is based on material from them.)

    The source of these seven levels is an ultimate ground of being, and they are said to emanate from it. It is described as a void, emptiness, or nothingness which in another manifestation, paradoxically, is also a fullness, the totality of all that is, an ultimate oneness, which is creative. It then begins to manifest itself as these various levels, each one increasingly more dense, until it eventually becomes the material world, the lowest emanation, which emerges from the level immediately above it, usually called the astral.

    It seems likely that such a process of unfoldment would be gradual rather than sudden, and would therefore render unnecessary any idea of a sudden explosion. It’s interesting to note, however, that Big Bang Theory is a kind of caricature or parody of spiritual thinking on this issue. Various early creation myths use the word ‘void’. This is surely a good word to describe the universe at the time of the singularity before the Big Bang. It is equally a good word to describe the moment when the divine creative principle is withdrawn completely within itself before the process of manifestation begins. Big Bang Theory also describes an ongoing process of manifestation from an initial nothingness, so seems to be on the right track, but lacks a spiritual perspective.

    The text of Genesis 1 is very confusing, but nevertheless has pointers to the above understanding of a multi-levelled universe, and describes up to a point that process of creation, provided we do not take the words literally. For example, verses 6–8 say: “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. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day”.

    It is hard to believe that the word ‘waters’ in this context means what we normally understand by it, so how should we interpret it? The dividing dome between the higher and lower waters is called Sky, which we can perhaps interpret symbolically as heaven; at the very least it is some kind of threshold, a distinct separation between the higher planes and the lower. There are waters above it, thus the higher realms of spirit, and waters under it, the lower levels of psyche (including what is known as the astral). This is said to have occurred on the second day, thus early in the process of manifestation.

    Then at Genesis 1.9: “God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’ ”. If we take the ‘dry land’ to mean the material, physical level of the universe, then we have a clear reference here to the emergence of the material out of a less dense, non-material, astral level. The text suggests that the appearance of the dry land is a consequence of some process happening in the lower waters. This is essentially what the modern revolution in quantum physics discovered, that matter, as we perceive it, is an illusion generated from another level of reality, and is actually non-material. This was an idea originally expressed by:

• Werner Heisenberg, “The smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”.
• Sir James Jeans, “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”.
• Sir Arthur Eddington, “Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism”. The material world “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”.

and more recently by David Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order², and Unfolding Meaning³, which is a very interesting title from a spiritual perspective. I take his concepts of Implicate and Explicate Orders in the first-named book to refer to the lower waters and the physical universe respectively. (It is interesting that one of the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers Thales seems to have understood this. He suggested that the earth rests on water.)

    Max Planck added an explicitly spiritual dimension to this way of thinking: “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”.

    I accept that there are other parts of Genesis 1 which do not easily fit with this interpretation. I can only speculate on the reasons for this: have there been editorial changes, meanings lost in translation, or am I reading too much into the text? I suspect, however, that when the original Hebrew version was written, it was, for whatever reason, more profound than the version that has been handed down to us. At the very least, the above interpretation fits more closely with what other spiritual traditions have to say.

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

Footnotes:

1. Here are links to the two articles: article 1 and article 2

2. 1980, reissued by Routledge, 1995

3. a weekend of dialogue with David Bohm, edited by Donald Factor, Foundation House Publications, 1985

    I assume that readers are familiar with part 1, and part 2.

    So, is Big Bang theory a terrible error of modern science? There remains, of course, the enormous weight of contrary opinion; such a claim would obviously be dismissed by orthodox cosmologists. Who am I to challenge them? Is everything I’ve said in part 2 an erroneous, fringe viewpoint, easily disproved by the experts?

    Wishing to find further material to support my argument, I therefore had a look at a book called Let There Be Light, Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah: a New Conversation Between Science and Religion¹. As you can imagine from the title, I was hoping for agreement with the general thrust of what I was saying in part 1. (For the relevant passages, see footnote 2.)

