Why We Believe What We Believe

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.

The problem with all such books is that they take several hundred pages to say what could be said in a fraction of that. The first chapter of my book, “A Worldview Based on Evidence,” deals with that subject and takes all 25 pages. However, brevity being the soul of wit, I will attempt to cover the topic much deeper in as few pages as possible.

You were born with no beliefs whatsoever. We all come to our beliefs via our environment, mitigated somewhat by our genetic makeup. That is, we are not all equally vulnerable to the environmental pressures that attempt to mold our worldview. But none of us are entirely immune to those pressures either.

All of us, well before we reach the age of reason, are subject to the beliefs of our parents, teachers, and peers. Our early opinions of how the world works or what life is all about are never based on logic, reason, or any research. We believe what we are told by those we regard as authorities on the subjects in question. And those beliefs, with some modifications, will stay with the vast majority of us for the rest of our lives.

Of course, not everyone grew up in families and with peers who were religious dogmatists who believed God wrote a book that explained everything they needed to know about life. And their population percentage has greatly increased in the last half-century or so. They have a new paradigm, a new worldview, and it’s called “materialism.” They believed they acquired this paradigm via their intellect, an intellect that is far superior to that of the superstitious huddled masses.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This paradigm was simply the accepted paradigm of their peers, teachers, and in some cases, their parents. The new paradigm rejects the god of the masses. They reject not only the god of Christianity but the gods of all religions. And if the god of no religion exists, then by definition, no god or gods exist.

The new paradigm is materialism. Materialism is the philosophy that states nothing exists outside the material world. Materialism rejects the concept of even the possibility of any existence outside the material world. Materialism denies the possible existence of extra-sensory perception and all types of psychic phenomena. And this new paradigm of materialism most definitely rejects the possibility of life after death.

I use the term “new” rhetorically here, as materialism is definitely not new; it is just the new paradigm generally accepted by the postmodern intellectual masses.

Of course, all religions reject materialism as if it were the Devil’s own handiwork. But there is a more serious philosophical opposition to materialism, called “dualism.” Materialism maintains that the mind is a product of the brain. That is, they are one and the same thing. Dualism maintains that they are separate entities. If the dualists are correct, then the mind is non-material.

There is a third worldview, “immaterialism.” That is the belief that the material world is just an illusion. That is a philosophy and not a very popular one. I will have more to say about that in a later essay.

Both materialists and dualists are certain of their positions. They both think they know how the world works. But how did they arrive at their conclusions? Did they study the evidence, weigh the pros and cons, and make a decision on the strength of the evidence? Is the certainty of their conviction justified by the depth and conclusions of their research? In his book: “On Being Certain,” Neurologist Dr. Robert Burton says no.

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

In the quote above, Dr. Burton explains how the feeling of certainty arises in our brains. That’s all well and good, but how did we arrive at those opinions of which we are so damn certain? That is the question. The answer to that question is that you absorbed them from your environment. I mean your environment, your teachers, peers, and family members. From your environment, you decided what you wanted to believe. And as I have been told many times over the years, “people believe what they want to believe.”

Of course, you have likely done a massive amount of research on the subjects so important to you. But that research was always after the fact. You have likely consulted the opinions of others, read books and articles, and perhaps watched videos that confirm your view. You also probably put considerable research into finding evidence that debunked evidence opposed to your beliefs.

It is just human nature. It’s called “confirmation bias” or “my side bias.” We seek certainty. We want to know that our most cherished held opinions are correct. We make every effort to confirm them and to discredit every opposing opinion. If you know something with what you believe is an absolute certainty, then it is just so damn easy to prove it by quoting those who agree with you and presenting their arguments as yours.

Your worldview is the lens through which your world is interpreted. It is your view of the meaning of life if you think it has one. It is your view of the universe and how it came into being. It is your view on the nature of existence. Your worldview is who you are. That worldview must be protected against the onslaught of all attempts to destroy it, to prove it in error.

People will twist themselves into pretzels to protect their most cherished beliefs. That is the case no matter what that belief. It may be that the world was created in six twenty-four-hour days, the world is flat, or nothing exists outside the material world.

There are materialists in every profession; they don’t have to be scientists. But I will only explain how scientists, who are also materialists, defend their worldview. Not just scientists in general but cosmologists in particular. Cosmology is the branch of science that deals with the origin and development of the universe.

