The purpose of this article is partly to give some retrospective publicity to those participating in an event that I attended last Friday (March 13th, 2020). Before I move on to that, here is the relevant preamble.

    Spiritually oriented people believe that the fundamental nature of the universe is consciousness rather than matter, that everything in existence is a manifestation of a supreme (divine) consciousness. Since consciousness implies life, the logical conclusion is that, no matter how inorganic and lifeless some objects may seem, for example rocks, they must nevertheless have some form of consciousness, no matter how basic. Someone who argues this persuasively on Medium.com is White Feather (see his article, I Like Rocks: Have you ever imagined being one?). Also, the Transpersonal Psychologist Stanislav Grof has spent his life doing altered-states therapy, using LSD at the start of his career, then intensive breathing techniques when LSD was banned. He reports that people can identify with trees, and even stones, when in these altered states of consciousness.

    If everything in the universe is alive, this suggests a worldview called animism, which was a common, perhaps universal, belief of ancient peoples. It has unsurprisingly been rejected out of hand by modern science. Perhaps the ancients knew something we don’t, and it is time to return to animism.

    The first sign in modern times that things were changing was James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, that planet Earth is a self-regulating ‘living’ superorganism. In the 1970s this shocked the scientific community, and attracted much criticism and derision from conventional scientists.

    More recently there has been a book called Towards an Animistic Science of the Earth by Stephan Harding, which is available as a free Ebook (click here). I am grateful to Jack Preston King on Medium.com for making me aware of this in an article entitled ‘God Killed the Great Mother. Science is Dancing on Her Grave. Let’s Bring Her Back to Life and Save the World’, and subtitled ‘What the World Needs Now — Scientific Animism’. He opens with a quote from Harding: “If we are to have any chance of surviving the looming catastrophe that science and technology have inadvertently helped to create we will need more wisdom, not more analytical capacity… We now urgently need to develop a new approach in science that integrates analysis with wisdom, fact with value, and nature with culture… by replacing our demonstrably unwise (and until recently, unconscious) assumption that the world is an inert machine with the arguably wiser and more accurate metaphor that the world is a vast animate (and hence ‘sentient’) being”.

    I have always been fascinated by Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent¹, especially the opening chapters. The basic claim is that the psychedelic substance ayahuasca allows communication with plants: “You can see images and learn things”, says Ruperto Gomez, someone he met during his research. Narby later says that people in the Amazonian forest “insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations” (p10).

    It is worth exploring that last point at some length. Narby says that “the botanical knowledge of indigenous Amazonians has long astonished scientists. The chemical composition of ayahuasca is a case in point. Amazonian shamans have been preparing ayahuasca for millennia. The brew is a necessary combination of two plants, which must be boiled together for hours. The first contains a hallucinogenic substance, dimethyltryptamine, which also seems to be secreted by the human brain; but this hallucinogen has no effect when swallowed, because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it. The second plant, however, contains several substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain. The sophistication of the recipe has prompted Richard Evans Schultes, the most renowned ethnobotanist of the twentieth century to comment: ‘One wonders how peoples in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not. The examples are too numerous and may become even more numerous with future research’.

    “So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 Amazonian plant species, the leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone, which they combine with a vine containing substances that inactivate an enzyme of the digestive tract, which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect. And they do this to modify their consciousness.

    “It is as if they knew about the molecular properties of plants and the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants” (p10-11).

    What does that mean exactly? How does this knowledge come? Narby goes on to mention Luis Eduardo Luna, author of a study of the shamanism of mestizo ayahuasqueros, Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the mestizo population of the Peruvian Amazon , who “say that ayahuasca is a doctor, It possesses a strong spirit and it is considered an intelligent being with which it is possible to establish rapport, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power…” (Narby, p18).

    Narby has long discussions with a local expert Carlos Perez Shuma who says: “When an ayahuasquero drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything” (p19). This is intriguing. What does he mean by ‘spirits’? Are we talking about quasi-human disembodied spirits giving advice? Or is it rather the spirits of the plants themselves? The suggestion is that it is the latter for, according to Narby, Shuma goes on to mention “invisible beings called maninkari, who are found in animals, plants, mountains, streams, lakes, and certain crystals, and who are sources of knowledge”. He quotes Shuma: ‘The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton, and how to make clothes” (p25).

    Western scientists must be getting very agitated at this point. What exactly are we talking about here? Fairies? Nymphs? Naiads? Dryads? Undines?

    Moving on now to the event I mentioned at the beginning, it took place at Treadwell’s bookshop, London. They stock books about esotericism, the occult, magic, paganism, and so on. They also host events, and I’m on their mailing list. A few weeks ago I received notification of an event called ‘Food Forest of Souls’, which was going to be a conversation between a certain Gordon White and Dr. Jack Hunter. I had never heard of them, but was intrigued by the advance publicity.

    Gordon White was described as “a practising chaos magician, and the host of Rune Soup, a popular podcast on magic, culture and the paranormal. He is the author of Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits, The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality, and Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments”.

    Jack Hunter was described as: “Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester, a tutor on the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and an Access to Higher Education lecturer in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Newtown College. He is the editor of Damned Facts: Fortean Essays on Religion, Folklore and the Paranormal and Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience”.

