Spirituality In Politics

The Reality of ESP — part 2

    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.

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Footnote:

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

The Reality of ESP — part 1

    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!

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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

Consciousness and the Brain – the Transmission Model

    “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.

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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

Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — Creative Evolution, part 3

    This is the latest in a series of articles. It would be helpful to have read them all¹, but essential to have read at least the last one. Otherwise what follows won’t make much sense.

    In the second half of the previous one, I was describing how spiritual traditions understand the nature of an organism, that there are several other levels or bodies above the physical body, thus not manifested in the physical world. I concluded by saying that, if these other bodies do exist, it opens up the possibilities that evolution and development might take place at levels different from the physical before emerging into physical form, and that physical processes might be directed from these higher levels.

    Raynor C. Johnson, whom I consider to be an authority in spiritual matters, expresses this idea as follows. He says that humans participate in at least six levels, that “the soul has acquired and uses a hierarchy of five bodies, or vehicles, or instruments, to serve its purposes”, and that “each body may be regarded as created by, or precipitated from, the one higher above it. The influence of the soul penetrates through all the bodies; the influence of the causal body penetrates through all those below it, and so on”².

    Now I’m going to explore whether there is any scientific evidence in support of such ideas, beginning by discussing a book called The Cosmic Blueprint by the physicist Paul Davies³. Even though he has written books with titles like The Mind of God, and God and the New Physics, he does not speak from a spiritual perspective. He is rather a conventional scientist, seeking naturalistic explanations: “I have taken the position that the universe can be understood by the application of the scientific method. While emphasising the shortcomings of a purely reductionist view of nature, I intended that the gaps left by the inadequacies of reductionist thinking should be filled by additional scientific theories that concern the collective and organisational properties of complex systems, and not by appeal to mystical or transcendent principles” (p203).

    He is, however, open-minded, will acknowledge genuine problems when he finds them, and does not try to sweep them under the carpet. Having stated the above as his starting point, he concedes immediately that scientific theory comes up against a big obstacle: “The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness — in other words, that the universe has organised its own self-awareness — is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming”.              I wonder what this mysterious ‘something going on’ is!

    He does use the term ‘new paradigm’, but in a different sense to how I’ve used it in earlier articles, where I think of it as a reunification of science and religion. He sees instead the need for a revolution in scientific thinking, along the lines of my theme of creative evolution: “Now there is the new paradigm of the creative universe, which recognises the progressive, innovative character of physical processes. The new paradigm emphasises the collective, cooperative and organisational aspects of nature; its perspective is synthetic and holistic rather than analytic and reductionist” (p2).

    If the universe is creative, it must be intelligent, and nothing like the blind, unconscious evolutionary process advocated by Richard Dawkins and others like him. (In passing, it is worth noting that such an idea, if true, refutes any notions of deism, a remote God who withdraws after the act of creation. As the epigram to his first chapter Davies quotes Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine: “God is no more an archivist unfolding an infinite sequence he had designed once and forever. He continues the labour of creation throughout time”⁴.) The question is, where does the intelligence reside? Is it in nature itself, which is the idea that Davies is exploring in this book? (He frequently uses the term self-organisation, which implies nothing external or higher.) Or does it descend from the higher levels that I was describing above? He actually uses the term downward causation, as does another physicist Amit Goswami, author of Creative Evolution: a Physicist’s Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design⁵, thus suggesting something similar to Raynor Johnson above.

    Here are a few random observations and quotes relevant to my theme, that nature cannot be understood without reference to other levels of reality:

  • The word blueprint in his title is actually reminiscent of the word archetype, as discussed in my previous article. Is there a blueprint (plan, design) for the cosmos?
  • “Strong organising principles are invoked by those who find existing physical laws inadequate to explain the high degree of organisational potency found in nature and see this as evidence that matter and energy are somehow being guided or encouraged into progressively higher organisational levels by additional creative influences”. He also refers to “some ‘behind the scenes’ creative activity” (p151). What could ‘behind the scenes’ possibly mean from a physicalist perspective, if not a higher level?
  • Referring to the ideas of physicist David Bohm – I would argue the most spiritual of the quantum physicists – who believes that quantum processes are not random, Davies says that in that case “the whole basis of neo-Darwinism is undermined”, that there is “an internally ordered process of evolution” (p156).
  • “Strong organising principles — additional laws of physics that refer to the cooperative, collective properties of complex systems, and which cannot be derived from the underlying existing physical laws — remain a challenging but speculative idea. Mysteries such as the origin of life and the progressive nature of evolution encourage the feeling that there are additional principles at work which somehow make it ‘easier’ for systems to discover complex organised states. But the reductionist methodology of most scientific investigations makes it likely that such principles, if they exist, risk being overlooked in current research” (p199).
  • “The flower analogy suggests the idea of a blueprint — a pre-existing plan or project which the universe is realising as it develops. This is Aristotle’s ancient teleological picture of the cosmos. Is it to be resurrected by the new paradigm of modern physics?” (p200)

    Perhaps the most difficult problem to resolve without reference to higher levels is that of morphogenesis: “Among the many scientific puzzles posed by living organisms, perhaps the toughest concerns the origin of form. Put simply, the problem is this. How is a disorganised collection of molecules assembled into a coherent whole that constitutes a living organism, with all the right bits in the right places? The creation of biological forms is known as morphogenesis, and despite decades of study it is a subject still shrouded in mystery. (He was writing in 1989, and science can make quick progress. I would be surprised, however, if significant progress has been made since then on these issues.)

    “The enigma is at its most striking in the seemingly miraculous development of an embryo from a single fertilised cell into a more or less independent living entity of fantastic complexity, in which many cells have become specialised to form parts of nerve, liver, bone, etc. It is a process that is somehow supervised to an astonishing level of detail and accuracy in both space and time.

    “In studying the development of the embryo it is hard to resist the impression that there exists somewhere a blueprint, or plan of assembly, carrying the instructions needed to achieve the finished form. In some as yet poorly understood way, the growth of the organism is tightly constrained to conform to this plan. There is thus a strong element of teleology involved. It seems as if the growing organism is being directed towards its final state by some sort of global supervising agency” (p 102).