    However, the author Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist, and lecturer on cosmology and Kabbalah, turned out to be a dedicated believer in orthodox Big Bang theory. For example, he says: “The basic theory and its derivatives have enabled scientists to explain with remarkable accuracy the intricate birth and early evolution of the universe and to understand its salient attributes, such as the rapid expansion that we see. Many subtle predictions have been verified, and meanwhile, as increasingly ethereal features of the observed universe are being uncovered, the model continues to provide either credible explanations or a solid framework for variant ideas. So far, the essential picture remains robust”. Smith has persuaded himself that the Big Bang is in accord with the ideas expressed in the Zohar (a medieval Kabbalistic text of Jewish mysticism).

    Christians also have enthusiastically accepted the Big Bang model, since creation ex nihilo seems to be in accord with the Genesis account. An example would be a book called Developing a Christian Worldview of Science and Evolution by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey³.

    From my perspective, the problem with both books is that they accept the orthodox story of the Big Bang, and are completely ignorant of what I have chosen to call the true history (in part 2). Thus we read the conventional ideas about redshift and CMBR. My suggestion, therefore, is that anyone who claims the truth of the theory, should be asked to explain in detail:

• why the tired-light theory is wrong
• why Hubble himself rejected the idea of the expanding universe
• and why the Big Bang explanation for CMBR was accepted, rather than the alternative which made much more accurate predictions of its temperature.

    By coincidence, I then listened to the tape of a talk given by the late John Gordon, former President of Blavatsky Lodge (the HQ of the Theosophical Society in London, where the talk was given), on a completely different subject⁴. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when I came across the following section:

    “The modern paradigm theory, put about by orthodox science, is that of Big Bang. Well, as I suggested to an astronomer from Glasgow University a little while ago, much to his dismay, the general theory about Big Bang theory, is as full of holes as a kitchen colander. (The audience laughs.) You laugh, he didn’t. He went ballistic at the very suggestion, on the grounds that I was not a scientist or an astrophysicist, therefore I knew nothing about the background to it. (This is what happens when you challenge the ‘experts’.) But when I asked him about certain of the phenomena associated with it, and the idea that the redshift and the blueshift, which is the basis of Big Bang theory, that redshift and blueshift occur purely also in relation to the movement of planets, relative to our own planet within the solar system, he wasn’t quite so keen on pushing the boat out. Nor the idea that the background microwave radiation, which has also been used to justify Big Bang theory, that this itself is not altogether surprising, bearing in mind that we have a huge number of celestial bodies moving through space. It’s rather like water moving through the ground. It creates an electrical field…

    “So, at the moment, Big Bang theory, science’s Big Bang theory, is a paradigm theory. It’s the best one they can think of, but they have to keep plugging the holes”. (‘Plugging the holes’ has been a familiar theme in parts 1 and 2.)

    He then referred to certain BBC Horizon programmes, in which “some of the foremost astrophysicists in the world have expressed puzzlement, dismay, disquiet over the fact that the whole of astrophysical theory at the moment looks highly suspect”. This was in March 2010. Things must have changed at the BBC since then, because the Horizon programmes I have been watching more recently have reverted to advocacy of the Big Bang theory without any signs whatsoever of puzzlement, dismay, or disquiet.

    Interestingly, in the same talk, John Gordon, obviously not sharing Howard Smith’s understanding, goes on to discuss the Zohar in support of his Theosophical, non-Big Bang viewpoint.

    This series will continue with further reflections on the Big Bang.

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

Footnotes:

1. New World Library, 2006

2. It seems that there are two possible solutions to the dark matter and dark energy problems. (The second solution is that) the cause of the dark matter and energy problems might have an esoteric or occult explanation. Esotericist Douglas Baker says: “The dark matter and energy now being probed by modern science are the mental matter and energies known to ancient sages”. This is also the line that Cox adopts, saying that the existence of dark matter conforms with the Ancient Wisdom. He wonders: “Is it possible that this represents the discovery (or rediscovery) of the galactic field of tamas known to the ancients thousands of years ago?”, and says that the dark-matter halo of modern science “corresponds directly to the dark neck of Shiva, which extends above his galactic torso”.