    The publicity further said: “The return of animism as a worldview has strong advocates in Jack Hunter and Gordon White, and it is now on a shortlist of acceptable metaphysical models. Join these two as they undertake a ‘Rune Soup’ style conversation on the Treadwells sofa, to explore what ecology can learn from magic, what magic can learn from ecology and what they both can teach mainstream science. They will be taking in topics from UFOs to ayahuasca to plant-human relationships”.

    This all sounded really weird, and obviously relevant to the issues Narby’s book was raising, so I immediately signed up, hoping to gain more insight. Unfortunately, the day before the talk I received an email saying that Jack Hunter was no longer able to attend, and would be replaced by Jay Springett, “a theorist and strategist for hybrid environments. He’s a Solarpunk whose concerns lie in the area where humans intersect with technology and the environment. A founding member of the decentralised creative exchange Guild.is, he is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an associate of the Institute of Atemporal Studies. Jay is currently writing his first public book, Land as Platform”.

    I was offered the possibility of a refund and, from the biographies, I probably would have preferred Jack Hunter, but decided to go ahead anyway.

    I won’t go into details about the whole conversation, save to say that the two speakers were passionate ecologists — you can easily imagine their conversation from the publicity mentioned above. This was new territory for me, and I was introduced to words I’d never heard before: permaculture, steampunk, solarpunk.

    The topic which I was hoping to learn about most was this question of human communication with plants, and the spirit world in general. I knew from the books of Peter Wohlleben that trees and plants seem to communicate with each other. It was new to me to hear, even if we don’t understand how, that insects and plants also communicate with each other; at least, this is something Gordon White firmly believes. He pointed out that humans are apparently unique, in that we are the only species which uses language to communicate. All other creatures seem to use non-verbal, we assume, methods. He said that he communicates with plants in order to assist him in his ecological endeavours.

    The words ‘magic’ and ‘spirit world’ cropped up frequently. I began to wonder exactly what was meant by this. I was having fantasies of latter-day John Dee figures, invoking spirits through magical spells. I asked a question along those lines at the end of the session, and Gordon replied that this was a rather old-fashioned way of looking at it, and that it was more a question of communing with spirits. I engaged him in further conversation during the drinks which followed. I asked him again about the nature of his communication with plants. He told me that it was indeed non-verbal, more in the nature of imagery, and intuitions, although very real.

    I had a second question. This is the background to it. I’m very interested in the question of superorganisms, for example, how a termite colony seems to act as one, even though it may consist of thousands of individual termites. I was once fortunate to ask the ‘heretical’ biologist Rupert Sheldrake his opinion about this in a conversation following a talk he gave. His response was that he believed it was “a group mind”.

    As I had never previously had the opportunity to speak directly to anyone who claimed to communicate with plants, I was keen to ask Gordon whether he thought he was communicating with individual plants, which would suggest that they had some awareness of their identity, or whether there was some hidden supervising intelligence, a group mind which was coordinating things behind the scenes. I was thinking along these lines: an individual liver cell probably doesn’t know that it is part of a liver, yet performs its function perfectly within that organ; a liver probably doesn’t know that it is part of a human being, yet performs its function perfectly nevertheless. The brain seems to be the organising command centre of a human, but does the brain know what it is doing? Where exactly does the organising intelligence lie?

    By analogy, if we accept James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is a self-regulating ‘living’ superorganism, and that all things that exist on it, for example plants, have some function within the superorganism, then it is reasonable to ask whether each individual plant has some awareness of its function, or whether it performs its function unconsciously, controlled by something like a global brain. I asked Gordon this question in an abbreviated form, and he replied the former, that he believed that he was actually communicating with individual plants. That is extremely interesting. Is each individual termite or ant aware of its role in the overall functioning of the nest, therefore? I have no answers to any of these questions, yet still find the subject matter fascinating.

    To conclude, at this event I heard for the first time about Dr. Monica Gagliano and her book Thus Spoke the Plant: a Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. This is the Amazon description: “Dr. Monica Gagliano is a pioneer in the cutting-edge science of plant intelligence, cognition, and communication. This book is the enchanting account of Monica’s journey. It’s comprised of events of absolute bravery to pursue what, in her heart, she believed was her true path”. I’ll definitely be adding this to my reading list.

    By a strange coincidence, just as I was about to upload this, I noticed that Jeremy Narby, discussed above and the original inspiration for this article, has said of her book: “Those who wish to see how a shamanic approach can help advance the scientific understanding of plants need to read this wonderful book. Monica Gagliano opens up new frontiers and her methods deserve broad attention”².

    Let’s all do everything we can to bring back animism to the world’s attention.

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Footnotes:

1. Phoenix, 1999
2. found on her website

    This article is a response to a recent one on Medium.com by Ryan Reudell entitled ‘Does Consciousness Continue After Death?’ (I’ll quote it extensively, but if you would like to read it first, click here.) His answer to this question was a firm NO, and he claimed that ‘science’ or ‘scientists’ supported his viewpoint. It seemed clear to me, however, that what he really meant by these terms was the philosophy of materialism and those who advocate it. It is a frequent ruse used by dedicated materialists to claim that what is merely their worldview is ‘science’.