    “If there is a blueprint, the information must be stored somewhere, and the obvious place is in the DNA of the original fertilised egg, known to be the repository of genetic information. (This would be the standard neo-Darwinian explanation.) This implies that the ‘plan’ is molecular in nature. The problem is then to understand how the spatial arrangement of something many centimetres in size can be organised from the molecular level. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of cell differentiation. How do some cells ‘know’ they have to become blood cells, while others must become part of the gut, or backbone? Then there is the problem of spatial positioning. How does a given cell know where it is located in relation to other parts of the organism, so that it can ‘turn into’ the appropriate type of cell for the finished product?

    “Related to these difficulties is the fact that although different parts of the organism develop differently, they all contain the same DNA. If every molecule of DNA possesses the same global plan for the whole organism, how is it that different cells implement different parts of that plan? Is there, perhaps, a ‘metaplan’ to tell each cell which part of the plan to implement. If so, where is the metaplan located? In the DNA? But this is surely to fall into an infinite regress”.

    Davies continues to discuss further difficulties if the blueprint is genetic, then says: “The real challenge is to demonstrate how localised interactions can exercise global control. It is very hard to see how this can ever be explained in mechanistic terms at the molecular level” (p104). If that is true, then we presumably have to look to other higher levels in order to explain this very real phenomenon.

    He goes on to observe that the traditional mechanistic, reductionist approach is based on the particle concept of physics, but that particles as primary objects have been replaced in physics by fields. He notes, however that “so far the field concept has made little impact on biology” (p105). He then suggests a possible solution to the above problem: “A possible escape is to suppose that somehow the global plan is stored in the fields themselves, and that the DNA acts as a receiver rather than a source of genetic information” (p106).

    I would suggest that this is indeed the case, or at least that such an idea, if true, fits neatly with the idea of downward causation as expressed by Raynor Johnson above. Are these ‘fields’ a scientific way of describing what spiritual people call etheric or astral bodies, or even the soul?

    I said above that Davies does not have a spiritual agenda, but tries to restrict his thinking to the realm of science. At a conference of scientists and mystics, however, he said that “Teilhard (de Chardin)’s belief in a creative progressive cosmos has at last been vindicated”. If he is sticking by his first statement, he is therefore saying that a creative progressive cosmos is true science! If he is correct, that would be a nail in the coffin of neo-Darwinism: “There will always be some scientists who’ll see in the creative cosmos nothing but a pointless charade. Others, however, will find these new developments deeply inspiring and it will confirm their belief that there is a meaning behind existence”⁶. Meaning! Thus teleology, that neo-Darwinian heresy.

Footnotes:

1. for a guide, see under Evolution, Doubts About Darwinism, New, on the Blog Index page.

2. The Spiritual Path, Hodder & Stoughton, 1972, pp 13–14

3. Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1989

4. ‘The Rediscovery of Time’, in Science and Complexity, ed. Sara Nash, Science Reviews Ltd., 1985

5. Theosophical Publishing House, 2008

6. ‘The Cosmic Blueprint: Self-Organizing Principles of Matter and Energy’, in The Spirit of Science from Experiment to Experience, David Lorimer (ed.), Floris Books, pp 74, 96

Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — Creative Evolution, part 2

    This is the latest in a series of posts¹. Here is a brief summary of the earlier ones for readers not familiar with them.

    I’ve been discussing Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Creationism, and the possibility of an alternative. The problem with Darwinism is that it is driven by an atheistic agenda, and tends to ignore the evidence, which is that there appears to be intelligence and purpose in organisms. The problem with Intelligent Design (even though the idea has some merit) is that it is often derived from unproven Christian theology, namely monotheism and a Personal God. The question, therefore, is whether we can find an alternative understanding which does justice to the evidence. In the previous article I introduced the term Creative Evolution, which is the title of books by the physicist Amit Goswami, the philosopher Henri Bergson; it is also implied by the thinking of the biologist Stephen Talbott.

    I am now going on to discuss the issue from a spiritual perspective, offering speculations and hypotheses, which will hopefully throw some light on this difficult issue, beginning with some necessary preamble. There are two sections, the first considering the nature of God and the cosmos.

    Spiritual traditions, in contrast to Christianity with its Personal God, consider the ultimate Ground of Being to be impersonal, beyond all description, attribution — a kind of nothingness. In Hinduism this is called Brahman, and in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah it is called Ayin. Thus Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi says: “God the Transcendent is called in Kabbalah AYIN. AYIN means No-Thing. AYIN is beyond Existence, separate from any-thing. AYIN is Absolute Nothing… There is nowhere where AYIN is, for AYIN is not”².

    Hard though this is to understand, out of this nothingness emerges a creative principle, a unity of being, a Oneness. In Hinduism this is called Brahma, which should be considered neither personal nor masculine, even though it is sometimes called the creator God. (If it is the source of everything, it must contain everything feminine.) In Kabbalah, it is called the En Sof. Halevi says that “out of the no-thingness comes the one of EN SOF… As the One to the Zero of AYIN, EN SOF is the Absolute All to AYIN’s Absolute Nothing… Both Nothing and All are the same”³.

    Carl Jung, the influential ‘mystical’ psychologist, opens his so-called Gnostic treatise The Seven Sermons to the Dead⁴ with very similar statements: “I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness… Nothingness is both empty and full… A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities”. “This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma”. In this last sentence Jung is explicitly saying that any being with personhood, for example the Christian personal deity, would be lower in the hierarchy of emanations, and should not therefore be considered God the Absolute.

    These spiritual traditions therefore replace the idea of a personal Creator God with an impersonal creative principle, which can reasonably be called the Divine Mind.