    So, even though Big Bang theory has presented very serious, perhaps insoluble, problems, it is still accepted uncritically by the majority of those involved. As (Robert) Cox puts it: “Although this theory is enormously popular it amounts to little more than a modern creation myth. …its starting premise is flawed logically. The dictates of pure reason tell us that something cannot be created from nothing. (The universe) must have been made from something, though modern science is mute as to what that mysterious something might have been. If we assume the Big Bang as a starting premise, the subsequent explanation of creation can be expressed logically, though it is rooted in an unexplained miracle”. Science accepts this last point, calling it a singularity, invoking uses of the word ‘infinite’ usually reserved for God. Cox’s last sentence is especially important, suggesting that the whole structure of Big Bang cosmology is a series of logical deductions based on the a priori assumption that Big Bang theory is correct. What if this assumption is wrong?

3. Tyndale House Publishers, 1999

4. ‘Atlantis and the Global Warming Cycle’, March 21st 2010

    A discussion of the Big Bang theory was the centrepiece of a talk which I gave recently on the subject of science and religion¹. I have extracted the content, added some extra material, and edited it to become the first three parts in this series, for readers interested in just this topic. The series will then continue with further reflections.

    I’m sure that many readers with an interest in science will be familiar with much of the material here. It is important, however, to establish in detail the conventional story of the Big Bang, before moving on in Part 2 to what I believe to be the true story. That will cast doubt on whether the universe did indeed begin with a Big Bang.

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

    For the vast majority of cosmologists the Big Bang has become an accepted fact. In this new series of articles I want to suggest that this theory, even though it might be true, is based on some very poor science and, like the theory of Darwinian evolution, has become tantamount to a religious dogma, a faith no more scientific than the beliefs of religious people that scientists sometimes rush to condemn.

    The term Big Bang was coined by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, and it has been adopted even though he intended it to be pejorative. His alternative was called the Steady State theory, which proposed that the universe was both expanding and eternal.

    In a 1987 article in New Scientist² Marcus Chown asked: “How do we know there was a big bang?” He could have said, but didn’t, why do we think there was a Big Bang? His justification included the phrases “armed with a growing mass of evidence” and “so confident of the scenario”. I’m going to investigate whether such confidence is justified. What follows is an outline of why cosmologists think there was a Big Bang, the orthodox story, repeated on BBC4 Horizon documentaries, and in various science books for popular consumption.

    I transcribed the next paragraph from a BBC4 documentary. Before publication this article was checked by a friend of mine who is a University of Cambridge Physics Professor. He marked this paragraph “not good”. If he’s right, that just goes to show how unreliable the BBC can be.

    The idea of an expanding universe could have been predicted by Einstein from his General Theory of Relativity, although he held back from doing so, preferring for non-scientific reasons, a static universe. He introduced into his equations the Cosmological Constant, which he later described as the biggest mistake of his career.

    In similar vein, here are two quotes from a New Scientist article³:

• “The big bang was born from our best theory of gravity, general relativity”.
• “According to general relativity it (space-time) must once have been an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point known as a singularity”.

    This is the text of my friend’s correction: “In its original form (1915), Einstein’s General Relativity equations implied an infinite universe. There were difficulties with this, and to make it finite, he found that an addition of an extra term (in 1917) (‘the cosmological term’) could make the universe finite. He then considered a slowly changing case (a quasi-static approximation), which then put a direct link between the value of the cosmological constant and the total mass of the universe. This was a mathematically tractable problem. De Sitter soon considered another approximate solution to Einstein’s equation with the cosmological term, but such that was very far from equilibrium, which then also becomes a mathematically tractable problem. He obtained a finite rapidly expanding universe”.

    The significant difference between the two versions is that the programme and the article suggest that the theory of General Relativity predicts an expanding universe, therefore associating the idea with Einstein, while the alternative says that the real issue for him was whether or not the universe is infinite. It was De Sitter, not Einstein, whose calculations suggested an expanding universe. I am not competent to decide which of the two accounts is closer to the truth.

(Returning now to, I believe, a reliable account.)

