Posted by Roberta Grimes • June 22, 2024 • 8 Comments
Understanding Reality
It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
but I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)
A few research scientists are trying to find the moment in proto-human history when the first entirely human mind kicked in and developed awareness that was deeply and profoundly human. But they seem to be having little success at finding just that precise moment. The problem may lie in their inability to define just which characteristics of the mind they are going to accept as constituting a fully modern human being. Since, after all, each creature’s environment will call forth needed skills from its mind, and if more advanced skills are not required, then that specific creature might have every conceivable human characteristic, but it still likely won’t display them all for far-distant future researchers to see. This is a fascinating question to contemplate, though, don’t you think?
With the recent availability of the reasonably funded and first-rate Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which pursues research science with no materialist restrictions on its research scientists at all, lots of sensible, if perhaps somewhat frivolous, questions like this one are now being asked, and such questions are giving our minds a playful place to experiment with seeking answers. Meanwhile, of course, the materialist scientific community continues to more and more hopelessly soldier on its stubbornly materialist way. Mainstream science has just discovered of late that there has been massive fraud among published scientific papers on such a gigantic scale that a recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes how fake scientific papers by the tens of thousands, and even whole fake scientific journals by the many dozens are being discovered, and they all must be discarded. This watching the materialist scientific boat springing so many leaks really boggles the mind!
I have been among the world’s most eager materialist-science groupies for the past forty years. Every month I would devour half a dozen popular-science magazines, Scientific American first of all but always several others besides, and for years they were full of smug and self-important articles about what the scientific community was just about to discover or to prove to be true about reality. It was all going to happen almost any minute now. For all of the nineties and into the aughts, materialist science’s strong emphasis was on origin and development of the universe and origin and development of life, and testing and proving various theories about when and how these things must have happened without the need to ever posit any form of a Creator or an Un-Caused Cause. Proving and refining Darwin’s theories, too. Everything must have originated and developed from nothing all the way to its lushly current form, entirely without any kind of intelligent intervention whatsoever.
But then, sometime around 2005 the realization began to dawn within the scientific community as a whole that things were not at all working out as everyone had been expecting that they would. As the Discovery Institute continues to prove to us ever more completely, the Intelligent Design explanation is turning out to be ever more clearly the only universally viable way to answer every question about the origin and development of anything. So now, the whole field of mainstream science is sadly drooping like a maiden who has been forced to take to her fainting-couch.
As a result, young scientists have no real clue about the fields in which they can acceptably do their research anymore without running afoul of their scientific gatekeepers. And those gatekeepers are, of course, the university science departments and those now deeply frustrated peer-reviewed science journals. So young scientists of the twenty-first century have apparently done a lot of faking it. Which is why so many of their – shall we say – “creative” scholarly papers must now be dumped. But this having been forced to resort to committing fraud should not be seen as altogether their fault. The materialist game was always hopelessly rigged against them.
As for me, I still read popular science magazines on occasion, which is easier since everything is now online. But somewhere around a decade ago, reading popular science magazines mostly stopped being fun, because mainstream scientists have given up even pretending that they are on the edge of discovering anything really big. The origin of the universe? The origin of matter? The origin of life? The source of consciousness inside the human brain? Materialist scientists know by now that all their quests are going to be dead-ended. Now it is just, here is a new kind of dinosaur that looks just like the old kinds of dinosaurs, but they imagine this one to have looked even frillier, and it is presumed to have been more colorful. Cloud-geoengineering is being done, and it affects where heat waves will show up; and apparently climate change will make fungi more dangerous. And this is now the very best that they can do for attention-grabbing science news headlines?