    Those introductory remarks were necessary in order to provide a background to what follows. The idea most frequently encountered in spiritual literature, relevant to the question of Intelligent Design, is that from this Oneness various levels of being emanate, one of which is a realm of ideas, which might be called the thoughts of the Divine Mind. Jung calls them archetypes, which means blueprints. In ancient Egyptian religion these were called neter. Something similar was expressed by the philosopher Plato, who is widely believed to have been initiated into the Egyptian esoteric tradition; he wrote about a world of Ideal Forms, so that we now talk about Platonic ideas.

    Amber Jayanti, writer on the Qabalah (a later spelling of Kabbalah), while discussing the creative process of four worlds according to that system, says: “The first world is called the World of Archetypes, or Atziluth in Hebrew. This is the divine world of the Universal Mind which generates the seed ideas after which things are then patterned by people and nature… This world is symbolized by the divine spark that causes the outward and downward flow of emanation or the life force from above”⁵. She also talks about “the invisible framework or structure beneath all physical forms, and upon which these are built”, and “the blueprints for what we have been planning to manifest in the physical world”.

    In passing, I’ll just note that, before Darwin, archetypes were thought to be the explanation for the forms of creatures.

    My second section addresses the question of the nature of organisms. Spiritual traditions often talk about a hierarchy of levels of existence, seven in number, of which the material universe is the lowest. For example, Amber Jayanti, even though Qabalah refers to the four worlds of creation, thus apparently four levels, talks about “the metaphysical system of the seven planes of existence and seven bodies” (p73). Thus spirit, before it manifests as a physical human being, descends through these levels and acquires several bodies appropriate to each one. The six bodies below pure spirit have been called soul, causal, mental, astral, etheric, and physical⁶, sometimes with variations, according to the various traditions.

    In spiritual literature this idea is usually applied to humans. It is an interesting question, therefore, whether the same idea, or something similar, can be applied to other organisms — animals, or even plants. I’ll briefly discuss the latter, assuming that, if this is true of plants, then it would surely also be true of animals.

    We know what Darwinian biologists will say about plants, that they have evolved through a process of natural selection, end of story.

    It would once have been absurd to think of plants as sentient, let alone having some form of consciousness. Times are changing, however, and new research is being done. Some books which offer alternative ideas, from a reasonably scientific perspective, are:

  • Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World⁷
  • Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows⁸

    Others, which would seem more outrageous to an orthodox scientist, are:

  • John Whitman, The Psychic Power of Plants⁹
  • Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants¹⁰.

    I’ll briefly discuss the latter. Having presented over 300 pages of material, describing many scientific experiments, on their concluding page the authors refer to:

  • “(Gustav) Fechner’s animistic vision of plants being ensouled”
  • “Goethe’s concept of a prototype plant” (does prototype = archetype?)
  • “the world of the devas and nature spirits”
  • two spiritual traditions:

1) Theosophy: “The ancient wisdom, as detailed by seers like Mesdames Helena P. Blavatsky and Alice A. Bailey, throws quite another light on the energy of bodies, both of humans and of plants, as well as the relation of individual cells to the entire cosmos”.

2) “Steiner’s anthroposophy, or Spiritual Science, throws such a light on plant life and agriculture as to make scientists root in their tracks”.

    It’s worth mentioning that the conclusions made by these spiritual traditions are sometimes obtained by clairvoyance, psychic investigation. The authors quote Dr. Aubrey Westlake: (who describes our imprisoned state, we are locked in a) “valley of materialistic concepts, refusing to believe there is anything other than the physical-material world of our five senses. For we, like the inhabitants of the country of the blind, reject those who claim to have ‘seen’ with their spiritual vision the greater supersensible world in which we are immersed, dismissing such claims as ‘idle fancies’ and advancing far ‘saner’ scientific explanations”. The authors continue: “The attraction of the seer’s supersensible world, or worlds within worlds, is too great to forgo, and the stakes too high, for they may include survival for the planet. Where the modern scientist is baffled by the secrets of the life of plants, the seer offers solutions which, however incredible, make more sense than the dusty mouthings of academicians”.

    There may be much more to plants, therefore, than is apparent. They may have other invisible, immaterial aspects —  the higher bodies and levels that I was discussing above.

    If these other bodies do exist, this opens up two intriguing possibilities:

  • evolution and development might take place at levels different from the physical before emerging into physical form
  • physical processes might be directed from higher levels.

    Such suggestions might seem strange and far-fetched, and are of course impossible from a materialist perspective. In the next post, I’ll begin to explore whether there is any scientific evidence in support of such ideas.

    Footnotes:

1. Earlier articles were: 1) Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Creationism — or Something Else?    2) Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — the Problem of Natural Selection     3) Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — Intuition, part 1  4) Reasons to Doubt Darwinism – Creative Evolution, part 1

2. A Kabbalistic Universe, Rider & Company, 1977, p7

3. In this context, a wonderful symbol for God is a turtle. I have discussed this in a previous article, The Problem of Literalism.

4. Robinson & Watkins Books, 1967, p7. The circumstances around the creation of this text were extraordinary. For details see book 10 of my article, 10 Books Which Changed My Life.

5. Principles of Qabalah, Thorsons, 1999, p78

6. Although it is often expressed in those terms, it is also possible, and perhaps closer to the truth, to see this process as one of progressive densification, these bodies being superimposed upon each other and integrated. They coexist but the ‘higher’ bodies are merely more subtle, more rarefied than the physical.

7. William Collins, 2017

8. Oneworld, 2012

9. Starbooks, 1975

10. Penguin, 1975, p318

 

 

Reasons to Doubt Darwinism – Creative Evolution, part 1

    The purpose of this post is to discuss the term Intelligent Design in relation to evolutionary theory, and suggest that, even though it may have some merits, the term Creative Evolution may be better.

    In a previous post, I noted that the emphasis can fall on either of the two words in Intelligent Design, its advocates stressing the ‘design’ element. However, it is also possible to stress the ‘intelligent’ element, thus putting ‘design’ onto the sidelines. This is more in accord with what can actually be observed, since there is strong evidence for intelligence in nature. The word design is therefore controversial, but the word intelligent less so, even Darwinian biologists agreeing that living organisms appear intelligent and purposeful, although they dismiss this as an illusion created by natural selection.

