Why We Believe What We Believe

Part One

The Philosophy of Materialism

A note before I begin. I often use the pronoun “you” in my essays. Please understand that I am not addressing you personally but just “you” in general. You, personally, may be an exception to “you” in general. So, when I say “you,” please don’t take it personally.

Another note: The opinions and conclusions expressed in this essay and those that follow are not just wild ideas dreamed up by some smart-ass uneducated in the fields I discuss here. But they mirror, at least in part, the opinions and conclusions of some philosophers and physicists such as Paul Davies, David Albert, and science writer John Horgan. I try to express the findings that other authorities on the subjects have reached in a much shorter and more descriptive manner. That being said, these other authorities are definitely in the minority.

Why you believe what you believe is the title of a book I own by Andrew Newman. I have over half a dozen other books on the same subject. Some of the titles are “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer, “Believing Bullshit” by Stephen Law, and “How We Know What Isn’t So” by Thomas Gilovich. The Newman book is excellent and informative, but the rest are about as dogmatic as your average fundamentalist book on religion. The authors are all dogmatic materialists. They say that if you believe anything other than the material world exists, you believe bullshit. However, they do have some value, as many things people believe are pure bullshit.

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My position on Science, Religion, and the Nature of Existence

I am not a scientist, but I believe in science. I would never argue with a scientist on any scientific subject. But I would argue with them when they venture into territories that have nothing to do with science.

I am not religious, in fact, I am strongly anti-religious. I am a Darwinian. Life on earth evolved via natural selection. I see no evidence for biological intelligent design. I think it is very likely that life also evolved in many other places throughout the universe. That is, however, only a logical deduction. There is no scientific evidence of other life in the universe, and likely any such evidence will forever be beyond our reach.

I agree with perhaps ninety to ninety-five percent of cosmologists who agree that the universe is extremely fine-tuned. However, there is no scientific evidence as to how the universe became so fine-tuned. However, I believe the logical conclusion points to some kind of cosmic entity or intelligence as a fine-tuner. And if that is the case, then this fine-tuner would likely have a logical reason for doing so.

 I agree with many scientists, like Jim Baggott, John Horgan, Sabine Hossenfelder, and many others, that such concepts as the multiverse, string theory, and the anthropic principle are not science. To quote John Horgan, “These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don’t deserve to be called Science. – Multiverse theories aren’t theories—they’re science fiction, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence.”

I am not a materialist. I believe there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of the non-physical spiritual world. I believe that evidence is denied because of, in the words of Neal Grossman, resistance to a paradigm change, intellectual arrogance, and social taboo.

That evidence will be discussed in future essays on this blog. These essays will, very likely, be part of my next and last book.

But for now, enjoy the short essay below.

Sodom and Gomorrah

The Rest of the Story

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A year or so ago I wrote a short essay on the Biblical chapter, Numbers 31. That is where God tells Moses to take vengeance upon the Midianites. I hoped to use the essay in a book or perhaps publish it on a website.

After completing the essay, I emailed it to my oldest son, Rusty, for his criticism. (Rusty is a materialist, that is he believes nothing exists except the material world.) I was stunned by his reply:

“No, no, no, Dad, far too graphic. That is shocking; You just cannot write stuff like that.”

So, I took his advice and deleted the essay.

Then today began thinking about all the shocking stuff in the Bible, the genocide, the drowning of all the world’s people, including toddlers, babies, and animals in a flood, the eternal burning of unbelievers in hell fire… Then I thought of a line I had read many years ago:

          Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.

          Thomas Paine:   The Age of Reason

Dammit, I thought. That chapter is one of the most shocking things I have ever read. If it is okay for that story to be published in the Bible, just why can’t I just try to explain how it all must have gone down or had to go down? If a person can just read about something happening without thinking about the details of how it had to happen, then that person is not being honest with him/herself. they can just imagine that nothing really nasty happened, but not all that bad. They just say to themselves, “nothing else to report here, so let’s move on.” A lie by omission.

No, hell no, I will publish this essay. Sure it is horribly shocking. But what the Bible said happened was shocking. This is presented as the holy work of God; therefore, it is only fair that if they say it happened, then it is only fair that we can try to describe the events as they surely must have happened.

I decided to rewrite the essay. But make no mistake, this essay is not intended to be an appeal to reason. It is intended only to shock. Read More

The corrected edition of my book is now available. “A Worldview Based on Evidence” Check it out on Amazon.com

Is the “Something from nothing hypothesis really valid?” An article titled “70-year-old quantum prediction comes true, as something is created from nothing” claims it is possible. This article, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel for Big Think, can be found at:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/

The problem is, the “nothing” as it is described in this article is most definitely “something”. The article readily admits this.