By way of contrast, here are some of the kinds of amusing and enjoyable articles that still were being published in popular-science magazines as recently as ten years ago. Physics takes a walk on the wild side in this one, because somehow we are all made of free particles! I loved this article, even though I cannot understand it because I am not a particle physicist. I never took even a high school science course, but just by reading so many popular science magazines, eventually I learned so much about science that I was independently able to discover the fact that consciousness underlies everything. Of course, this author doesn’t actually say that all that exists is consciousness, but you can pretty easily infer that fact when you read enough of these articles. And here, amazingly, some science writer got away with telling the truth about the fact that matter is energy, and it is almost entirely empty space. Again, it’s a flirt with the truth about consciousness. These authors and the publications for which they wrote were testing the rules ten years ago, to see how far the materialist scientific gatekeepers would let them go. But the draconian answer turned out to be, “Not even an inch!” So that was when many of those fraudulent peer-reviewed papers that are now being rooted out and tossed were written and published in desperation, just so young scientists could find jobs or get tenure.
But to be a materialist science gatekeeper today means that you are going to have to police even the civilian publications, where you sometimes can find articles or side notes now proclaiming that death is an illusion. Bully for MSN! No matter how the materialists try to knock it down, the truth is going to start popping up more and more nowadays, through every crack and crevice. Because it is in fact matter that is the complete illusion, a fact which is now easily provable, so the silly “fundamental dogma of materialism” around which more than a century ago those gatekeepers built modern mainstream science should long since have been discarded. But the scientific gatekeepers never found the moment when it felt easy enough to give it up, and by now they have gone too far down that pointless materialist track to nowhere.
Genuine science is supposed to be freewheeling and joyous! Was it Albert Einstein who said he never actually had worked a day in his life? No, it was Thomas Edison who said that. But Einstein likely would have said the same thing. If what you do for a living is fun, then it never is work! My science-groupie habit has mostly switched over to following the Discovery Institute. There the science lacks any dogmas at all, and it still is free and joyous.
Which is why much of my former enthusiasm for educating myself with popular science magazines is being channeled now into following what is going on at the Discovery Institute. They continue to demolish the theory of blind evolution, true, to make sure that Darwin’s Frankenstein monster remains truly flat-out dead. But also, they provide all sorts of information and general public education. I don’t necessarily always agree with them. I continue to seek just the objective truth! But Discovery is up-front about where its bias is: these are trained scientists who are practicing Christians, and they are not materialists. So these are truly honest scientists. Which can never be true of mainstream scientists, all of whom are lying in not publicly disclosing the fact that they will not study anything which they consider to be not material.
The Discovery Institute covers lots of fun things, too. For example, this spring there are two big batches of trillions of periodic cicadas emerging in the American Midwest at once, in a combination that hasn’t happened since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was the American President. And Discovery uses this concept of periodic cicadas, which emerge from the ground in batches like clockwork every thirteen years or every seventeen years, depending on their clan, as just another of very, very many examples of amusing things that simply could not have developed by natural selection and survival of the fittest because there is not a sufficient survival advantage to their having developed these particular traits. There is, however, as there is in so many things, from a giraffe’s neck to an elephant’s trunk to a kangaroo’s peculiar kangarooishness, to – I don’t know – the orchids in my office window and the angle at which the sunlight hits your lawn and each of a trillion other wondrous things in science a very significant fun advantage! And you have the sense that Discovery gets that. They do some of their best teaching of adults with simple and often adorable videos which you appreciate being able to enjoy during a quick break now and then before you head on back to work. But everything about the Discovery Institute is fun. Perhaps the worst thing about mainstream scientists and their clinging to their pointless materialist lie is the fact that even as they continue to hold back from the public the truth about their materialist bias, to the great disadvantage of humanity and for no good reason, they remain so joyless about it!
That is always true of closed-minded people who fight truth because they prefer their own lies. As the great polymath Nicola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” And in holding to their lie of materialism, mainstream scientists are very much like the white Dixiecrat bigots of the failed American South, who bitterly clung to racial segregation for a century after the Civil War. But the greatest American of the twentieth century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us how to respond to pointless evils as he fought the Dixiecrats’ greatest evil of them all. Dr. King said,
“We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we … resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door to fulfillment.…”
Dr. King’s words ring down to us through time, and now they lift our hearts! As he so well taught us, we must continue to live in free and uncompromising science, no matter what any others may do, until eventually materialist scientists drop their nonsensical bigotry against the truth and they follow Nicola Tesla’s lead and “study nonphysical phenomena”. We must continue to live in the truth! Because we know that free science of the sort being practiced at the Discovery Institute is on the side of truth. And as Jesus also taught us (JN 8:32), sooner or later, whether now or a hundred years from now, eventually the truth will win.