    The perceived problem with the term Intelligent Design is that it suggests a specific being, an intelligent agent, planning in advance in the manner of an inventor or an artist, therefore that the organism is an after-effect, the result of this process. Atheists and materialists obviously want to reject this idea out of hand because of its supernatural implications.

    Although advocates of Intelligent Design make scientific arguments, and usually avoid making specific claims about the nature of the designer, it is often the case that they are Christians. Therefore, hidden behind their arguments, there are assumptions about the truth of Christian theology, specifically monotheism and a personal God. Once these are assumed, there is little room for discussion about the nature of the designer, or the meaning of the term ‘design’, since there is only one candidate.

    Thus Douglas Axe in his recent book, having made a scientific case for Intelligent Design, says: “the weighty realization that the great Cause of everything clearly reveals himself not as an impersonal force but as a very personal God… Creation is only ever accomplished by drawing upon what exists, and personhood, so fundamental to our existence, must therefore have come from someone in whom it already existed. Persons can only have come from a personal God”¹.

    Likewise, Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, who challenge Darwinism from a conventional Christian standpoint, say: “The Christian worldview begins with the Creation, with a deliberate act by a personal Being who existed from all eternity”².

    Therefore, in order to pursue that debate, it is important to consider how true this theology is, and what other possibilities there are. Is God personal? Is monotheism true? Most spiritual traditions believe that the ultimate ground of being is impersonal, therefore that any personal beings (gods, deities, high spiritual entities, or whatever you want to call them) are at a lower level in the hierarchy. We are therefore drawn into the debate between what is often called the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers (a First Cause).

    In the opinion of the Theosophical writer Edi Bilimoria, who in his book is seeking, as I do, a reunification of science and religion/spirituality, “there are four crucial misunderstandings (my italics) that must be cleared before there can be any hope of genuine and sustainable progress, on a large scale”. The first of these is “the notion of an external, anthropomorphic ‘Creator God’ (who performs according to his fancy), as preached by the exoteric religions… (his italics)”³. From this alternative spiritual perspective we would definitely have to find other non-Christian understandings of Intelligent Design.

    Now let’s have a look at statements by two scientists critical of both Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The biologist Stephen Talbott says that “many of the opponents (Richard) Dawkins commonly has in mind prefer an intelligent designer. What seems to have fallen out of the argument on both sides is the organism itself, which has vanished into the automatisms of engineered machinery. Its living powers have been transferred to a mysterious designer, blind or otherwise, who, having messed around with everyone’s ancestors, remains conveniently obscure for current scientific investigation”⁴.

The physicist Amit Goswami has written Creative Evolution: a Physicist’s Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design⁵. The jacket notes say: “Dr. Goswami’s central theme is that pure consciousness, not matter, is the primary force in the universe. This view differs radically from mainstream theories that see evolution as the result of simple physical reactions. It also differs from intelligent-design arguments that posit a clockmaker God who fabricated the universe. Biology, Dr. Goswami says, must come to terms with feeling, meaning, and the purposefulness of life. The key is the idea of creativity in biological development, which reconciles evolution with intelligent design by a purposive designer… What’s more, when the question of life’s purposefulness and the existence of the designer is reconciled with neo-Darwinism, other difficulties of biology are resolved” (my italics).

    Two observations on the above are:

  • the idea that pure consciousness is the primary force in the universe fits well with many spiritual traditions, although not necessarily with mainstream Christianity.
  • the statement that “intelligent-design arguments… posit a clockmaker God who fabricated the universe”, may be an overstatement, since I don’t think that all ID advocates would argue that. It does, however, highlight the basic problem, that the word design stresses the importance of an earlier event, and perhaps does not attach enough importance to what is going on in the present.

    The philosopher Henri Bergson has also written a book called Creative Evolution⁶. He notes that there is sometimes the “production of the same effect by two different accumulations of an enormous number of small causes”, that this “is contrary to the principles of mechanistic philosophy” (i.e. materialism), and that “every moment, right before our eyes, nature arrives at identical results, in sometimes neighbouring species, by entirely different embryogenic processes”. He then concludes: “We must appeal to some inner directing principle in order to account for this convergence of effects. Such convergence does not appear possible in the Darwinian, and especially the neo-Darwinian, theory of insensible accidental variations…” (my italics).

    So we have a biologist, a physicist, and a philosopher making a similar argument. They are all saying that there is an ongoing process of creative evolution in organisms, and the two scientists are saying that the term Intelligent Design does not take this sufficiently into account. As I noted above and in previous articles⁷, atheistic neo-Darwinian biologists strongly agree that this appears to be the case, although they argue that this is an illusion created by the process of natural selection. (I suggest that it might be better to accept the evidence of their own eyes.)

    The question is therefore, what spiritual or philosophical worldview is suggested by the phenomenon of creative evolution? Does it suggest animism? Some variety of pantheism? Does Christianity need to change its beliefs in order to accommodate this? Do we need some clarification of the concept of Intelligent Design in order for it to be reconciled with Creative Evolution? These are questions I will try to address in future posts.

 

Footnotes:

1. Undeniable, How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed, HarperOne, 2016, p254

2. Developing a Christian Worldview of Science and Evolution, Tyndale House Publishers, 2001, p24

3. The Snake and the Rope, the Theosophical Publishing House, 2006, p239

4. Can Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously? http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/org/comm/ar/2016/teleology-30.htm This article is no longer available online, having been updated.

5. Quest Books, 2008

6. First edition 1911. The quote is from the 1954 edition, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Macmillan & Co Ltd., pp. 79–80.

7. See:    The Problem of Natural Selection, and Intuition, Part 1

 

Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — Intuition, part 1

    This post follows on from The Problem of Natural Selection, and continues its theme.

    Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed is the name of a book by Douglas Axe¹. As the title implies, it is a critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory, arguing for Intelligent Design.            I don’t intend to discuss it in detail, but want to refer primarily to the word intuition in the title.

