Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 23, 2016 • 15 Comments
Quantum Physics, Understanding Reality
There are times when we encounter willful ignorance so spectacular that we stand in humble awe of it. How is it possible for an adult human being in the year 2016 to remain entirely unaware of every bit of modern afterlife evidence?
Incredibly, there is one physicist who claims to be so unaware. According to a recent interview in Scientific American, Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology argues in his new book, The Big Picture: On the Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself that “There is just no such thing as God, or ghosts, or human souls that reside outside of the body. Everything in existence belongs to the natural world and is accessible to science.”
This interview is prickly with bogus assumptions introduced by both interviewer and interviewee. That the only alternative to materialist science is religion; that “natural” and “supernatural” are meaningfully distinct; that the “natural world” cannot be greater than what modern science considers to be natural; that “natural” and “material” are therefore rough synonyms; and that the mere refusal to 
notice phenomena must mean that they probably do not exist are all cheerfully assumed to be fact. It is on some level adorable to watch educated adults conversing this way, pretending a narrow naivety, in much the same way that it is adorable to watch a tea party of children pretending to be grownups.
And their resolute ignorance runs deep. To quote Dr. Carroll, “I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it. It just seems weird that this kind of thing would be so crucial and yet so difficult to notice in any controlled scientific way. I would make the case that it is sufficiently unlikely in a fair Bayesian accounting that we don’t need to spend any time thinking about it anymore. Five hundred years ago it would have been a possibility. I think these days we’re ready to move on.” His worry is that if we give up on God, we might then give up on finding meaning in life, so he has written a book on how we might find that meaning within a materialist framework. It is an undertaking at once well-meant and ridiculous.
Even Dr. Carroll must be aware, as Albert Einstein said decades ago, that “Concerning 
matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, agrees that “there is no matter as such.” Dr. Planck goes further, asserting in 1931 that “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” So Max Planck actually said that consciousness must pre-date matter? And this is not a red flag for Dr. Carroll?
Apparently not. And he remains so cheerily oblivious to any sort of afterlife-related phenomena that he feels safe enough within the echo chamber that is modern materialist science to advocate for the party line without fearing that he will be made to look foolish.
Dr. Carroll is in good company. At the turn of the previous century there was the same sort of tribal certainty among physicists that they had it all figured out. For example, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in 1900, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, reportedly said, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Albert Michelson, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physics, echoed Lord Kelvin in 1903, saying, “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. [I]nstances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that ‘our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals’.”
Obviously Dr. Michelson’s Nobel Prize was for his work with light and not for his skills at 
prognostication! Fifteen years after he uttered those words, Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. And all those physicists who had assumed that everything already had been discovered were left to try to live down their words.
Sadly, so it also will be for our poor friend, Sean Carroll. It won’t be more than a decade or two before his book makes him a laughingstock, since we are confidently told by those we used to think were dead that there will soon be good electronic communication between their level of reality and our own. And meanwhile, beyond the ken of dogma-bound types like Dr. Carroll, scientists who retain their curiosity continue to make progress in building bridges between our benighted present and that glorious, unfettered future that begins when scientists will no longer be forced to constrain what they investigate in order to avoid inadvertently finding God.
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Yes…..Everything in existence including God and things we did not discover yet belongs to the natural world”, which unfortunately this scientist fails to define!
Thank you, Danka – precisely right! The fact that a natural aspect of reality is outside the scientific preference for materialism does not make it any less real. And when that seems to be such a commonsense fact, how can it be so far outside their ken?
Roberta you wrote in reply to Carroll’s book about finding meaning in a strictly material universe, “His worry is that if we give up on God, we might then give up on finding meaning in life, so he has written a book on how we might find that meaning within a materialist framework.” Ridiculous is the right response. If his postulate about the material or “natural” world is right then by definition there is no ultimate meaning to existence at all. And there never can be as life, in this case, is a meaningless incidental byproduct of scientific process. From the ultimate physical viewpoint the universe will expand into eternity until all useable energy is expanded and all goes infinitely dark and cold. Life in this case is nothing more than the chemical flickering of a firefly, a comedy played out for the, cosmically soon, finale of utter silence. Try as he might Mr. Carroll’s view on life can have no more meaning than rearranging the deck chairs on a universal Titanic. Ridiculous indeed.
Exactly right, dear wonderful Michael! Either our existence is accidental – and therefore meaningless by definition – as most scientists assume that it is; or it is deliberate, which means that there must indeed be an un-caused Cause. The existence of a Creator does not automatically convey meaning and purpose to our lives, but it suggests that there may well be the kind of meaning and purpose that is impossible if our existence is accidental. Try as they might, scientists cannot have it both ways. You are precisely right!