I have covered the materialist worldview in other essays and a book. Nevertheless, I will briefly go over it here again. That is, I will try to describe how materialists believe the material universe came into being… from nothing.

First, they start with nothing. The first assumption they make is that this nothing is not really nothing. In fact, this nothing is really something, empty space, which they call nothing. They also tell us that this empty space is unstable. Of course, common sense tells us that empty space has the property of being unstable, then it has to be something, not nothing. However, the universe came into existence, it had to start with something, or some being, already existing. So, I think it only reasonable that we grant them the pre-existence of this “unstable vacuum’ that they call “nothing.” Or at least that’s how one science writer, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, describes it.

Scientists have, in their laboratory, created a near-perfect vacuum. And in this vacuum, they have detected something going on. They believe this is tiny particles and antiparticles popping into existence. Then in a millionth of a second or so, they come together and destroy themselves, returning the energy they had borrowed for their existence to from whence it came.

The particles have never been observed, but most scientists believe they are electrons and anti-electrons, called positrons. And this, they postulate, is how something came from nothing, answering the question philosophers have asked for centuries; “Why is there something rather than nothing.” Of course, the pre-existence of their “unstable nothing” is still unexplained.

However, it is a quantum leap (pun intended) from a tiny particle popping out of nothing to an entire universe popping out of nothing. Okay, before I go any further, a little background information is needed to explain what I mean by “a universe just popping out of nothing.”

We are talking about the Big Bang here. The Big Bang is, among the scientific community, overwhelmingly accepted as how the universe, as we know it, came into being. There may or may not have been something before the Big Bang, but that does not alter the fact that that is how the universe started. Also, we are talking about cosmologists, folks who study such things, and their belief as to how the universe came into being.

I do not use the word “belief” lightly here. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Big Bang happened, there is no evidence whatsoever of what caused it. There is no evidence of the source of all the matter and energy that suddenly popped into existence in a tiny fraction of a second. We can use logical speculation or call it philosophy, but we cannot call it science unless we can find evidence to support how the universe came from nothing.

I would estimate that around eighty percent of all cosmologists are materialists. But one thing almost all of them agree on, materialist or non-materialist, is that the universe is incredibly fine-tuned. The last outright denier I am aware of, Victor Stenger, died in 2014. However, you can find many internet atheists who deny that the universe is fine-tuned. Of course, they know diddle squat about cosmology.

I have tried to describe the term “The fine-tuned universe” before on this blog and other places. However, I will try a different approach and compare it to a fine-tuned piece of machinery, the automobile.

Every part of the automobile must be tuned to work with every other aspect. The cylinders must be the exact diameter of the cylinder bore. Nothing would work if any of them were one millimeter too wide or one millimeter too narrow. The timing of the firing of the spark inside the cylinder must happen at an exact point in the compression cycle, or nothing works. Every gear must mesh perfectly with every other gear in the automobile. Everything works together, or nothing works at all.    

The universe is unbelievably complicated. There are at least 13 particles if you count the massless particles, and even more, if you include, if it exists, the dark matter particle. There are 26 electromagnetic constants. There are dozens more, like the cosmological constant, a decimal point followed by 120 zeros, and then a 1. That is unimaginably small. But if it were any greater, the universe would have been blown apart before stars and galaxies could form. And if it were any smaller,  the universe would have long ago collapsed upon itself. There is the resonance of the carbon. It has to be exactly as it is, or there would be no carbon in the universe.

All these things make up the universe. They all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. They all work together; if one is not present or has a different value, then no universe as we know it. Every constant, every particle, must be precisely as it is, or else the universe, if it existed, would not have galaxies, stars, or rocky planets capable of allowing life to evolve. That, in a nutshell, is what is meant by the fine-tuned universe. But how and why did this extremely fine-tuned come into being?

1973, American physicist Edward P. Tryon proposed that the universe had its genesis as a vacuum fluctuation. That is, the universe just popped out of the vacuum of empty space. A few years ago, another American physicist, Lawrence Krauss, took that football and ran with it. In 2012 he published a book called “A Universe From Nothing.” A few physicists and many non-physicists loved the book. Biologists Richard Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss’s book. “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.  

” A few physicists had a far lesser view of the book. Science writer John Horgan wrote a scathing article for Scientific American titled “Is Lawrence Krauss a Physicist, or Just a Bad Philosopher?” I listened to an audio version of the book, then bought and read it cover to cover. From this effort, I came away with the same opinion as John Horgan.