    Darwinian evolutionary theory, in its modern form, argues that evolution is a blind, purposeless process, natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations. (Blind and purposeless is what ‘natural’ means in this context.) The focal point of Axe’s argument is that nobody would believe this, if they relied purely upon their intuition (common sense); if we contemplated living organisms without any preconceptions, we would assume that some intelligence lies behind them.

    As I noted in my earlier post three evolutionary biologists accept that position, even the arch-Darwinist and atheist Richard Dawkins conceding: “So overwhelming is the appearance of purposeful design that, even in this Darwinian era when we know ‘better’, we still find it difficult, indeed boringly pedantic, to refrain from teleological language when discussing adaptation”².

    Darwinism is not the only belief of modern science that is counterintuitive. On a different topic, that of the nature of the self, in previous articles I have often quoted Francis Crick and his Astonishing Hypothesis, 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… This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing”³.

    Crick made a statement comparable to that of Dawkins on the subject of evolution: “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved”⁴. If I may take the liberty of paraphrasing Dawkins and Crick, they are saying that, if biologists believed the evidence of their own eyes, they would concede that living organisms demonstrate purpose, thus intelligent agency; they have to keep trying to persuade themselves, that what they can see with their own eyes, against their better judgement, is a false perception.

    Scientists, therefore, have to go to great lengths to persuade not only the public of their beliefs, even themselves.

    Let us turn this argument on its head. If living organisms exhibit a convincing appearance of purpose and intelligent agency, is not the simplest explanation that they are indeed purposeful? And if, as Darwinists claim, the end results are exactly the same as if they were intended, how do we know that they were not intended? It is hard to imagine a scientific experiment which could decide. Perhaps the intuition that there is intelligence and purpose in life is correct. Perhaps the public know best.

 

Footnotes:

1. HarperOne, 2016

2. ‘Replicators and Vehicles’, Current Problems in Sociobiology, edited by King’s College Sociobiology Group, Cambridge University Press, pp45–64

3. The Astonishing Hypothesis, Simon & Schuster, 1994, p3

4. What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, 1988, p138

Reasons to Doubt Darwinism — the Problem of Natural Selection

    In an ideal world, science should seek the truth objectively, without bias, desired outcomes and preconceived ideas. In reality, there is no such thing as science in the abstract; there are only scientists doing their work, and they may be subject to the same human failings as the rest of us. At the very least, if scientists do desire a particular outcome of their experiments, and are trying to prove something, this should in no way influence the scientific work, which must remain objective.

    With all this in mind, let’s examine the concept of natural selection in evolutionary theory. Natural selection does not exist in the sense that it is something that can be seen or touched; it is merely a theoretical principle, assumed to operate. This is not necessarily a problem, and does not deny it, for we also cannot see or touch gravity, but this does not stop us from seeing and experiencing its effects. We therefore assume that gravity is real. It is not quite so clear, however, in the case of natural selection.

    The arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins wrote: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. He reveals, I would suggest, that his motivation to be an atheist is stronger than his desire for scientific truth; that is perhaps why he so enthusiastically accepts Darwin. And he is not alone; the desire to be an atheist, often expressed as the need for ‘naturalistic’ or ‘materialist’ explanations, drives much science.

    It can be seen clearly in the language of some evolutionary biologists that they are predisposed to the concept of natural selection, precisely because they want to avoid any suggestion of anything non-material (supernatural), therefore teleological.

    August Weismann said: “the principle of [natural] selection solved the riddle, how it is possible to produce adaptedness  without the intervention of a goal-determining force”¹. So for him, in nature there appears to be a goal-determining force. Rather than accept this as real — one might say the evidence of his own eyes — he assumes that this is an illusion, wants it to be an illusion, because he says that it is a problem or riddle that needs to be solved. He refuses to consider the possibility that this is how things are, that there might actually be a goal-determining force, which is perhaps the simpler explanation. He therefore welcomes the arrival of natural selection, which gets rid of the teleological implication he dislikes.

    Julian Huxley said: “It was one of the great merits of Darwin himself to show that the purposiveness of organic structure and function was apparent only. The teleology of adaptation is a pseudo-teleology, capable of being accounted for on good mechanistic principles, without the intervention of purpose, conscious or subconscious, either on the part of the organism or of any outside power”².

    Richard Dawkins said: “So overwhelming is the appearance of purposeful design that, even in this Darwinian era when we know ‘better’, we still find it difficult, indeed boringly pedantic, to refrain from teleological language when discussing adaptation”. And yet “the theory of natural selection provides a mechanistic, causal account of how living things came to look as if they had been designed for a purpose”³.

    The atheistic agenda of the latter two authors is so obvious that it requires no further comment. Of course, Darwin did not show what Huxley and Dawkins claim. It would be more accurate to say that, if Darwin’s theory were correct, then it would suggest that the purposiveness was apparent. Since the theory is adopted so enthusiastically and uncritically by those who want to deny purposiveness at all costs, it is reasonable to doubt the truth of the theory.

    Dawkins also said:

  • “The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life”.
  • “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity”⁴.

    I believe both his statements are incorrect. Darwin’s theory cannot explain the origin of life, although it could explain the evolution of life once it had started. This is what Dawkins says in the second quote, but it is not in principle the only explanation, for alternative explanations (possibly more credible but unacceptable to Dawkins) would be divine creativity or imagination. So what Dawkins means is that Darwinism is the only rational or scientific theory which could explain organized complexity, i.e. a naturalistic or materialist explanation. Maybe the truth is irrational, outside the realm of science as we normally understand it, thus something needing a spiritual or supernatural explanation.

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Footnotes:

1. Quoted in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance, Cambridge MA: Bellknap/Harvard University Press, 1982, p517

2. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, Allen and Unwin, 1942, p412

3. ‘Replicators and Vehicles’, Current Problems in Sociobiology, King’s College Sociobiology Group, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp45–64

4. The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, 1988, p288, p317. In the second quote, I have changed the italics. In the original ‘capable’ was italicised, not ‘in principle’.

Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Creationism — or Something Else?