    I responded: “These are not facts, or science, merely your firmly held opinions. Stating opinions with conviction does not make them any more true. The things you say are facts are debatable and controversial, therefore not facts”.

    He responded: “Graham, I respect your disagreement and I honor your right to think differently, but if what I’ve said are merely firmly held opinions, then make your own response based on facts and science. Because I’m sharing the “opinions” — and by opinions, I mean the thoroughly researched observations and experiments of highly educated, experienced scientists — of those who know more about this than either of us. Right now your response to my article is merely a firmly held opinion. Give me something factual to work with so we can have an honest debate”.

    So here we go.

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    The debate between the philosophy of materialist science and alternative understandings is a theme that I frequently address in my articles; hopefully my followers will be interested in yet another episode in this saga. Some of the material here will be restating things from earlier articles, so feel free to jump ahead, if you think you are familiar with it.

    I’ll begin by noting things that Reudell considers to be facts, thus science, but which I think are merely opinions.

    Firstly he says: “We know everything you and I are made of. We already have the language to describe the most basic parts of the universe — all the elementary particles and the forces moving them around, including the ones inside our bodies”.

    I’m impressed, but surprised, by his confidence. He therefore believes that this statement amounts to ‘science’. Why then does a recent issue of New Scientist magazine¹ have blazed across its front cover: ‘Why the Laws of the Universe Explain Everything… Except You?’ Someone clearly thinks that Reudell’s belief is not science. The accompanying article² was entitled: ‘Your Decision-Making Ability is a Superpower Physics Can’t Explain’, and the subtitle was: ‘In a universe that unthinkingly follows the rules, human agency is an anomaly. Can physics ever make sense of our power to change the physical world at will?’ The article clearly suggested that physics was struggling to do this, and then quoted Matt Leifer from Chapman University in California: “If I’m saying that something doesn’t boil down to the laws of physics, then I’m basically positing something supernatural, that’s outside natural laws”. Very interesting indeed! Perhaps, contrary to what Reudell says, we do not know everything you and I are made of.

    My second criticism in response to this first statement is that Reudell seems to be suggesting that elementary particles are things, material objects. Physicists will tell you, however, that what appears to us as matter is an illusion, and is in reality patterns of energy. They will also tell you that particles emerge into and out of existence at incredibly fast speeds. Where are they coming from, and where are they going to? No one really knows, but speculations are made about hidden non-material levels of reality. Physicists also speak of massless particles. How can matter be made out of ingredients with no mass?

    Continuing on that theme, another recent issue of New Scientist magazine³ asked on its front cover: ‘What is Reality?: the More We Look at it, the Less Real it Seems’. The title of the accompanying article⁴ added “Why we still don’t understand the world’s true nature”.

    That’s strange; I thought that Reudell said we did. His opening statement above, about elementary particles and forces, suggests that he has complete faith in what is known as the Standard Model. Here is what this article has to say on that subject: “By roughly the middle of the 20th century, physicists thought they had at least identified the fundamentals of the game: particles and quantum fields. The particles made up the matter and energy around us, and the quantum fields were responsible for forces, like electromagnetism, which governed how they interact. The rules of the game were set by quantum theory. This standard model has broadly stood the test of time. The discovery of its final missing piece, the Higgs boson, was confirmation that it is at least on the right track. And it arguably fulfils at least one philosophical definition of reality: what exists and what does it do? According to philosopher of science Tim Maudlin of New York University, if you have answered both these questions, then you have essentially cracked the problem of reality”.

    So far so good for Reudell. However, the article continues: “But the standard model is nowhere near a complete answer. It leaves out many things that physicists are pretty sure are real even if they have yet to be characterised, including dark matter and dark energy. And it can’t account for the force that substantially defines our experience of reality, gravity. Despite high hopes that the Large Hadron Collider would follow the discovery of the Higgs with at least some hints about a more complete theory, none has yet been forthcoming”.

    This missing “more complete theory”, as I would have thought every scientist knows, is that there is as yet no theory of everything which can accommodate both quantum theory and general relativity, even though both of them on the whole are considered to be ‘true’. This is a problem on a grand scale, exercising the minds of the world’s greatest cosmologists and physicists, not some minor inconvenient detail that needs to be worked out. The Standard Model is not the be-all and end-all of our understanding of reality. 

    From his statement we can also deduce that Reudell seems committed to an approach known as Reductionism, that if we can only get down to the basic building blocks of matter (elementary particles) then we will understand how the universe, including human beings, works. In response I can say that as early as 1968 there was a symposium at Alpach of scientists (and other intellectuals) which rejected this approach. The participants were mainly scientists, and sixteen are listed. Some of the better known names (in scientific circles) were: Jean Piaget (Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva), W. H. Thorpe (Director, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge), Viktor E. Frankl (Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Vienna), Paul A. Weiss (Emeritus Member and Professor, Rockefeller University), and Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Faculty Professor, State University of New York at Buffalo). Others included the Director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, the Professor and Head of an Institute of Neurobiology and Histology, a Professor of Psychiatry, a Professor of Developmental Psychology, a Professor of Psychology, and a Professor at a Genetics Department. The proceedings of the symposium were recorded in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences⁵. Some very impressive qualifications there!