As it so happens, Roberta, this Sean Carroll was on Coast-to-Coast with George Noory recently. I heard the last part of the interview. He said about the same things as you relate that he wrote in Scientific American. Yourcomments hit the nail on the head.
This Dr. Carroll is a sad case and I also agree completely with what Michael Newton wrote above in his comments. In the call in segment of the Noory program, Carroll dismissed any contradictory evidence presented as a “brain dysfunction” or “delusional thinking” on anyone not agreeing with him. And Noory let him get away with it!
He seems totally ignorant of the realms of scientific evidence for the paranormal and the afterlife. As for his statement: “I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it.” Fact of the matter, as you and others regular readers of your blog know, there are volumes written of the historic encounters with “spirits” and the “supernatural” throughout history and into today. Of course, Dr. Carroll would dismiss it all as “delusional.”
What George Noory should do is have a parapsychologist like Dr. Dean Radin, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, on with this Dr. Carroll(who’s a regular guest) and Dr. Carroll would have a real challenge to him.
An article came to my attention that was in Scientific American, which you read regularly, that you might have missed. It’s by a John Horgan, a blogger. It’s titled “Dear Skeptics: Bash Homeopathy and Big Foot less and Mammograms and War More.” I only read a summation of his article, but he takes to task the “skeptics” who are narrow minded and dogmatic. Have you read this article?
Wow, whenever I write something on which both of my beloved, learned friends named Michael will comment, I always feel that I’ve hit the nail on the head!
I also read a summary of Horgan’s opinion in SA, but the very fact that he set up his false strawmen of homeopathy and bigfoot against his preferred things to bash, and he didn’t mention NDEs and the recent evidence that consciousness survives brain death, suggests to me that he is still toadying to the gatekeepers and not attempting to open their minds. At any rate, we know that what our dear Victor Zammit calls “the closed-minded skeptics” are going to ignore whatever he says. As you and Michael Newton and I have pointed out, it takes a spectacular level of adherence to ignorance for someone to champion a position like Dr. Carroll’s in 2016, and an equally amazing level of confidence in the power of one’s tribe to preserve the status quo to step into what he must have seen as the lion’s den of George Noory’s (!) living room and trumpet his partisan message. That George didn’t challenge him directly indicates that level of safety was a likely condition of his even being there, but who knows? And in the end, it doesn’t matter.
Dr. Carroll’s only value lies in the fact that he illustrates the depth of determined ignorance to which our entire culture has now sunk. It isn’t only that mainstream science still refuses to allow any professional scientist even to consider phenomena like NDEs and communications from the dead, but just as importantly all the gatekeepers – from peer-reviewed journals and universities right through the mainstream media and Wikipedia – have banded together to maintain the dualist notion that scientists study all that is “normal,” so anything they won’t study must be “paranormal.” Science studies truth, while religions worship fantasies. Therefore, by definition, whatever scientists will not study cannot possibly be real.
For more than a century, afterlife researchers have tried to convince those who still fight to maintain this artificial dualist structure to open their minds. Brilliant scholars like Charles Drayton Thomas, Sir William Barrett, and Montague Keen have labored and died in obscurity. It seems now to have dawned on those we used to think were dead that this revolution cannot happen at the top, but it can begin only when we have reached so many regular folks with the truth that they will be laughing in scientists’ faces.
Hence the great push being orchestrated now to establish first the Brazilian Station and then the North American Station, so soon electronic communication between there and here will be such a commonplace that within the decade it will no longer be possible for anyone to plausibly deny that the dead survive. They tell us now this is going to work, and they tell us it will happen soon. And when it does, the long-delayed future will begin, scientific inquiry will again become the open-minded pursuit of the truth, and all the Dr. Carrolls who still hope to delay the deluge until after they themselves are safely dead will be left like fools in history’s dust. I feel bad for them, actually.
The likes of #Sean Carroll…they look themselves through the plain mirror and see an immaterial reflection of themselves and just because they cannot grasp the concept of the one invisible to them on the other side of the mirror they dismiss its existence and term it a natural cause,little do they know the one on the other side of the mirror isn’t just a reflection of our body but a whole bigger part of who we are as spirits ……
So true, Benson! Dr. Carroll and his ilk suffer from a profound inability to see on a number of levels, and all of it stems from the notion that may have originated in ancient Greece – or may go back even farther – that it even is possible to study only what seems to us to be material. That we can derive from such a narrow study anything of lasting value. The uncomfortable facts that these folks still to this day refuse to face include (but aren’t limited to) these:
1) “There is no matter as such.” Max Planck and Albert Einstein both said this decades ago. By now, every physicist realizes that even the tiniest subatomic particle is just a vortex of energy, which is why they looked so hard for the Higgs Boson, which had been posited as a way to lend “mass” to energy. So if even matter is not really material, then what now can be the intellectual basis for studying only matter and its correlate energy and refusing even to consider the possible existence of anything else?