    In the past I have written several articles on the theme of evolution and Darwinism¹. Readers of these will know that I find Darwinism, specifically the neo-Darwinian synthesis, unsatisfactory. I am now going to begin a new series, Reasons to Doubt Darwinism, which will follow on from these previous articles.

    These are the possible approaches to the scientific problem of life:

  • the neo-Darwinian synthesis — the revised version of Darwinism following on from an understanding of genetics. Scientists on the whole prefer this because it offers a naturalistic, materialist explanation.
  • Intelligent Design, which is against the neo-Darwinian synthesis, usually from a Christian perspective, although the arguments are scientific
  • Creationism, based on a literal interpretation of Genesis
  • attempts to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity. Two with which I am familiar are Creation and Evolution, by Alan Hayward², and Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? by Denis Alexander³.
  • milder forms of Darwinism. There is the interesting case of the eminent zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, who claimed to be a believer in the neo-Darwinian theory, yet refused to accept the materialistic, atheistic implications. He believed in the reality of spiritual experience, not specifically from a Christian perspective. This is a quote from the jacket of Darwin and the Spirit of Man⁴: “The assertion that Darwinism must lead inevitably to a materialistic interpretation of life is essentially both reductionist and unbalanced… So Sir Alister’s argument is that Darwin’s doctrine must be enlarged — added to in such a way that its significance for man’s understanding of himself must undergo a striking change. Man’s spirituality must be regarded as a real and essential part of his make-up”.
  • other non-materialist, spiritual explanations not based on Christianity. In my view, they are the most credible of these alternatives.

    A discussion of the above will be the inspiration for the forthcoming series. Before beginning, however, I thought it would be a good idea to make a few clarifying remarks:

    The neo-Darwinian synthesis is closely allied with a materialistic philosophy and atheism. One could almost say that neo-Darwinism, with its insistence on blind forces, random genetic mutation, and lack of purpose, is atheism in disguise. Hence Richard Dawkins’s well known statement: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. This is why, from my perspective, it cannot be accepted. It is possible that some genuinely scientific aspects of Darwinism may be valid, if we remove the philosophical baggage.

    The word evolution is often misused. It means merely change over time, and a spiritual world-view has no problem accepting evolution in that sense. In the modern debate, however, it has become equivalent to Darwinism, or the neo-Darwinian synthesis, thus implying that to deny evolution is to accept some form of Creationism or Intelligent Design.

    Creationism should not be confused with Intelligent Design. Creationism is a religious movement, whereas Intelligent Design is a scientific argument, (although its advocates tend to be Christians). Darwinian critics tend to lump the two together, saying that Intelligent Design is Creationism in disguise, in an attempt to confuse the issue and discredit ID.

    Any version of Darwinism is ultimately unsatisfactory because, even though it can explain the evolution of life once it has started, it cannot explain the origin of life, nor can it explain the emergence of consciousness.

    It is not clear, however, what the best alternative theory is. Let’s consider Intelligent Design. To state the obvious, it consists of two words. So the emphasis can fall on either. Advocates of ID stress the ‘design’ element. That’s fine up to a point, but the problem is that, under the influence of Christianity, this might suggest a specific supernatural deity coming up with plans, in the manner of a human creative artist, or scientific experimenter. This is possible — divine imagination is an interesting concept, depending on how you understand divinity. It should also be noted that the world we inhabit often gives that impression — even staunch Darwinians accept that organisms give an overwhelming impression of design. Many people find the idea of such a Creator hard to accept, however, and I therefore prefer to stress the ‘intelligent’ element, and put the design element onto the sidelines. There is indeed strong evidence for intelligence in nature. The question then becomes how to understand the nature of this intelligence, and how to explain the appearance of design. This is where various spiritual traditions can help.

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

Footnotes:

1. For details, see under Evolution in the Blog Index.

2. Triangle, 1985 revised 1994

3. Monarch, 2008

4. Collins, 1984

Is There a Liberal Conspiracy in Science? — the Case of Sir John Maddox

    I recently wrote an article discussing the 2017 March for Science. One of the protesters, Judy Twigg, a public health professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, was wearing a T-shirt that said “Science is not a liberal conspiracy”.

    Science clearly should be, rather than a conspiracy of any kind, an ongoing unbiased, objective search for truth. Ms. Twigg, however, was obviously protesting, quite sincerely in her mind, against others who were claiming something else. Her slogan therefore raises some interesting questions:

  • is there an actual conspiracy, or does it merely look like that to some people?
  • if true science is not a conspiracy, has it been replaced by scientism, the worship of science?
  • if there is a conspiracy, who is responsible, and what is their agenda?
  • and what does ‘liberal’ mean in this context anyway?

    Here I’m not going to try to answer all those questions, nor am I going to claim that science is a conspiracy, liberal or otherwise. Instead I’m going to look at the reasons why some people might think that.

    I mentioned John Maddox in a recent article¹. He was the editor of the prestigious science journal Nature at the time of a dispute with the Natural History Museum (London) in 1981. The Museum had dared to offer an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory called Cladistics. One could argue, therefore, that they were doing what good science should do — be aware of limitations in theories, search for new possibilities, be open-minded. However, an editorial appeared in Nature entitled ‘Darwin’s death in South Kensington’, which included the phrase “the rot at the museum”. If Maddox did not write the editorial himself, he must at least have approved it, and therefore take responsibility².

    He is also well known for an editorial in September 1981, following the publication of Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life, describing it as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years”. He thought that because Sheldrake’s theories of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields seriously challenged the materialist paradigm dominating modern science.

    Many people, often non-scientists, have a rather idealistic vision of science and scientists. Here, for example, are the thoughts of the comedian Ricky Gervais: “Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence — evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold onto medieval practices because they are tradition”³.

    Sheldrake quotes this passage, and then comments: “Gervais’s idealised view of science is hopelessly naïve in the context of the history and sociology of science. It portrays scientists as open-minded seekers of truth, not ordinary people competing for funds and prestige, constrained by peer-group pressures and hemmed in by prejudices and taboos”⁴ (my italics).