    Then, in the early 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann published solutions to Einstein’s equations, making no attempt to force a static-universe solution. This work later became the foundation for Big Bang theory, although it was the Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître who in 1927 independently first proposed the idea of a universe born at a single instant in the past, and expanding outwards.

    About this time the astronomer Edwin Hubble was analysing the light from distant galaxies, and discovered that it was shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Astronomers interpreted this as a Doppler effect, familiar to anyone who has noticed how the pitch of a police siren changes as it passes by. The siren becomes deeper because the wavelength of the sound is stretched out. Similarly with light, the wavelength of light from a galaxy which is moving away from us would be stretched out to the longest, or reddest, wavelength.

    It was therefore believed that Hubble had discovered that most galaxies are receding from the Milky Way, in other words that the universe is expanding. There seemed to be only one conclusion: the Universe must have been smaller in the past. There must have been a moment when the Universe started expanding: the moment of its birth. By imagining the expansion running backwards, astronomers deduce that the Universe came into existence several billion years ago — the figures given ranging between 13.5 and 15 billion years.

    According to the scientific method, a hypothesis or theory is required to make predictions which can be tested; if the predictions prove correct, this lends support to the theory, although not definite proof of it.

    In 1948 Big Bang advocates Robert Herman and Ralph Alpher, a student of George Gamow, who also made a significant contribution, predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation (which I’ll call CMBR from here on), believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected an odd signal with a radio horn they were using for satellite communications. The signal did not come from the Earth nor the Sun. It seemed to come from all over the sky. This appeared to be the evidence required, and scientists rushed to the conclusion that they had discovered the CMBR. Hoyle’s steady-state theory was rejected, Stephen Hawking no less saying that the discovery of the CMBR was the “final nail in the coffin for the steady-state theory”.

    So far, so good. Later on, however, it was decided that the observable universe did not fit with the predictions of Big Bang theory. The universe had to start off extremely uniform, with only tiny variations in the distribution of matter and energy, and had to be geometrically flat. These starting conditions seemed unlikely. It was therefore hypothesised that there must have been a very early spectacular growth spurt which would have spread out energy until it was evenly dispersed and straightened out any curves and warps in space. This spurt was named inflation.

    One could argue that this was just an elaborate fantasy designed to preserve Big Bang theory. After all, what could possibly have caused this inflation? Since the need to preserve the theory was considered so important, soon after inflation was hypothesised, it was concluded that it had indeed occurred.

    So everything seemed to be fine again, at least for the time being. I’ll just mention that recently there has been a complication, in that Paul Steinhardt, one of the original contributors to inflation theory, had second thoughts, and wrote a paper in 2011 which expressed doubts about it⁴.

    Later on, however, it was again decided that the observable universe did not fit with the predictions of Big Bang theory. Cosmologists were attempting to correlate the estimated mass of the galaxy with the known laws of gravity. Their results were inconsistent to the extent that their estimate of the galactic mass was off by as much as 90 percent. It was decided that the missing mass could be accounted for by postulating the existence of non-luminous, therefore invisible, dark matter. To date no one has detected it, or observed it for certain, but this does not prevent New Scientist articles from announcing frequently: “we know that the vast majority of the mass of the galaxy is hidden”.

    So, once again, Big Bang Theory was back on track, assuming that dark matter actually exists. Something akin to Groundhog Day happened, however, when it was noted that galaxies were accelerating away from each other, whereas, if the initial cause of the expansion was the Big Bang, it was assumed that the expansion should be slowing down. Dark energy was therefore hypothesised, to account for the discrepancy.

    Have cosmologists forgotten that, according to the scientific method, when data conflict with the predictions of a theory, you are meant to re-examine the theory? It seems, however, that the Big Bang has become so accepted that this is no longer deemed necessary. I have actually heard Harvard Professor of Physics Lisa Randall being interviewed on the radio, discussing dark matter, and saying “we have to defend the theory”. Why?

    So, even though Big Bang theory has presented very serious, so far insoluble, problems, it is still accepted uncritically by the majority of cosmologists. Are they right? I believe there is a strong possibility that they are wrong. So, in the next article I’ll turn to an alternative account, what I believe to be the true history. This will challenge the Big Bang theory in its entirety. The following paragraphs give a flavour of some of the objections.