    You could argue, therefore, that Reudell’s worldview is already more than fifty years out of date. (Remember that the article mentioned above said that the Standard Model was formulated “by roughly the middle of the 20th century”.) Since 1968 many more scientists have concluded that Reductionism cannot explain the universe, that is to say that the parts cannot explain the whole, as explained by Marilyn Ferguson in her classic book about the emerging new paradigm, The Aquarian Conspiracy: “Science has always tried to understand nature by breaking things into their parts. Now it is overwhelmingly clear that wholes cannot be understood by analysis”⁶ (her italics). Scientists have therefore turned to other understandings based on the concepts of systems theory, holism, complexity theory, dissipative structures, a holographic universe, downward causation, synergy, and self-organisation. A well known advocate of this approach would be Fritjof Capra — see for example The Web of Life: a New Synthesis of Mind and Matter⁷.

    Reudell continues: “Scientists are strongly convinced they will never discover new particles that will matter in you and me — no new particles that will change the way we think or behave or how we’re conscious… We have a complete view of 100% of what makes you… you. In the physical sense”.

    From this we conclude that he thinks that consciousness is the result of interactions of particles. Also that we humans are nothing but these interactions. I submit that these are merely opinions for which there is no scientific evidence or, more accurately, that they are preconceptions based on the assumption of the truth of the philosophy of (atheistic) materialist science. I am happy to concede, up to a point, that we have a complete view of what makes us human in a physical sense. It would then have to be demonstrated that that is indeed all we are. Science has never done this, although the unnamed scientists, whom Reudell approves of, may claim that this is the case.

    Here is the second point that Reudell calls science, but which I think is merely an opinion: “There is no particle in your mind — no atom, electron, proton, or neutron — that will pass on so much of a nanogram of your personality, thoughts, feelings, values, or anything related to your identity to another life. No particle survives death. The hardware of your brain dies and the software of consciousness dies with it. Everything that is you in You dies… When the brain dies, consciousness dies”.

    My first reaction to reading this passage was, why does he need to keep repeating himself? This is what led me to say in my response “stating opinions with conviction does not make them any more true”.

    Once again we are confronted with the unproved assumption that personality, thoughts etc. are manifestations of elementary particles. Putting that to one side, however, it is more interesting to consider the following: “We know what makes you You is in your brain because there are fully functioning, conscious humans with no arms or legs yet when someone suffers brain damage, their personality can irreparably change”.

    I accept that the relationship between consciousness and the brain is exceedingly complicated, and I don’t dispute the truth of this statement. However, in one of the issues of New Scientist mentioned above, there was another article entitled ‘Teen born without half her brain has above average reading skills’⁸. It opened by repeating the title, then said: “The 18-year-old also has an average-to-high IQ and plans to go to university. Brain scans reveal she has more of the type of brain tissue involved in reading than typical. Tests of her brain activity indicate that the right side of her brain has taken on some of the functions of the left, suggesting that the organ has adapted to compensate for the missing tissue”.

    The title of the Leader accompanying the article⁹ was ‘A woman with half a brain offers more proof of the organ’s superpowers’, and the subtitle was ‘From a teenager excelling with half a brain to the organ’s visual areas being co-opted in people who are blind, our brain’s ability to adapt continues to amaze’.

    The leader went on to say: “This week, we cover the case of a teenager born without a left hemisphere. Given that this is the half of the brain specialised for language, you might have expected her speaking and reading skills to suffer. Not so. In fact, she has above-average reading skills”.

    I think it is reasonable to say that being born without half a brain constitutes what Reudell calls “brain damage”. In this case, however, far from the personality changing irreparably (for the worse), the brain actually adapts and compensates for the damage. I would like to hear the explanation as to how the unintelligent motions of elementary particles have achieved this extraordinary feat.

    My next response to his second point is that, if what Reudell says is true, then there would be no possibility of reincarnation. Why then do some children have memories of past lives, the details of which, so far as is possible, have been authenticated by scientists? I have previously written a longer article about this, which can be consulted if anyone is interested. This is not necessary, however, because what follows are extensive quotations from that article, in order to extract the main points.

    The best known researcher in this field is Ian Stevenson, who began work in the 1960s, then published Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation¹⁰. He describes “an almost conventional pattern. The case usually starts when a small child of two to four years of age begins talking to his parents or siblings of a life he led in another time and place. The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of that life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognises places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence. On such occasions the case usually attracts much attention in the communities involved and accounts reach the newspapers” (p16).

    Stevenson further says: “The child claims (or his behaviour suggests) a continuity of his personality with that of another person who has died…in a few cases the identification with the previous personality becomes so strong that the child rejects the name given him by his present parents and tries to force them to use the previous name. But in most cases, the subject experiences the previous self as continuous with his present personality, not as substituting for it” (p359).

    Stevenson openly admits that his cases are not definite proof of reincarnation, as in his title merely suggestive. He nevertheless states that some of the cases furnish “considerable evidence” for reincarnation, and that “about thirty others are as rich in detail and as well authenticated as the ten best cases of the present group” (p2). He is aware of nearly six hundred cases, of which he and his colleagues have investigated about a third.