    The two examples above suggest that Sheldrake is closer to the truth than Gervais, and Maddox was the editor of Nature, therefore responsible for deciding what would and would not appear in the journal. Was he a fit person for this task?

    I’m now going to give details of a further example from 1988 which, I hope, demonstrates that Gervais really doesn’t know what he is talking about. He is, however, obviously describing the science that we would like to see operating. (Any quotes in what follows without footnote references are taken from the two books in the bibliography.)

    Maddox is less well known for his role in an episode involving Jacques Benveniste, a distinguished French scientist, a doctor of medicine who then became a specialist in allergy research, research director at INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research. He had received the Silver Medal from CNRS, one of the most prestigious French scientific honours. He was a proper, highly qualified scientist.

    He then became involved in a controversy related to the purported memory of water, with implications for homeopathy. A member of his team, Elisabeth Davenas, had brought to him the bizarre results of some experiments she had been conducting. These were hard to believe, so the experiments were carefully repeated over a period of four years in five laboratories in four countries, the original findings being replicated. We can note therefore that the experiments were conducted, as you would hope, with adherence to the scientific method, performed under double blind conditions to eliminate any experimenter bias. Benveniste was a proper scientist, doing true science of the kind which Ricky Gervais approves of.

    The findings appeared to confirm the central claim of homeopathy — the weaker the solution, the more powerful its effect. They “provided strong evidence that the method of preparing highly diluted homeopathic solutions would be likely to produce a modified water that carried biological activity (hence a memory), even though there were no molecules of the original solute present. His experiments also demonstrated that this biological activity can be transmitted to otherwise neutral water through an electromagnetic device”.

    I should note at this point that any suggestion that there might be some truth in the theory of homeopathy is anathema to orthodox science, a heresy, something that gets materialists hot under the collar because of the possible repercussions for the accepted laws of biochemistry. In Britain there have even been demonstrations outside chemists selling homeopathic remedies, based on the claim that they don’t work and are therefore fraudulent⁵.

    A paper was prepared for publication in Nature, claiming: “specific information must have been transmitted during the dilution/shaking process. Water could act as a template for the molecule, for example, by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields… The precise nature of this phenomenon remains unexplained” (my italics).

    The paper was accepted, but Maddox took the unprecedented step of placing an editorial addendum at the bottom of the article: “There is no physical basis for such an activity. With the kind collaboration of Professor Benveniste, Nature has therefore arranged for independent (note that word) investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments. A report of this investigation will appear shortly”⁶.

    Let’s have a look at how ‘independent’ these investigators were. Maddox went himself — we can tell how open-minded he was from his reactions to the Natural History Museum’s ‘heresy’ and Sheldrake’s book. He arrived with Walter Stewart, a well-known quackbuster, and James Randi, a professional magician dedicated to exposing fraud. The latter was a fanatical, sceptic materialist, as can be seen from the subtitle of his book Flim-Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions⁷, and his membership of the notoriously sceptical organisation CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal).

    Were a magician and a quackbuster, with no relevant scientific training, the best possible team to assess the subtleties of such experiments, which had already been replicated by other professional scientists? Does this not suggest that Maddox’s true intention was not to assess impartially the validity of the work, rather to discredit it at all costs?

    Elisabeth Davenas performed four experiments in front of them, one blinded, all of which, according to Benveniste, were successful. However the team disputed the findings and changed the experimental protocol, Stewart insisting on carrying out some of the experiments himself and changing some of their design even though he was apparently untrained in these particular experiments. “Under their new protocol, and amid a charged atmosphere implying that the INSERM team were hiding something, three more tests were done and shown not to work. At this point, Maddox and his team had their results and promptly left”⁸.

    Nature then published a report entitled ‘High dilution experiments a delusion’. “It claimed that Benveniste’s lab had not observed good scientific protocol. It discounted supporting data from other labs. Maddox expressed surprise that the studies didn’t work all the time, when this is standard in biological studies — one reason Benveniste had conducted more than 300 trials before publishing”. “They expressed dismay that two of Benveniste’s co-authors were being funded by a manufacturer of homeopathic medicines”, when industry funding is standard in scientific research. Rather than insinuate fraud, they should have produced actual evidence of it.

    Benveniste’s response was feisty, and I would say appropriate: “Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions will kill science. Science flourishes only in freedom”⁹.

    Unfortunately, the scientific world believed Nature rather than Benveniste — it is, after all, a prestigious journal — and this episode had a devastating effect upon his career. “INSERM refused to listen to Benveniste’s objections about the quality of the Nature investigation and prevented him from continuing… Letters poured in to Nature and other publications, calling his work ‘dubious science’, a ‘cruel hoax’ and ‘pseudo-science’ ”. We might wonder whether these terms could be applied more appropriately to Nature’s investigation.

    The result was that Benveniste’s funding was curtailed, his laboratory closed down and he himself lost his post — all a direct consequence of his scientific study of (ideas related to) homeopathy.

    Here are some of the key points which show why the arch-materialist Maddox was so alarmed:

  • molecules communicate with each other in oscillating frequencies (not through chemical exchange). Cells rely on electromagnetic signalling at low frequency.
  • action at a distance, “a ‘cascade’ of electromagnetic impulses travelling at the speed of light”. Two molecules are then tuned into each other, even at long distance, and resonate to the same frequency. A medium enabling the molecules to speak to each other nonlocally and virtually instantaneously.
  • water behaves mysteriously — when closely packed together, atoms and molecules exhibit a collective behaviour, (thus something like a superorganism).
  • “water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether the original molecule is still there or not”. “Water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which can be imprinted wave information”¹⁰.