     The spiritually oriented writer Robert Cox describes the problem: “Although this theory is enormously popular it amounts to little more than a modern creation myth… Its starting premise is flawed logically. The dictates of pure reason tell us that something cannot be created from nothing. (The universe) must have been made from something, though modern science is mute as to what that mysterious something might have been. If we assume the Big Bang as a starting premise, the subsequent explanation of creation can be expressed logically, though it is rooted in an unexplained miracle”⁵.

    Science accepts this last point, calling it a singularity, invoking uses of the word ‘infinite’ usually reserved for God (infinitely small, infinitely dense). Cox’s last sentence is especially important, suggesting that the whole structure of Big Bang cosmology is a series of logical deductions based on the a priori assumption that Big Bang theory is correct. What if this assumption is wrong?

    The philosopher Peter Wilberg gives more detail, and is even more scathing in his criticism: “The claim, now accepted as dogma, that the universe, including time and space themselves, began with a ‘Big Bang’, implies that there could be something ‘before’ time or ‘outside’ space. Such a simple logical and philosophical observation as this wholly subverts the assumption that ‘Big Bang’ theory is simply a verifiable scientific hypothesis confirmed by physical measurements and ‘observations’. Instead it is quite evidently a metaphysical theory full of logical and philosophical contradictions and paradoxes. It is effectively just a new religious creation ‘story’ or myth”⁶ .

    Or as Jon Cartwright puts it from a scientific viewpoint: “Recounting the beginning of time is about finding not just the right words, but the right physics — and ever since the big bang entered the popular lexicon, that physics has been murky”³. Indeed it has!

Footnotes:

1. For links to two versions click here.

2. issue 1583, October 22nd 1987

3. ‘Why the Big Bang was not the Beginning’, Jon Cartwright, issue 3169, March 17th 2018

4. ‘The Inflation Debate’, Scientific American, April 2011, Vol. 304 Issue 4, pp 36–43

5. Creating the Soul Body: The Sacred Science of Immortality, Inner Traditions, 2008, p90

6. The Science Delusion, New Gnosis Publications, 2008, pp 69–70

    This article follows on from part 1, so please read, if you’re not already familiar with it, at least the opening section of that regarding Brian O’Leary before proceeding here.

    I’m now going to describe a similar incident in my own life. I was attending a course experimenting with ESP. There were six Wednesday evenings, then a whole day Sunday workshop, and the following experiment took place on this last day. Each participant had been instructed to think in advance merely of the name of a person that no one else on the course would know and their town of residence.

    We broke into groups of three, one person providing the name and town, thus the inquirer, another trying to tune into that person psychically, and the third acting as secretary, writing down everything that was said. The psychic person was instructed not to censor anything, and say absolutely everything that came into their head. If something meaningful and relevant emerged, the inquirer was told to ask neutral questions to try to take the psychic further, but obviously without giving away any information, thus something along the lines of “can you say anything more about that?”

    I won’t go into detail about how the psychic state was induced, merely report on two significant moments. When I was acting as the inquirer, I provided the name and town of a friend of mine who was at that time taking his final exams in psychology over a hundred miles away. He was renowned for having illegible handwriting; anyone who knew him would say that. Within a few moments of my having said the name and town, the psychic said: “I see large halls. I see lots of handwriting in front of me, and I can’t understand any of it”. I was very impressed, and therefore asked “can you say anything more about the halls?”. I was hoping to get the answer that they were university examination halls. The psychic was unable, however, to say anything more.

    While I was acting as the psychic, some way into the session a voice inside my head said “say alligator”. For some time, even though we had been instructed to censor nothing, I resisted saying this. It’s hard to say why; perhaps it just seemed ridiculous, perhaps I was expecting images rather than words. Eventually, however, I did say “a voice is telling me to say alligator”. In the feedback session that followed, it was revealed that the inquirer and former partner (the named person not present in the room) had had a holiday in Florida, the most memorable moment of which was watching alligators, and this for some reason had become a significant turning point in their relationship.

