I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day.
Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)

 

For people who are seeking the truth about reality, this is such an awkward time to be alive. There is a pitched battle going on now between two groups of scientists who each want reality to align with their own preconceived ideas, and to start out demanding a particular result when what you claim to seek is objective truth makes no sense whatsoever. So for more than a century, theoretical physicists in particular have been producing ever more fanciful and entirely untestable theories. Which means that for decades we have been watching what amounts to a war between materialists wielding paper weapons and religionists whose weapons are razor-sharp, but unfunded and therefore also headed nowhere. I root for the religionists. How can you not? Even though the Roman Christianity that motivates them has bogus dogmas at its core, their science is so beautiful. Wikipedia, of course, calls Intelligent Design “pseudoscientific.” But so is a lot of materialist science equally pseudoscientific, at least until it shows some success. Like take, for example, the materialists’ search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain. There can be nothing more pseudoscientific than that!

The religionist scientists are as poor as church mice. They have nothing on their side except some excellent science. They started out fighting for creationism and against Darwin’s theory of evolution; but they have broadened their mandate in recent years, so now they look more mainstream. And this is a David-and-Goliath situation, if ever there was one! Almost every working scientist on earth is a materialist, while all the religionist scientists seem to be based at The Discovery Institute, at the Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington. The religionist scientists’ primary publication is Evolution News & Science Today. I urge you to sign up to receive their emails, because reading about those religionist scientists’ work is such a treat! I also follow a couple of materialist scientific organizations, and I attend their online lectures when I can find the time. But the materialist scientists are so constrained by their gatekeepers that you always know beforehand pretty much what they are going to say.

And you and I have a pressing need to get past this foolish catfight between the materialists and the religionists and ever better understand what is true about reality. How else will we make sense of things, so we can better understand how it all fits together? For us, being science hobbyists is essential. Getting the science right is a huge part of making sense of the greater reality where we enjoy our eternal lives, since figuring out how all of that fits with this material universe is our most fundamental need. Until you can truly envision it all, you will find it hard to vanquish your fear of death. And to give you a tiny taste of how the religionist scientists can help, let’s look at some of the articles that they sent out for our delectation in just this past week:

  • Epigenetics. In the battle of ideas between Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), I always have thought that Lamarck’s insight that some traits are acquired during life and are passed on in the genes must be right. And it turns out that indeed Lamarck was right!
  • Inflationary Cosmology. Materialist science is forever stuck with the problem of explaining how the universe got started, if in fact there is no creative agent. And here is yet another materialist scientist tackling what we might call the need for an Uncaused Cause. And for the umpteenth time, yet one more materialistic scientist amusingly comes up short.
  • The Placebo Effect. Each individual human mind is so powerful that the simple ritual of taking a blank pill can have measurable effects on the human body. Think about that! Yet again, we observe what we can only call Mind over Matter.
  • The Science of Purpose. Materialism insists that evolution must be random, but religionist biologists are finding truly elegant and complex purpose in the course of evolution that further reinforces Lamarck’s great insight.

 Those four articles were in the religionist scientists’ Monday morning email. Then came their Wednesday afternoon email:

  • Twelve Boosts for Intelligent Design. A religionist scientist states all twelve boosts in a kind of quick insider code, and then provides a video, no less.
  • Why Epigenetics Contradicts Evolutionary Theory. These Wednesday articles tend to be more sophisticated, and they sometimes make direct comparisons to materialist science, as this one does. Again, with a video.
  • More Unnatural Naturalism, and More Confusion from Naturalists. This article is a meditation on engineering feats as they develop in nature, things like honeycombs and animal paths, although the meditation was originally inspired by questions about the origins of Covid. When scientists’ careers are not dependent on the approval of materialist gatekeepers, scientists can on occasion indulge in some quite elegant visionary thinking.