    There are two follow-ups worthy of notice:

  • Professor Madelene Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast, originally sceptical, tried the experiments along with a large pan-European research team, with a view to disproving Benveniste’s results once and for all. She became a convert, however, after obtaining similar results. McTaggart speaks for Benveniste: “If negative, her results would have been published in Nature, thereby forever consigning his work to the trash heap. Because (the team’s) results agreed with his, they were published in a relatively obscure journal, a few years after the event, a guarantee that no one would really notice”.
  • Of many scientific double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of homeopathy which lent support to Benveniste’s findings, “the most unassailable were carried out in Glasgow by Dr David Reilly (who) showed that homeopathy works for asthma, with all the usual checks and balances of a pristine scientific study”. This persuaded the journal The Lancet to publish the results, but an editorial simply refused to accept them, saying: “the dilution principle of homeopathy is absurd; so the reason for any therapeutic effect presumably lies elsewhere”.

    On the basis of this example, whose view of science is closer to the truth, Gervais’s or Sheldrake’s? Once upon a time it was science which challenged the dogma of the Church. Now it seems that certain scientific beliefs have acquired the status of unchallengeable dogma, despite what Gervais claims. How does a bigot, someone so against proper scientific enquiry, become editor of a prestigious scientific journal? Was Maddox a fit and proper person? Who appointed him? Was he censured or fired for his appalling behaviour in the Benveniste incident? Why was he knighted?

So, is science a liberal conspiracy? Certainly not very liberal, in the case of Benveniste, rather fascistic. But is there an actual conspiracy? Bilimoria seems to think so:

  • “This episode encapsulates, without exaggeration, the typical reaction of the ‘secret police of establishment science’ when faced with inexplicable observations that lie outside the parameters of the mechanistic/molecular paradigm. The armoury of suppression includes the illegitimate use of legitimate scientific tools such as statistics, fake attempts at duplicating their results by ‘experts’ (sometimes anonymous), persecution, false rumours, slander and the abuse of financial and institutional power. It is a truism that establishment scientists operate under an illusion of scientific objectivity with blind faith in a reductionist approach using mechanistic laws… The greater the pursuit of scientific power (with attendant money, fame and position) the more is truth compromised”.
  • “The fact that a scientist in England could terminate the research of a famous scientist in France shows the savage clout and manipulative control that can be wielded by establishment scientists in positions of supremacy. The very fact that Benveniste’s work called forth such a hysterical comeback from the establishment shows that the latter felt extremely threatened. It virtually ‘proves’ that Benveniste’s findings were very plausible, for who would bother to shut down someone’s laboratory if the result were inconsequential and of no import?”
  • “The demise of Benveniste’s work signals a real blow to the scientific advancement of complementary medicine. One cannot but wonder whether the move to stop further research into homeopathy was driven by the fear that if success in this field could be shown in the public eye to have been scientifically proven and published, the drug industry would suffer a serious downturn in profits with far-reaching conclusions”.

    If there is not actually a conspiracy involving real people plotting somewhere, even if that sometimes appears to be the case, then there must be a strong drive, possibly unconscious, in many scientists to behave in this appalling way. Maddox’s attitude is certainly not an isolated example. How could this be explained? If not a conspiracy, it would seem that the meme of scientific materialism, a highly contagious cultural virus, has infected the minds of many so-called scientists.

    Or is there perhaps an actual conspiracy? With people like Maddox in charge of Nature, it is easy to understand why some people might think that.

There is also an Appendix below, following on from footnote 5.

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Bibliography:

The Field, Lynne McTaggart, HarperCollins, 2001, chapter 4, p60f

The Snake and the Rope, Dr. Edi Bilimoria, Theosophical Publishing House, 2006, Appendix B

 

Footnotes:

1. for full details of the brief summary which follows, click here.

2. Issue 289, February 26th 1981, p735

3. “Why I’m an atheist”, Wall Street Journal, December 19th 2010

4. The Science Delusion, Coronet, 2012, p27

5. These people are ignorant of the facts, for homeopathic theory has been confirmed many times, using proper science. (See the Appendix below for further information, if interested).

6. Editorial 1988, 313:818

7. Prometheus Books, 1982

8. for this quote and what follows, see McTaggart, pp64–65

9. Nature 1988, 334:291

10. The third and fourth of the bullet-points are referred to by McTaggart in relation to the work of two Italian physicists, Giuliano Preparata and Emilio Del Giudice, thus not Benveniste himself, but relevant to his thinking.

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Appendix

    In the article I have referred to the work of Benveniste’s team, the replication of his results by five different laboratories in four countries, the conclusions of Professor Madelene Ennis, Dr David Reilly, and Giuliano Preparata and Emilio Del Giudice. Following the Benveniste incident:

  • “in 1992, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology held a symposium… examining the interactions of electromagnetic fields with biological systems”¹.
  • “Numerous other scientists have replicated high-dilution experiments”².
  • “several others have endorsed and successfully repeated experiments using digitized information for molecular communication”³.
  • “Benveniste’s latest studies were replicated eighteen times in an independent lab in Lyon, France, and in three other independent centres”.

Footnotes to Appendix:

1. A. H. Frey, ‘Electromagnetic field interactions with biological systems’, FASEB Journal, 1993; 7: 272

2. References are:

  • M. Bastide et al., ‘Activity and chronopharmacology of very low doses of physiological immune inducers’, Immunology Today, 1985; 6: 234–5
  • L. Demangeat et al., ‘Modifications des temps de relaxation RMN à 4MHz des protons du solvant dans les très hautes dilutions salines de silice/lactose’, Journal of Medical Nuclear Biophysics, 1992; 16: 135–45
  • B. J. Youbicier-Simo et al., ‘Effects of embryonic bursectomy and in ovo administration of highly diluted bursin on an adrenocorticotropic and immune response to chickens’, International Journal of Immunotherapy, 1993; IX: 169–80
  • P.C. Endler et al., ‘The effect of highly diluted agitated thyroxin on the climbing activity of frogs’, Veterinary and Human Toxicology, 1994: 36: 56–9

3. References are:

  • P. C. Endler et al, ‘Transmission of hormone information by non-molecular means’, FASEB Journal, 1994; 8: A400;
  • F. Senekowitsch et al., ‘Hormone effects by CD record/replay’, FASEB Journal, 1995; 9: A392