Everything that exists, down at a fundamental level, can be decomposed into individual entities — quanta — that cannot be broken down further. These elementary particles include quarks, electrons, the electron’s heavier cousins (muons and taus), neutrinos, as well as all of their antimatter counterparts, plus photons, gluons, and the heavy bosons: the W+, W-, Z0, and the Higgs. If you take all of them away, however, the “empty space” that remains isn’t quite empty in many physical senses.

Further in the article, they state, bold mine:

But even for the electromagnetic force — even if you completely zero out the electric and magnetic fields within a region of space — there’s an experiment you can perform to demonstrate that empty space isn’t truly empty. Even if you create a perfect vacuum, devoid of all particles and antiparticles of all types, where the electric and magnetic fields are zero, there’s clearly something that’s present in this region of what a physicist might call, from a physical perspective, “maximum nothingness.”

Okay, lets continue with the understanding that what some physicists call “maximum nothingness” contains a “little somethingness”. This “somethingness” is called “quantum fields.”

For one, even in the absence of particles, quantum fields remain. Just as we cannot take the laws of physics away from the Universe, we cannot take the quantum fields that permeate the Universe away from it.

This “maximum nothingness” not only contains something called quantum fields, but it also contains laws.
Dr. Siegel goes on to explain how, with very strong electric field, particles and antiparticles can be created. And if the field is strong enough, the particle-antiparticle pair can be separated and not reannihilate and destroy each other.

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The invisible matter might be a better name for it. It cannot be seen or detected by any instrument. We only know it’s there because of its gravitational effects on regular matter and light.

In 1933 Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, working at Caltech, was studying the Coma Cluster of galaxies. The Coma Cluster, about 320 million light-years away from us contains over 1,000 galaxies. It is the nearest cluster to our home cluster, the Virgo Cluster, which contains our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Galaxies in a cluster are held together by gravity and rotate around the center of the cluster. They don’t all rotate in the same direction but rather all rotate in different directions. Zwicky noticed something strange about their rotational speed. They were all rotating way too fast. That is the amount of visible matter in the cluster was not nearly enough to hold the galaxies inside the cluster, they should have long ago escaped the cluster. Zwicky calculated that the cluster needed 400 times as much matter as was apparent from observation to hold the cluster together. (Since Zwicky’s time that number has been reduced but the cluster still rotates far too fast for the assumed matter present.) Zwicky assumed that there had to be far more matter in the cluster than could be observed. He called this matter “dark matter”.

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I have been told that I don’t understand infinity. That there is a hierarchy of infinities therefore my use of the word is, or must somehow be, incorrect. Yes, there is a hierarchy of infinities as explained in this 8-minute video. You don’t really need to watch that video because the hierarchy of infinities has nothing to do with my argument. I post the link only for those who think it does.

A Hierarchy of Infinities

I used the term as: “There are an infinite number of numbers.”  Those numbers can be either whole or fractional. But that number can never be reached, either by counting or as an actual number of physical entities.

An example, if there were a sphere 200 billion light-years in diameter, filled with neutrons packed as tightly as they are inside a neutron star, their numbers would not approach infinity. Multiply that number by a trillion, and you are still nowhere close to having an infinite number of neutrons. Then multiply that number by a trillion trillion, and you are not closer to infinity than you ever were. There can never exist an infinite number of anything physical, be neutrons, bowling balls, or universes. Read More

or

The Great Non-Sequitur

I wrote a rather long essay on “From Whence The Fine-Tuned Universe” and posted it as a page on PeakOilBarrel.com. However, I don’t think many people read the entire essay because I keep getting questions that I already answered in that essay. I will try to be a lot clearer in this post.

First, I must make one thing clear. The fact that the universe is fine-tuned is overwhelmingly accepted throughout the cosmological community. There are only three or four holdouts among the hundred or so that write books and papers as well as those who post YouTube videos on the subject. And even the tiny few, like Sean Carroll, who say that they are “not so sure” that the universe is fine-tuned, hedge their bets by positing the multiverse as a backup explanation when they are pressed with the overwhelming evidence of fine-tuning. Read More

The double-slit experiment is the central puzzle of quantum mechanics. Because it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results. Richard Feynman called it “a phenomenon which is impossible to explain and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics”. In reality, it contains the only mystery of quantum mechanics.

If you are not familiar with the double-slit experiment then this 9 minute video is the very best and quickest explination I have found.

Double Slit Experiment explained! by Jim Al-Khalili