My new book is now available on Amazon. I am told it is far better than my first one. I think it will do far better because it is
priced far more reasonable. Tht Kindle copy is only $3.95 and the
paperback is only $5.95.
That is about one third the price of my first book. I had no control
over that price but for this book I found a publisher who agreed to a much lower price.
The book is only 77 pages and the first 7 pages are posted below.
I can be reached for comments at Darwinian200@gmail.com
Back Cover
The battle rages between materialism and theology. The materialist says your life and the universe are just a happy accident with no meaning or purpose, and it will all end, for you, the day you die. The theologians say, no, you were born with the sin of Adam, deserving Hell. But God sent his son as a blood sacrifice to save you from that fate. And if you believe that story, you will inherit eternal paradise. But if you find yourself unable to believe that story, you will burn in Hell forever.
This book explains why you have been conditioned, almost since birth, to believe only one of those stories or the other. This book presents overwhelming evidence that both of those stories are wrong.
The universe does have meaning; your life has a purpose, Hell does not exist, and your fate has nothing to do with religion.
For the Amazon page click on the title below.
The Soul Survives and Religion Lies
By Ron Patterson
Copyright © 2023 Ron Patterson
Excerpts from this book may be quoted, printed, or posted so long as they are properly sourced and accredited.
ISBN:
Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of my son, Jeff. He loved life, loved people, and hated no one. He was taken by the gay plague in the prime of his life. I hope to meet him again.
Author’s Note
This is my second book. The first one, “A Worldview According to Evidence,” written over a year ago, was a dud. Written in haste and submitted to a self-publisher whom I believe ripped me off and gave me no control over pricing. They priced the book, Kindle, and paperback, way above what the market could bear. Both should have been priced at less than half of what they were priced at. To say the book did poorly would be an understatement.
However, since almost no one read the book, I have repeated a few points I made in that book. But only a few. Also, looking back, the book was written from a different perspective. I plan to correct that problem in this book. I will be brief, using as few words as possible to convey my point. I will not try to baffle you with bullshit using sesquipedalian* words when a much shorter term would do. (*A foot and a half long.) I will write in a vernacular that any young adult can understand. Though if you are a deeply religious person, you will find some of it offensive, perhaps even shocking. If so, you may assume that was my intention.
My reasons for writing this short book are to avoid misleading anyone. I am a strong advocate of the scientific method. I believe in science though I believe science has a blind spot, which I will describe in detail later in the book. For almost all my adult life, I have called myself an atheist. However, some would label me as a deist. I wouldn’t say I like that label. The word “deist,” like the word “god,” means something different to different people. I believe the universe was set into motion by some conscious entity. I must confess I have absolutely no idea as to the nature of that conscious entity.
Contents
Skepticism as a Belief System.. 3
Stating the Obvious Why We Believe. 6
The Accepted Paradigm of Our Peers. 8
The Rest of the True Believers. 12
Reason, Logic, and Evidence. 13
A Closer Look at the Birth of the Universe. 35
There Must Have Been a Purpose. 42
Our Belief System
Premise
I am an old man, 85 years of age, and in fair health. Most would say I am a presumptuous old fool to attempt to write such a book as I now try to write. They would say that because I am not a scientist, philosopher, or a member of any profession that deals with the subjects I am about to critique. But I have studied all of them all long life. A short bio is in order. In it, I will explain why I feel qualified to embark on this attempt to critique the subjects in this book.
I was born in a three-room sharecropper’s shack in 1938. I was the sixth of ten siblings, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Dirt farmers, in those days, usually had many children. Children were farmhands that only cost the farmer room and board. They also gave the farmer and his wife much love and all the heartaches and problems with raising children.
In those days, dirt farming was backbreaking labor. I hated every minute of it. In high school, I had no direction for my life. I only knew that I would not be a farmer. But luckily, a few years after I graduated from high school, and with the aid of electronics training I received in the US Air Force, I found the job I dearly loved.
Though I had no engineering degree, my job title was “Field Service Engineer.” I worked for a large mainframe computer manufacturer. About twenty percent of my time was spent either on the road or repairing large mainframe computers or their peripherals. I spent the rest of the time in my office, if I was lucky enough to be a resident engineer, or in my home, reading about my favorite subject of the day.
That subject might be astronomy, paleontology, geology, anthropology, psychology, or some other scientific “ology” subject. I wanted to know what I referred to as “the answers.” By that, I mean the answers to life’s mysteries. Does life have any meaning? Is there a purpose behind it all? Admittedly, I have not found all the answers. However, I believe I have found some of the answers. Here is one of the most important things my decades of research have taught me. I have discovered that there is overwhelming evidence that the material world is not all that exists.
Here I must give a brief description of “materialism.” Materialism, sometimes called naturalism, is the philosophy that the universe is made up of matter and energy and nothing else. Materialists deny the existence of anything non-material, like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or any type of extrasensory perception. And they certainly deny the existence of life after death.
That our belief system is deeply flawed is not some harebrained theory I came up with on my own. I discovered it is also the opinion of almost everyone who ever investigated the science of epistemology.
Skepticism as a Belief System
I have about two dozen books in my library on why we believe what we believe or dealing with that subject. Most of them, unfortunately, are wordy and tedious, taking ten or more pages to say what could be said in one. The titles of just a few of them are “How We Know What Isn’t So, Why People Believe Weird Things, and Believing Bullshit,” which are dogmatic, implying that nothing outside the material world exists.