    In a later book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect¹¹, Stevenson makes an even more extraordinary claim, that birthmarks or birth defects on a person correspond to wounds or death blows from a previous incarnation. He says that such marks “provide an objective type of evidence well above that which depends on the fallible memories of informants. We have photographs (and occasionally sketches) which show the birthmarks and birth defects. And for many of the cases, we have a medical document, usually a postmortem report, that gives us a written confirmation of the correspondence between the birthmark (or birth defect) and the wound on the deceased person whose life the child, when it can speak, will usually claim to remember… The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation” (p2).

    He says that he is “well aware of the seriousness — as well as the importance — of such a claim” that “a deceased personality — having survived death — may influence the form of a later-born baby”, but “can only say that I have been led to it by the evidence of the cases” (p2). He believes that this is “a better explanation than any other now available about why some persons have birth defects when most persons do not and for why some persons who have a birth defect have theirs in a particular location instead of elsewhere”. He agrees that there are other causes for such marks, yet thinks that these “account for less than half of all birth defects” (p3).

    We can easily understand why Stevenson is “aware of the seriousness” of this claim, since it deals a fatal blow to the philosophy of materialism which Reudell is advocating, and his specific claims; how on earth could a ‘memory’ of a wound from a previous life be represented on a later body according to the rules of orthodox science?

    Erlendur Haraldsson carried on Stevenson’s work, and reports on his results in I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation¹². In it there is a foreword by Jim Tucker, who says of Stevenson, that once he began looking for such cases, he found hundreds more”. “He quickly saw that details the children gave could often be verified to match ones belonging to the life and death of one particular deceased person”. A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that “in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases… in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds”. Tucker says of Haraldsson that he shows “the same dogged attention to detail that Stevenson did” (all quotes Pxi). I hope this description qualifies him to be a scientist worth listening to.

    Let us remind ourselves of Reudell’s ‘scientific’ claim: “There is no particle in your mind — no atom, electron, proton, or neutron — that will pass on so much of a nanogram of your personality, thoughts, feelings, values, or anything related to your identity to another life. No particle survives death”. Would he accept any of the above as evidence that he is wrong? I doubt it, even though these were methodical and extensive studies by reputable scientists. The least we can say, however, is that the issue remains unresolved, and to say that science has proved that nothing of any person’s identity survives death is clearly not a fact, merely an opinion, and, given the above accounts, perhaps an unlikely one at that.  I, of course, do not believe that it is the interactions of elementary particles that are responsible for the effects that Stevenson and Haraldsson describe.

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    Reudell and I seem to be arguing about what is called old paradigm and new paradigm science. Readers familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s work will appreciate those terms. I obviously assume Reudell’s article to be part of the old paradigm which is gradually disappearing into history. He will hopefully respond to this article with his defence of this old paradigm.

    I’ll now offer some further examples of scientists who disagree with Reudell’s claims. Two books with striking titles which obviously contradict his worldview are:

• The Spiritual Brain: a Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul¹³
• Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness¹⁴

    Another prominent scientist with similar views is the late Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine. (Is that educated and experienced enough for Reudell? To see an impressive list of his credentials and honours, click here.) He co-wrote with Karl Popper The Self and Its Brain¹⁵, which is self-explanatory. Another book of his is The Human Mystery which contains the Gifford Lectures of 1977–1978¹⁶. In its preface he makes an important statement relevant to the current discussion: “I believe that it is vitally important to emphasize the great mysteries that confront us when, as scientists, we try to understand the natural world including ourselves. There has been a regrettable tendency of many scientists to claim that science is so powerful and all pervasive that in the not too distant future it will provide an explanation in principle of all phenomena in the world of nature including man, even of human consciousness in all its manifestations. When that is accomplished scientific materialism will then be in the position of being an unchallengeable dogma accounting for all experience. In our recent book Popper has labelled this claim as promissory materialism, which is extravagant and unfulfillable. Yet, on account of the high regard for science, it has great persuasive power with the intelligent laity because it is advocated unthinkingly by the great mass of scientists who have not critically evaluated the dangers of this false and arrogant claim” (pVII). I offer the suggestion that the unnamed “highly educated, experienced scientists” whom Reudell admires so much are scientists of this type.

    There is a series of conferences called Mystics and Scientists. (Its 43rd conference will take place this April.) I have a book which is a collection of contributions from the 1980s and 90s¹⁷. Scientists willing to appear at these conferences, thus rejecting materialism and speaking from an alternative, new paradigm, viewpoint, were:

• Fritjof Capra: The New Physics and the Scientific Reality of our Time
• David Bohm: Cosmos, Matter, Life and Consciousness
• Paul Davies: The Cosmic Blueprint: Self-Organizing Principles of Matter and Energy
• Kurt Dressler: The Experience of Unity
• Glen Schaefer: A Holistic Philosophy of Nature
• James Lovelock: The Environment Now and the Gaian Perspective
• Brian Goodwin: Complexity, Creativity and Society
• Lyall Watson: The Biology of Being: A Natural History of Consciousness
• Rupert Sheldrake: Evolutionary Habits of Mind, Behaviour and Form
• Charles Tart: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology
• Sir John Eccles: The Mystery of the Human Psyche

    I suggest that none of these scientists would agree with the statements that Reudell calls science. At the very least they would consider them limited or highly debatable.