    This experience was very impressive, but did not have such a dramatic effect on me as his did on Brian O’Leary, apparently his first encounter with psi. As I said, this was the last day of the course, and by that time I had already become convinced of the reality of ESP.

    It’s possible, and sceptics might well say, that the two examples above are merely coincidences;            I obviously prefer to believe otherwise. How can you tell? What fascinates me the most is that a voice inside my head said “say alligator”. Who or what was that voice? How did it know about the alligator? It would seem that I was not tuning in psychically to that person, rather that I was being given information, but by whom?

    For me, this was clear evidence that thoughts are not generated by the brain, or at least not all of them. Some independent consciousness, which had access to my mind, also had access to information from the external world in some inexplicable way.

    Here is a quote from Sam Harris, who featured in part 1: “Most scientists consider themselves physicalists; this means, among other things, that they believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of our brains… Indeed, many scientists purvey this conviction as though it were itself a special sacrament, conferring intellectual integrity upon any man, or woman, or child who is man enough to swallow it”¹.

    For me, scientists can go on saying things like this for all eternity. I have evidence from my own life that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

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

Footnote:

1. The End of Faith, Free Press, 2006, p208

    I’ve been inspired to write a couple of articles on ESP after reading a passage from Brian O’Leary’s The Second Coming of Science: an Intimate Report on the New Science¹.

    O’Leary is an outstanding example of a new-paradigm scientist. This is how he describes himself; he was once “a typical ‘left-brained’ academic — rationalistic, reductionistic, deterministic, materialistic — and I felt I had the universe and its laws mastered. Serving on the physics faculty at Princeton University I lived a comfortable life and was well accepted by my peers. Yet for all that I felt alienated. Cut off from life. I felt no joy about the science I was doing”.

    Then something happened which completely turned his life around. “In the spring of 1979, during a weekend ‘human potential’ workshop. I temporarily let go of my rigid thinking. As a result, my hard-earned scientific belief system was irreversibly shaken. In one of the final processes of the workshop, sitting opposite a total stranger who gave me only the name of a man, his age and his town of residence. I was asked to tune in psychically on this man. While the scientist-skeptic within me chattered ‘poppycock!’ I found myself somehow slipping into a state that could best be termed ‘trancelike’, and immediately conjured up an image of this person. Then I described him as a meteorologist-journalist who liked to hang out on the west coast of Maui and who had lost his wife by death.

    “All of that ‘poppycock’ turned out to be true. Lacking the conventional sensory and informational means of arriving at such an accurate description, I was dumbfounded. My actions appeared to violate the precepts of Western science — my science — which had largely formed my sense of reality and security. Without knowing it, I had just participated in a successful ‘remote viewing’ experience — a kind of clairvoyant process known through the ages by psychics, mystics and, lately parapsychologists”.

    I found this very interesting, for I had had an almost identical experience around the time of my conversion to a spirituality worldview. When something has happened to you personally, the scepticism of others doesn’t matter; you know it for a fact.

    Let’s have a look at two such sceptics. The new-paradigm scientist Rupert Sheldrake reports a conversation with Richard Dawkins in front of a TV camera. “Dawkins then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand, without going into any detail. He said that if it really occurred, it would ‘turn the laws of physics upside down’, and added, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ ”. Sheldrake’s reply was the same as what mine would have been: “This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”².

    We can obviously expect prejudice like this from the closed mind of Dawkins. Sam Harris is a more interesting case. He is well known as one of the Four Horsemen group of prominent and influential New Atheists, and the author of The End of Faith. He was a co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a foundation for spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society (which I think no longer exists). Despite all this, he is the author of Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion. That surprising title intrigued me, so I decided to take a look.

    On the whole it is disappointing, the emphasis in the title is obviously on the word searching — Harris doesn’t seem to have found spirituality, and remains on the whole sceptical. It’s nevertheless an interesting read. However, on the subject of ESP he says: “While I remain open to evidence of psi phenomena — clairvoyance, telepathy, and so forth — the fact that they haven’t been conclusively demonstrated in the lab is a very strong indication that they do not exist”³.