Some things that happen for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before!
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)
Dear Roberta,
You mention the “joyless” nature of the gatekeepers of Mainstream Science-is that possibly due to their insatiable addiction to power and control? It’s so weird to me that even if proof is put in front of them, they refuse to see it and bury it. There are various scientists with YouTube channels (some have come together to create a channel they all contribute to), that talk about information purposely hidden. There is so much interest in “ancient” stuff and what is was actually used for (like the great pyramid) and there is such a distrust growing of mainstream science, whether it’s medical or chemistry, or environmental…
I keep asking myself, “why?” Is it just their pride, that they don’t want to be “wrong?” I heard from someone today that behavior like this is in governments, religion, educational institutions and more to “control the people”.
Thanks for the tip on Discovery Institute.
The fact that so many scientists who are still promoting the materialist dogma in their approach to explaining science are noted to be “joyless” is probably because they know they are deliberately ignoring an entirely valid (non-materialist)
approach.
Even if they sincerely believe that a non-materialist viewpoint is probably balderdash, they don’t even get to have the fun of trying to prove it! They are stuck working in a system that effectively forbids them from exploring anything
unless it is done in a way that pays homage to the materialist
paradigm. Any sort of
“unconventional” questions,
theories, experimental methods
or techniques would be met with derision and ridicule and a loss of funding and academic standing. As it stands, there are some interesting approaches to origin of life research that are being done using a materialist paradigm. However, the level of speculation is about the same as it has always been, because it’s one thing to describe chemical pathways occurring in a series of reactions that actually MIGHT work in an uncontrolled, but somewhat protected environment on a primitive planet. However, it’s another thing to encase that process in a semi-permeable membrane that came from, where? And so on.
And we still don’t have a good explanation for the origin/evolution of various organelles like ribosomes, or the development of repair mechanisms for RNA and DNA. And so on.
In any case, leaving the origin of life to the whims of time and blind circumstance has always seemed dissatisfying. Not to mention mathematically improbable when all the complexity and variables are taken into account.
Thanks for discussing this endlessly fascinating topic.
Oh my dear beloved Mark, it’s even worse than that for them. The intelligent design scientists at The Discovery Institute have pretty well proven by now that there are many specific points on the road toward success in discovering how life developed which are impossible to explain unless materialism is abandoned. Effectively, at this point, materialism is dead and with multiple stakes through its heart!
Hello, my dear Fran! Well, perhaps in part. But primarily I think it’s due to the fact that materialism simply has failed as an approach to the study of the most important aspects of reality, and primarily the origin of life. It flat-out doesn’t work, and materialist scientists have not yet figured out a way to get around that fact. Especially since The Discovery Institute’s scientists have found methods which DO work, and a few of their stars – (cough) James Tour (cough) – have begun to hold contests, name names, and generally rub the materialist scientists’ noses in their own repeated and clearly now inevitable failures. (Not that, after that lost century of materialist arrogance, we can blame them….)
Faith debunks materalism in one breath!
Having faith frees you to let go of of the myth
of materialism.
Consciousness is the stream we can all
swim in!
However you get there, faith will answer every question. Faith will not abandon you!
In the morning, I wake up on a bed. I make coffee
Our souls need a body, a temple.
Souls vibrate loudly. In faith, we can hear them.
‘Be still and know that I am God.”
Jesus took a body, so as not to scare us! The truth
has a heart! We are no longer lost. Let Faith in,
and Reality will rush in. Faith rests in your
Soul. Listen to your soul:it wants to tell you everything!
Erica! That is beautiful! ❤️ thank you so much!
Oh my dear beautiful Fran, we are all so deeply resonating now to the spirit of peaceful mutual understanding. Science has tried so hard to push the truth away, but it seems that no one is listening anymore.
Oh so true, my dear lovely Erica!