I love it! Anticipating watching those carefree scientific minds doing their carefree scientific work makes me smile to see another religionist scientists’ email arrive; and reading about what they are up to now provides a couple of high points every week. And then I read New Scientist or Scientific American, and I see how those materialist scientific writers have to parse words to get around their censors, and to no purpose whatsoever but to maintain an utterly spurious crusade against finding a figurehead sort of creature that has become a bogeyman god developed and nurtured entirely in the minds of the materialists gatekeepers in all those mainstream university science departments. And I wonder for the umpteenth time what the point of any of this might be. We live in the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake, and not in the Middle Ages! Can you literally believe that adult human beings, and never mind trained scientists, are still putting up with this level of garbage? 

Look, dearly beloved Materialist Scientists, materialism is a fully discredited theory. I think that by now everyone can see that. Consciousness is the base creative force, whether you call it God or Tomato Soup. You materialists don’t have to fight the religionists, since you can simply call the creative force “Not-God” and refuse to worship it, but instead you can just study it and move on. Simply allow for Epigenetics, Intelligent Design, Something-from-Nothing, and all the other by-now-obvious effects of whatever that base creative force might be, and add them to your generally accepted scientific protocols. Why not? There was a very much earlier day when your scientific predecessors had to accept the demonstrable scientific fact that the earth is round, even though it looks flat. Surely you must remember that? And there also was a day when scientists finally had to accept the certainty that the earth revolves around the sun, even though it looks as though the sun revolves around the earth. Don’t you remember that as well? And all of this is no different. Just learn to deal with a new set of facts, get rid of the gatekeepers, start doing objective science again, and move on!

And now look at that, dearly beloved Religionist Scientists. You have finally sort of won. You can start doing your free science in the sunlight, which is where all objective truths belong. Just soft-pedal the religious stuff, okay? Nobody wants to hear it. What people want to hear about is the wonderful scientific discoveries that are going to be possible, now that all that stupid bickering is past. And talk about consciousness, not God. Don’t gloat. Don’t insist that scientists who still feel squeamish at the notion of talking about a creative force must personify consciousness in any way. I think you will find that God doesn’t mind.

How else, really, does this standoff ever end? It has lasted now for more than a century, at incalculable cost in time and treasure. I have never seen anything more stupid. If you were to break the news in any newspaper anywhere on earth that otherwise rational adult scientists have been fighting like bratty children for the past century over whether or not there is a God, and they have been funding their war to the tune of billions of research dollars, no one would believe you. And yet, that is precisely what is still going on, to this day.   

The most tragic aspect of their battle is the fact that neither side is seeking anything like the objective truth. The religionists are more objectively right, since they are not hampered by the materialists’ limiting fundamental materialist dogma; but since even they are all professed Christians and working with a Christian agenda, we cannot really call either side free-minded. So basic scientific research continues to be severely stymied, especially in two crucial areas:

  •  The Nature and Role of Consciousness. For materialist scientists to insist that what Max Planck discovered to be a fundamental force is just a product of the human brain, and to spend a billion dollars trying to find its source inside the brain, is plain tragic. Once materialist scientists are free to study consciousness, they are going to find that understanding the leading, and indeed the all-encompassing role of consciousness will transform humankind’s understanding of reality altogether.
  • The Origin of Life. Materialist scientists have put a lot of effort into trying to understand where life comes from, and into attempting to create life in a laboratory, but so far without success. I am pretty sure that life is a fundamental property of consciousness, and if that turns out to be true then the search for the origin of life will be at a dead end until materialist scientism at last bites the dust.

Truth is truth. The mainstream scientific gatekeepers – the university science departments and the peer-reviewed journals – have not changed what is true by one iota by insisting upon materialism as the fundamental scientific dogma for all of this past, lost century. They risk nothing if they now give up the reins. And if they don’t do that, their loss is certain. Since the day will come, inevitably, when scientists who are neither materialists nor religionists – scientists who are no longer in bodies, and many of whose names you would recognize – will finally figure out how to solve what have been some almost insuperable problems with the process of establishing easy communication between the earth and the place where those that we used to think were dead now reside. And then you will be able to ring up dead Aunt Mildred and get her recipe for turkey dressing. And then, too, she will be able to ring up her great-grandson, who now is working as a physicist gatekeeper in some university science department. And she will give him a dressing-down that he will not soon forget.  

I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day.
Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)