As I stated earlier, most cosmologists are materialists. They believe the universe just popped out of the pre-existing quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. But how do they explain the fine-tuning of the universe? They opt for what they call the “multiverse.” And they usually refer to an infinite number of them. I quote Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing, page 176. Bold mine:

Nevertheless, a multiverse, either in the form of a landscape of universes existing in a host of extra dimensions or in the form of possibly infinitely replicating set of universes in a three-dimensional space as in the case of eternal inflation, changes the playing field when we think about the creation of our own universe and the conditions that may be required for that to happen.

 In the first place, the question of what determined the laws of nature that allowed our universe to form and evolve now becomes less significant. If the laws of nature are themselves stochastic and random, then there is no prescribed “cause” for our universe. Under the general principle that anything that is not forbidden is allowed, then we would be guaranteed, in such a picture, that some universe would arise with the laws that we have discovered.

There, in a nutshell, is the materialist’s view of how the universe, or multiverse, came into being. The laws, constants, and particles of the universe must be random, and there must be an infinite number of them. Concerning Krauss’s use of the term infinity, there can be an infinite number of possible universes but never an infinite number of actual universes. There can never be an infinite number of anything, be it rabbits, bowling balls, or universes.

But let’s examine the multiverse advocate’s argument a little closer. The validity of the argument depends on every facet of the universe, the particles, the constants, and the laws, being random. Otherwise, every universe would be exactly like all the others. But how many different random variations can there be of each? And what are the chances of one universe getting them all correct? Therein lies the killer to their argument.

How many possible subatomic particles could exist that are not an up quark with the same mass, charge, and spin as the up quark we have in this universe? The answer is obvious. There is an infinite number of possible subatomic particles that bear no resemblance to our up quark. And the same can be said for the down quark, the gluon, the electron, and all the other subatomic particles. And there is an infinite number of different possible constants for all of the dozens of constants and laws that govern our universe.

So what are the odds? If there exist a trillion, trillion, trillion universes, what are the odds that one of them will generate an up quark exactly like the one in this universe? Slim, but it could happen. But what about the down quark? Same odds, almost non-existent. Same for the gluon, and the same for each of the dozens of other laws and constants.

They must be random, that is the rule, or it doesn’t work. And if they are random, what are the chances of getting them all correct in one universe? If getting just one right would be 1 times 10 to infinity, Then the chance of getting them all right is one times 10 to infinity, to infinity, to infinity to …

But what does this mean? First, I will tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that a deity created and worshipped by iron age desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes had anything to do with it. Also, it has nothing to do with the evolution of life on this planet.

Concerning human evolution, the male sperm and the female egg combine to form a single double-helix strand of DNA inside the zygote in the womb. Biologists tell us that this strand of DNA is not a human being but rather the recipe for a human being. That DNA molecule, that recipe, took over three billion years to evolve.

Immediately after the Big Bang, there existed nothing but plasma, a kind of quark-gluon soup. Then those quarks and gluons combined to form protons and neutrons. After about three minutes, these protons formed hydrogen and helium nuclei. But it would be almost 300,000 years before that plasma had cooled enough that the nuclei could capture electrons and form actual hydrogen and helium atoms. And it would be another 300 to 500 million years before gravity would pull these hydrogen and helium atoms close enough together to form the first stars and galaxies would form.

It all played out over half a billion years, according to a recipe, a recipe for a universe. But unlike the DNA recipe inside the human zygote, this recipe did not evolve. This recipe popped into existence in a tiny fraction of a second at the instant of the Big Bang.

“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all… it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe.

The impression for design is overwhelming.”

                                      Paul Davies

Dr. Davies is one of the world’s leading cosmologists. But he is in the minority. I would estimate that perhaps 80 percent of cosmologists disagree with him. They agree with him that the universe is fine-tuned, but they believe it was just all a happy accident. But why? Because their worldview forbids it. Evidence does not matter, and logic or reason does not matter. They hold, with absolute certainty, that nothing exists outside the material world. And no evidence can possibly exist strong enough to dislodge that certainty.

Permission is granted to copy and publish all or any part of this essay, or any other essay on this blog, provided the context is not changed and the source link is also listed.

I have a book you might be interested in:

A Worldview Based on Evidence

I will be posting a new essay about twice a month. If you would like to be notified by email when a new essay is posted, please email me at Darwinian200@gmail.com . 

Ron Patterson

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