    It makes you wonder what evidence would be needed to persuade these sceptics. Obviously what is needed is a direct, personal experience, as in the example of O’Leary above. As I said, when something has happened to you, the theories and scepticism of others don’t matter; you know it for a fact.

    I’m not going to go over the whole history of the evidence for ESP. One highly significant example is that the American military once pumped a lot of money into a Remote Viewing project. Would they really have done that if it weren’t successful? I suggest, that if the American military had good results and believed in Remote Viewing, then that is pretty good evidence.

    Two of the best known of these psychic spies are Joe McMoneagle and Pat Price. Dean Radin gives an account of one especially impressive operation:

    “Why was this topic supported for two decades…? For one very simple reason: remote viewing works — sometimes… When conventional investigation and intelligence techniques were at a loss to provide critical information on sensitive missions, sometimes remote viewing worked spectacularly.

    “For example, in September 1979 the National Security Council asked one of the most consistently accurate army remote viewers, a chief warrant officer named Joe McMoneagle, to ‘see’ inside a large building somewhere in northern Russia. A spy satellite photo had shown some suspicious heavy-construction activity around the building, which was about a hundred yards from a large body of water. But the National Security Council had no idea what was going on inside, and it wanted to know. Without showing McMoneagle the photo, and giving him only the map coordinates of the building, the officers in charge of the text asked for his impressions. McMoneagle described a cold location, with large buildings and smokestacks near a large body of water. This was roughly correct, so he was shown the spy photo and asked what was inside the building. McMoneagle sensed that the interior was a very large, noisy, active working area… In a later session, he sensed that a large submarine was apparently under construction in one part of the building. But it was too big, much larger than any submarine that either the Americans or the Russians had…

    “When these results were described to members of the National Security Council, they figured that McMoneagle must be wrong, because he would be describing the largest, strangest submarine in existence, and it was supposedly being constructed in a building a hundred yards from the water. Furthermore, other intelligence sources knew absolutely nothing about it. Still, because McMoneagle had gained a reputation for accuracy in previous tasks, they asked him to view the future to find out when this supposed submarine would be launched. McMoneagle scanned the future, month by month, ‘watching’ the future construction via remote viewing, and sensed that about four months later the Russians would blast a channel from the building to the water and launch the sub.

    “Sure enough, about four months later, in January 1980, spy-satellite photos showed that the largest submarine ever observed was traveling through an artificial channel from the building to the body of water…

    “Scores of generals, admirals, and political leaders who had been briefed on psi results like this came away with the knowledge that remote viewing was real. This knowledge remained highly classified because remote viewing provided a strategic advantage for intelligence work…

    “Scientists who had worked on these highly classified programs, including myself, were frustrated to know firsthand the reality of high-performance psi phenomena and yet we had no way of publicly responding to skeptics. Nothing could be said about the fact that the U. S. Army had supported a secret team of remote viewers, that those viewers had participated in hundreds of remote-viewing missions, and the DIA, CIA, Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, and Secret Service had all relied on the remote-viewing team for more than a decade, sometimes with startling results”.

    This account can be found in a book called The Conscious Universe⁴. I find it impressive and convincing, unless of course you think that Radin just made the whole thing up. Interestingly, Sam Harris actually references this book, saying: “Researchers who study these things allege that the data are there and that proof of psi can be seen in departures from randomness that occur over thousands of experimental trials”. Well, obviously sometimes things do happen against the odds, so such experiments may not be considered definitive proof. Yet he fails to mention evidence like the above account, saying “I have yet to see a case in which evidence for such abilities was presented in a credible way”. (Perhaps he didn’t read the whole book?) Well, if he needs to see in person the evidence for such abilities, he should spend more time in parapsychology laboratories. I suggest that he would be more than willing to accept without being present the work of others which supports his worldview. Why not accept Dean Radin’s account?

    In Radin’s book there is also a fascinating chapter called A Field Guide to Skepticism, obviously a psychological analysis of this phenomenon, which I highly recommend. In it he quotes the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true”. This is, of course, what materialists constantly have to do, in order to preserve their worldview.