I’ll turn now to two books under the general editorship of Edward F. Kelly:

• Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century¹⁸
• Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality¹⁹

    In the preface to the first of these Kelly says: “We also identify a variety of specific empirical phenomena, and a variety of critical aspects of human mental life, that appear to resist or defy understanding in terms of the currently prevailing physicalist conceptual framework” (Pxxix), which is obviously the framework that Reudell subscribes to. Some of the phenomena discussed are: ESP and parapsychology, hypnosis and Mesmerism, genius, savant syndrome and prodigious memory, memory and consciousness surviving bodily death, reincarnation (and birthmarks and birth defects in relation to this), memory as not being a brain function, secondary centres of consciousness, a deeper self beyond the ego, mystical and conversion experiences, near-death and out-of-body experiences, dreams, hallucinations, apparitions and visions, trance, placebo and nocebo effects, ecstasy, voodoo death, possession, faith healing, automatic writing, mediumship, psychosomatic phenomena, artistic creativity, and invisible environments interrelated with the one we know directly.

    I assume that Reudell and his ‘scientists’ would dismiss all or most of these as illusions, brain malfunctions, or nonsense believed only by credulous, gullible people. They are nevertheless discussed seriously and in great depth by Kelly’s team.

    The remainder of Reudell’s article consists of statements typical of modern materialist scientists. They are the brave, heroic figures who have faced up to the truth of the tragic human condition, and who struggle to make the rest of us lesser mortals face unpleasant truths, instead of seeking comfort in religion and fantasies of the afterlife. The only logical solution is to adopt a philosophy of Humanism (a term which he does not use, but which seems to me to apply to what he is saying). I have criticised advocates of Humanism in earlier articles²⁰.

    Reudell’s article is a typical statement from the Bible of (atheistic) scientific materialism. Like all fundamentalists, he is convinced of the truth of his worldview. Are what he considers to be scientific facts really facts, or are they just opinions? I leave the reader to judge. The very least we can say is that, if there are such differing understandings among scientists, then any particular worldview remains a hypothesis, thus an opinion rather than established science.

    He may choose to appeal to “thoroughly researched observations and experiments of highly educated, experienced scientists”. These authorities are so far unnamed, and I hope he reveals them, in order to take the debate further. I would be surprised if they were any more educated or experienced than those I’ve mentioned in this article. If he chooses only to read and be aware of scientists who agree with him, and ignore all those who don’t, then it is hardly surprising that he arrives at the conclusions he wants to arrive at.

    To conclude, I’ll repeat one of his statements: “No particle survives death. The hardware of your brain dies and the software of consciousness dies with it”. He is so confident of this that he puts the opening sentence in bold print. This is one of the more bizarre things that he says, implying that elementary particles are material objects, that our bodies are composed of them, that one collection of particles is exclusive to us and dies with us, in effect that they are our elementary particles. I hope that he would consider Richard Feynman to be a “highly educated, experienced scientist”, one of “those who know more about this than either of us”. He is, after all, a Nobel laureate in physics. Feynman has been quoted: “Today’s brains are yesterday’s mashed potatoes”, in which case they can presumably be tomorrow’s mashed potatoes as well. Does Reudell really understand quantum physics and the nature of elementary particles?

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Footnotes:

1. issue 3269, February 15th 2020

2. By Richard Webb, click here.

3. issue 3267, February 1st 2020

4. click here.

5. Edited by Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies, Hutchinson of London, 1969

6. Granada Publishing, 1982, p168

7. Flamingo, 1997

8. by Jessica Hamzelou, issue 3269, February 15th 2020, click here.

9. click here.

10. University Press of Virginia, 2nd edition 1974

11. Praeger, 1997

12. White Crow Books, 2016

13. by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, HarperOne, 2007

14. by neuroscientist and cognitive scientist Alva Noë, Hill and Wang, 2009

15. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983

16. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984

17. The Spirit of Science, edited by David Lorimer, Floris Books, 1998

18. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

19. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015

20. click here, here, and here.

    This article follows on from part 1, and I strongly advise anyone not familiar with the conventional history of Big Bang theory to read that before continuing here.

    I’m now going to outline what I believe to be the actual history of the Big Bang theory, the true story. (Obviously as a non-scientist I am relying upon sources — see the bibliography.) Before I do that, it would be interesting to know if any reader knows what I’m going to say. Pause for a moment, and consider whether you know of any other credible alternative to the Big Bang theory, apart from Steady-state.

    There are two features of the conventional history especially worthy of comment. I’ll begin with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (from here on referred to as CMBR).

    As noted in part 1, Alpher and Herman predicted the existence of the CMBR in 1948. In 1933, however, the German physicist Erich Regener had predicted the existence of a microwave background produced from the warming of interstellar dust particles by high-energy cosmic rays, thus not a product of a Big Bang¹.