Others are just as dogmatic but in the opposite direction, implying that they know the truth and proceed to tell you how they know what they think they know. One such book is titled “How Do We Know?” That book stated on the very first page, “This book is an introduction on epistemology that is written from a Christian perspective.”
That is the case for most epistemology books. They assume a prior truth. For instance, the book “How We Know What Isn’t So” by Thomas Gilovich is a book on epistemology written from a materialist perspective. However, the author does not make that specific claim. He writes in a chapter titled Belief in ESP:
Othing that can be said about ESP is that it compels our attention regardless of whether or not it exists. If, despite current evidence to the contrary, we should someday discover the reality of psi, then both science and everyday life would change more dramatically than even the most creative science-fiction writers have imagined. On the other hand, if ESP is nothing but an illusion that it currently appears to be, we are left with the fascinating question of why many people are convinced of its existence.
Here I must disagree with Professor Gilovich. Science deals exclusively with the physical world. ESP, if proven, would prove that the non-physical world exists. It should not affect science. As to everyday life, I cannot imagine how that would change at all, except a few people would become more enlightened on the subject.
Other books on epistemology, however, are less dogmatic. One such book, by D.B. Ramsey, is “Speaking of God: We Don’t Know Shit.” I loved that little book, I read it cover to cover in one sitting. But one of my favorites is titled “On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not,” by Dr. Robert A. Burton. Dr. Burton tells us the revolutionary premise of his book is:
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.
The certainty Dr. Burton is talking about is not the type found in mathematics, as in 2+2=4. It is the certainty we feel about our core beliefs and our worldview. Most Christians “know” that the Bible is the inspired word of God, while most atheists “know” that nothing exists except the material world. Neither arrived at this supposed “knowledge” by logic or reason. If not, how did they gain this seemingly, absolute knowledge?
In other words, how do people who are sure they possess the truth about how the world works know they are correct? Of course, they don’t know that at all. They think they do. They have this feeling of knowing that no argument is sufficient to dislodge. I can think of a few rather obvious explanations that cover the vast majority of the believing world. I will discuss those here. Others require a much deeper psychological or neurological explanation. Dr. Robert A. Burton, a neurologist, does cover many of those in his book, but I am neither a psychologist nor a neurologist, so I will leave those to him and other professionals.
This short book is written neither from a religious nor materialist perspective. I believe in science. I would never argue with a scientist about provable, testable science. I would go even further. Though we can only observe the universe as it exists today, we can still calculate how it all must have begun by measuring the recession of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background radiation. I think that the Big Bang Theory is correct. And that is the opinion I will hold until a better theory comes. I doubt that will ever happen, but I can turn on a dime if that ever happens.
I stress my opinion here because I want to clarify that I am not anti-science. I am a Darwinian without any theistic beliefs whatsoever.
However, scientists sometimes drift off into belief systems that cannot be tested or supported by observation. Such theories are easy to identify because they can only be supported by faith and are, not always but quite often, vigorously opposed by other scientists.ne
Stating the Obvious Why We Believe
Early Indoctrination
First, and by far the most obvious reason why we have that feeling of knowing what is true and what is false about the world is early indoctrination. In most of the world, children are indoctrinated from birth in the beliefs of their parents and early role models. Almost every religious person knows this. It’s even in the Bible. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he becomes a man, he will not depart from it.” Or the Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”
All childhood indoctrination programs are not equal. I lived for almost five years in Saudi Arabia. There, for young boys, half the school day was spent in religious instruction. Some of them, by the age of 12, had memorized the entire Koran, their holy book, which is about the size of the New Testament. Everyone is required to pray five times a day. All shops and businesses must close for about 15 minutes for prayer time. It’s the law. It’s all about repetition, repetition, repetition. Repetition is the cement for the brain. If any dictatorial state has complete control of all public media, schools, and the laws of the state, they can dictate the beliefs of the state and require that they be repeated as required incantations, repeatedly until they are set as if cement in the brain. Not one person in a thousand will become a disbeliever when raised in such a dictatorial environment.
Such indoctrination can be seen, to somewhat a lesser extent, in the fundamental evangelical Christian family. God is poured over everything, like ketchup over fries. Any misfortune is “God’s Will.” Anything not understood is “God works in mysterious ways.” At every meal, everyone holds hands with the person sitting next to them, and the same identical incantation, called a prayer, is repeated. Such a family brings up their children in the way they think they should, and when they become adults, they will be religious fanatics, just like their parents.
When we object to such behavior by Christians, we are told that this is their religion and that all religions should be respected. I state emphatically that I will not respect such forced indoctrination on children, even in the name of religion. It is child abuse, pure and simple. We are told by people who should know better when we criticize any religion, such as Islam, for the way they treat women, denying them an education and forcing them to cover their bodies, even their faces, from head to toe, that this is racism. To this, I cry, “bullshit.” Such people are letting their misguided respect for religion override their common sense. All human rights abuse, even in the name of religion, deserves nothing more than our outright condemnation.
Early indoctrination is, by far, the most common reason for our hard-core beliefs, even though most are not as obvious as we can observe in religious indoctrination. Our early upbringing, whether deeply religious, heretical, indifferent, or pernicious environment, will affect our belief system for the rest of our lives.
This is the end of the preview of this book. Click on the link below for the Amazon page;
The Soul Survives and Religion Lies
I can be reached for comments at Darwinian200@gmail.com