    Returning now to Richard Dawkins’ claim that the reality of ESP would “turn the laws of physics upside down”, so what? That’s how the scientific method works. There is a consensus which is accepted until repeated anomalies appear, so that the old paradigm can no longer be sustained. Then the ‘laws’ need to be changed. That is what needs to happen now in regard to ESP. The problem is that atheistic materialist scientists won’t accept what needs to happen to change the rules.

    I’ll conclude by mentioning an editorial in New Scientist from several years ago (not on the subject of parapsychology, but the quotes are appropriate)⁵. The title was “We deny the inexplicable at our peril”. Here are some selected quotes:

• “It’s the evidence that counts, not our prejudices, even when that means overturning what we thought were fundamental ideas”.
• “Scepticism needs to be tempered with open-mindedness. Unexpected and inexplicable experimental observations sometimes lead to significant breakthroughs”.
• “Musings that they are ‘probably wrong’ or that there ‘must be a mistake somewhere’ will get us nowhere”.
• “Sometimes organised scepticism needs to be shaken out of its comfort zone”.

    Indeed it does!

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

Footnotes:

1. North Atlantic Books, 1992. The quote is from the Foreword, Pix-x

2. The Science Delusion, Coronet, 2012, p256

3. Black Swan, 2015, the quote is on p170

4. HarperOne, 1997, pp 214–216

5. issue 2783, October 23rd 2010

    “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.

    That is the opening of a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis by Nobel-prize winner Francis Crick¹ on his “scientific search for the soul” (the subtitle). I often come across this quote in books and talks, usually when the author or speaker wants an example of the extreme lengths that materialist science can go to, or, put less kindly, how ridiculous a supposedly intelligent scientist can sometimes be.

    Recently, however, I’ve come across someone praising him. Here is Steven Pinker: “The feature (neuroscientists) find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it ‘the astonishing hypothesis’ — the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA (personal digital assistant), consciousness is the activity of the brain”².

    I hope everyone understands that the last statement is Pinker’s personal belief; I would say his faith, since it is tantamount to a religious statement. It is not science. The fact that most neuroscientists agree does not prove it; it merely indicates the inadequacy of neuroscience to see what is really going on.

    I believe that what Pinker rejects is actually the case. The idea that the brain acts as a reducing valve or filter which limits consciousness is a credible hypothesis mentioned frequently, obviously in literature that Pinker doesn’t read.

    In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley quotes the Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, who suggests that we should take seriously the idea of the French philosopher Henri Bergson: “The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe”³. Joseph Campbell quotes the passage and embraces it⁴, saying that “each one of us is potentially Mind at Large”.

    The idea of the reducing valve is also called the Transmission Model, following William James. Other relevant names are Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Henri Bergson as noted above, English philosopher F. C. S. Schiller. A highly relevant book is Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality⁵. Chapter 3 is called ‘The “Transmission” Model of Mind and Body: a Brief History’. Its author Michael Grosso says: “What emerges is a picture, deeply embedded in the historical psyche of an intuition of mind as primordial and transcendent, mind interactively interwoven with and essentially pervading physical nature. It is an intuition at odds with currently prevailing outlooks that lean en masse toward physicalism”, thus Crick, Pinker, and others like them.

    So, it is not just the silly, ignorant public who reject the beliefs of neuroscientists. I hope that these impressive thinkers will be remembered long after Pinker and Crick (apart from his discovery of the structure of DNA) have been forgotten. Crick says: “This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing”. Pinker says that “many people outside the field find (this idea) the most shocking”. As is frequently the case, the public’s intuition is probably more accurate than the conclusions of modern scientists. The hypothesis is astonishing because nobody in their right mind could believe it.

    “The brain is not the mind; it is an organ suitable for connecting a mind to the rest of the universe”⁶.

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

Footnotes:

1. Simon & Schuster, 1994

2. The Mystery of Consciousness, Time magazine, January 19th 2007

3. Vintage Classics, 2004, p10

4. Myths To Live By, Souvenir Press, 1973, reissued 1991, p263

5. Edward Kelly and others, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

6. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: a Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, HarperOne, 2007, Introduction, Pxi