    Now, if CMBR is predicted by Big Bang theory, and also by a non-Big Bang theory, then surely its discovery says nothing whatsoever about the truth or otherwise of the Big Bang. This becomes even more interesting when you consider that Alpher and Herman predicted in 1948 a microwave temperature of about 5 degrees Kelvin, which they revised upward to 28 degrees Kelvin in the three years that followed. This turned out to be ten times too high. Regener, however, had predicted a temperature of 2.8 degrees Kelvin, this estimate erring from the actual value by less than 3 percent.

    So Regener was not only the first to predict the existence of the CMBR, but also the one who predicted it with the greatest accuracy. According to the scientific method, therefore, this alternative theory should have been considered superior to the Big Bang. So why did Big Bang theorists win? Apparently, they were better organized, and lost no time in claiming the newly discovered CMBR for their own cause. It is even claimed that Gamow was somewhat economical with the truth about his earlier predictions at that time.

    Some pretty shoddy science followed. The CMBR was claimed to be proof of the correctness of Big Bang theory. “But as more data on the CMBR were gathered, little evidence appeared of any connection between the alleged big bang fireball and this microwave radiation. The uniform manner in which the CMBR is distributed across the sky implied that the fireball should have been extremely uniform and that matter should also be uniformly distributed in space. Instead, the universe is seen to be very clumpy. Matter is gathered in the form of gas clouds and galaxies, which in turn are gathered into clusters, and so on. Just to account for the existence of galaxies, the big bang theory required that the CMBR intensity vary from one part of the sky to another by at least one part in a thousand. To account for the vast structures discovered in the mid-1980s, the supercluster complexes and immense periodic structures stretching across the universe, even greater nonuniformities would have been needed.

    “But such nonuniformities were not found. In 1992, the most accurate observations of the microwave field were made with the COBE satellite (that’s the Cosmic Background Explorer). These indicate that when the Earth’s motion relative to the CMBR is taken account of, there are intensity variations of less than one part in 100,000, a hundred times smaller than the big bang theory’s most modest prediction. When the COBE scientists first announced the discovery of ‘ripples’ in 1992, they proudly asserted that they had finally proven the existence of the Big Bang. The news media blindly echoed their claims, and even theologians were purporting the ripples to be evidence of the biblical act of creation. Yet if anything, the COBE measurements had definitively disproven the big bang theory by showing that the CMBR was far too smooth to account for the universe’s clumpiness”².

    In the following year an article appeared in New Scientist³ with the heading, Challenge for the big bang: Results from the COBE probe ruled out key elements in the conventional explanation of how the Universe began. Is it time for an alternative theory? The article did indeed suggest an alternative called quasi-steady state cosmology (echoes of Fred Hoyle there).

    So, evidence which disproves, or at least challenges, a theory is claimed to be proof of it. How can this be allowed to happen? How can ‘scientists’ not notice that they are doing this? Why are they so desperate to preserve Big Bang theory?

    I’ll turn now to the redshift phenomenon, which is not itself in dispute although, as Robert Cox says: “Hubble’s explanation of the cosmological red shift is not the only possible explanation; it is simply the most popular. There are a number of complementary explanations that do not require any form of galactic recession.” This sounds like several competing theories. Actually, however, he says that they all come under the general heading of tired-light theories. How many of you thought of that earlier, when I asked for alternative theories? And if not then, now that I’ve mentioned it, how many of you have heard of it?

    This was proposed by the German physicist Walther Nernst in 1921⁴. He pointed out that in a universe of unlimited age, whether it be stationary or freely expanding, the temperature of interstellar space should be continually increasing, owing to its accumulation of stellar radiant energy. Noting that the temperature of space has instead remained quite low, he proposed that light photons must lose energy to the ether as they travel through space. He published a further paper on the same theme in 1938, citing Regener’s CMBR prediction⁵.

    Also in 1929, only seven months after Hubble had published his redshift results, Fritz Zwicky proposed a quite different interpretation of his findings, suggesting that galaxies and space were cosmologically static and that the redshift was instead due to light photons gradually losing their energy during their long journey through space, thus supporting Nernst’s tired-light hypothesis⁶.

    Nernst’s prediction came before Friedmann, Lemaïtre, and Hubble’s discovery of the cosmological redshift-distance relation. Furthermore, and this is really important, in 1935, somewhat alarmed by the velocities involved, Edwin Hubble himself suggested that some mechanism other than expansion might be responsible for producing the cosmological redshifts⁷. And a year later, armed with a much better set of data, Hubble wrote a follow-up paper that came out decidedly in favour of the tired-light model. His data agreed with a stationary Euclidean universe in which the redshifts were due to some unknown effect, which caused photons to lose energy as they travelled through space⁸. He was therefore agreeing with Nernst, Zwicky, and Regener.

    So, the man whose discovery led to the theory of the expansion of the universe, and therefore to the Big Bang, contrary to what you are led to believe by TV documentaries and popular science books, himself did not believe in the idea, saying in his paper that the data were incompatible, and that “the expanding models are a forced interpretation of the observational results”⁹.

    In 1938 Nernst praised Hubble’s conclusions, noting that his own hypothesis had anticipated the redshift discovery as early as 1921. He said: “It is highly significant that Hubble, one of the discoverers of redshifts, should consider the model of the expanding universe to be unreliable”¹⁰.