2) Consciousness must pre-date the universe. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, said this, and other physicists have said it as well. Experiments in quantum physics strongly suggest that what we think of as human consciousness gives rise to matter, which should be a rather large red flag, don’t you think?
3) Something is keeping the universe stable. Again, the brilliant Max Planck and the equally brilliant Albert Einstein both referred to the Mind behind it all. Dr. Planck called that Mind “the matrix of all matter,” which is a brilliant insight.
4) The ongoing stability of the universe requires certain cosmological constants to maintain vanishingly tiny tolerances. If these constants were off by even a tiny bit, the universe would either explode or collapse on itself. It lately has been discovered, however, that the cosmological “constants” actually change! They continuously adjust. Wow. Scientists have discovered Dr. Planck’s posited Mind at work, maintaining the universe’s stability! And how have the scientific gatekeepers reacted to this astonishing discovery? They have decided to set the constants arbitrarily. So, as one of them said to the great Rupert Sheldrake, “If they change again, we’ll never know about it.”
5) There is no rational basis for calling anything “supernatural.” If it exists, it must be natural by definition, and we simply don’t yet understand it; if it doesn’t exist, then it needs no name at all. That arbitrary distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is just part of the same old artificial duality between material and spiritual inquiries which never should have existed in the first place!
… And we could go on. Mainstream science is in a tangle of its own creation which was made worse a century ago when the gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – decided to double down on dualism and restrict with the dogma of materialism what should be the open-minded study of reality. Their edifice of nonsense is going to fall in this century, and with it will fall the value of much of an entire century’s worth of work by scientists who have been very badly served by the leaders of their profession :-(.
After a century of Einstein’s fourth dimension, Quantum and Multidimensional Physics, and astrophysicists proving 96% of the universe is not atoms, Materialists ignore much of the recent scientific evidence. In the In the June 2016 issue of The Atlantic, Stephen Cave wrote, “But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.” There is certainly no such agreement in the scientific community.
It is simply wishful thinking for people who refuse their open their mind to the recent scientific breakthroughs – many of which are detailed in my upcoming book Sacred Quantum Metaphysics.
It’s all pretty ridiculous, isn’t it, Rich? At this point, given all the evidence, it is literally self-evident that human consciousness is not and cannot be produced by the brain. Even Max Planck said as much! And I’m excited about your book, dear. Gary Schwartz thinks it’s great, and that is high praise indeed ;-). Please email a PDF to me when it is about to be published, and we’ll have a conversation about your ideas and discoveries on Seek Reality!
I bought ‘fun of dying’ awhile back, on my kindle reader and then got busy and forgot about it. Then this past February my beloved pet passed. I was waiting in my car for a friend one day in March, thinking about ‘the meaning of it iall’ and I rediscovered your book! I am so glad that happened – ‘providence’ I think they call it!?!
I love your blog, it is one of the only ones I read now. I’ve been of the world, as they say, building my own towers in the business world, but at 55 now, I am slowing down to, as I say, grow where I am planted. To find my roots and then ‘my wings’, that is what makes all of this worthwhile to me.
How arrogant for any human – I don’t care how many PhD’s he or she has – to believe he/she has life ‘all figured out’!
Welcome, Barb! Thank you so much for commenting here. Isn’t it wonderful to be this age, at this time? While the consciousness of the planet rises all around us – and it is doing that, quickly, which is one reason why there is so much backlash – we have enough experience in the world to have some perspective, and to appreciate the glories that are about to come. Now you’re one of those that I’ll be thinking of as I write my next blog post!
Thank you Roberta – your response made my day. I would LOVE to be more involved in this movement of making contact with the other side. I am a psychotherapist and, while I am what I call a hopeful agnostic (raised catholic), I often bring up the topic of spirituality with my clients as it is such a useful life coping skill.
Thank you Roberta – your response made my day. I would LOVE to be more involved in this movement of making contact with the other side. I am a psychotherapist and, while I am what I call a hopeful agnostic (raised catholic), I often bring up the topic of spirituality with my clients as it is such a useful life coping skill.
Dear Barb, I am coming to realize that this allowing us now to figure out death and the afterlife has been the entry to our deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life, which of course is spiritual growth. The planet’s consciousness is rising now with amazing speed. That you feel called to lead those you counsel toward a deeper spirituality is not surprising at all, and it’s wonderful!