    This alternative history that I have presented has been merely a summary. I could also have mentioned Charles Guillaume, Sir Arthur Eddington, Andrew McKellar, Gerhard Herzberg, Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, and Max Born. They are significant figures in this story, whether or not you have heard of them.

    Despite all the above, Simon Singh, writing a book almost 500 pages long, called Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It¹¹, finds no room at all to mention Regener, Nernst, nor the relevant work of any of those just mentioned, claiming incorrectly that Zwicky was the inventor “of the flawed theory of tired light”. He attempts briefly to justify this claim, but unconvincingly in my opinion. He says merely that it did not fit in with the then known laws of physics. Laws and theories, of course, sometimes need to be revised in the light of new discoveries.

    He further says that:

• Hubble “demonstrated that the universe was expanding” even though, as quoted above, he rejected the idea.
• that the COBE results proved the Big Bang model once and for all.

    BBC4 Horizon documentaries continue to churn out the orthodox story (as described in part 1). In two different programmes within the space of two months¹², Jim Al-Khalili went over the same material, failing to mention any of the above, and claiming that the main opposition to Big Bang theory was the Steady-State theory. There was no mention of the tired-light theory, even if only to dismiss it, and explain why it is wrong. I don’t wish to claim conspiracy, even if I sometimes suspect it, but such ignorance, and failure to do proper research is inexcusable.

    In passing, let’s note that tired-light theory goes along with a static universe, which is consistent with Einstein’s 1917 theory including the cosmological constant, and with a theory of dynamic equilibrium advanced by Andre Assis and Marcos Neves¹³. It is also at least in name related to Hoyle’s Steady-State theory.

    So to summarise, once it had been decided that the discovery of the CMBR had proved the Big Bang, even though it had been predicted more accurately by non-Big Bang theory, the Big Bang became a fact. Thereafter, every time that observations, actual data, contradicted the predictions, the rules of the scientific method were ignored, and something fanciful was invented to fix the theory. I have focused on inflation, dark matter, and dark energy.

    Interestingly, in 2005 New Scientist reported on a conference of Big Bang dissenters in Portugal¹⁴ described as “doubters thinking the unthinkable”, asking “the question no one is supposed to ask”. One attendee, Riccardo Scarpa was quoted: “Every time the basic big bang model has failed to predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something new — inflation, dark matter and dark energy”. The data contradicting the theory at the time of writing were argued to be: the temperature of the universe, the expansion of the cosmos, and even the presence of galaxies. All these were said to have cosmologists “scrambling for fixes”.

    The article further said: “For Scarpa and his fellow dissidents, the tinkering has reached an unacceptable level. All for the sake of saving the notion that the universe flickered into being as a hot, dense state”. Eric Lerner, author of Big Bang Never Happened, attended and is also quoted: “Big bang predictions are consistently wrong and are being fixed after the event”.

    The author of the article, Marcus Chown, offered the orthodox CMBR story, then asked: “So if there was no big bang, where did the CMBR come from?” As if there were no alternative explanation! He draws a comparison between Lerner’s ideas and Hoyle’s Steady-state theory, but seems to have no knowledge of Regener and Nernst. And he is a physics graduate, professional science writer, and cosmology consultant for New Scientist.

    One more detail from the article. Following significant data obtained by the Spitzer telescope “some of the stars in distant galaxies appear older than the universe itself”. This is not the only time this has happened. Down the years there have been occasional articles in New Scientist describing stars which are calculated to be as old, if not older than the universe, at least according to the date of the origin of the universe according to the predictions of Big Bang theory.

    So, should we take Big Bang theory seriously or not? Further reflections will follow in part 3.

Bibliography:

• Paul LaViolette, Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation, Park Street Press, 1995, p275f. This was later reissued with the title Genesis of the Cosmos, Bear & Company, 2004.
• A paper by Andre Koch Torres Assis & Marcos Cesar Danhoni Neves http://www.dfi.uem.br/~macedane/history_of_2.7k.html   Regrettably, this paper is no longer available online.
• http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060823bigbangscience.htm

The precise details are not always in complete agreement, but the general thrust is the same.

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Footnotes:

1. ‘Der Energiestrom der Ultrastrahlung’, Zeitschrift für Physik 80, 1933, pp666–69

2. LaViolette, p277

3. Jayant Narlikar, issue 1878, June 19th 1993

4. The Structure of the Universe in Light of Our Research, Berlin: Springer, 1921, p 40, translated by R. Monti in SeaGreen 4, 196: 32–36

5. “Additional test of the assumption of a stationary state in the universe”,                                                          Zeitschrift für Physik 106: 633–61

6. “On the red shift of spectral lines through interstellar space”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15 (1929): 773–79

7. E. Hubble and R. C. Tolman, “Two methods of investigating the nature of the nebular red-shift”, Astrophysical Journal 82 (1935): 302–37

8. “Effects of red shifts on the distribution of mebulae”, Astrophysical Journal 84 (1936): 517

9. ibid. p554

10. as footnote 5, pp. 639–40

11. Fourth Estate 2004, Harper Perennial 2005

12. January 17th 2016, Lost Horizons: the Big Bang, and The Beginning and the End of the Universe, programme 1, March 22nd 2016

13. see bibliography

14. issue 2506, July 2nd 2005