Category: Opinion

I find I have a malady of the mind. Call it regret or a desire for a do-over.

Here are the symptoms. I realize that my choices have limited my options and I think, I should have done such and such. If I knew then what I know now, I would have done such and such. Then I could have done such and such.

Sometimes there is regret, sometimes it is just a wish to do things differently. But the could of, would of, should of scenarios play on and on.

I know, as the Stoics would point out, the past is not under my control. And if it is not under my control, drop it. Let it go. These could of, would of, should of scenarios are a waste of time.

As I write this, I wonder if this is where belief in reincarnation gets some of its support. It would be nice to redo my life and correct my mistakes. I have made more than my share. Many of my mistakes have hurt other people. How can I not have regrets?

But the Stoics are right, of course. I can’t undo the past by running improvement scenarios in my head. I have to deal with the things I can control, like my current beliefs, actions, and attitudes. You can’t move forward, looking back.

Yes, we can learn lessons from the past. But this is different. You think of a past mistake and then draw out a lesson from it. For example, if you have two job offers, take the one that helps the most people. Don’t follow your passion, follow the path that produces the most good in the world.

So the next time could of, would of, should of scenarios play in your head, think to yourself, “The past is not under my control. I need to deal with what is not what could have been.”

Then learn from your mistakes and move on. Life is too short to live in the past. Life is happening now.

A popular meme says:

So if guns kill people, I guess pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk, and spoons make people fat.

Guns are designed to kill, pencils are not designed to misspell words, cars are not designed to drive drunk, and spoons are not designed to make people fat. But guns are designed to kill. That’s their purpose. These things are not equivalent.

When guns are used to kill people it is a crime. When a pencil is used to misspell a word it is a mistake. When cars are operated by drunk drivers it’s a crime. And when spoons are used to overeat it’s an unwise choice. Notice that only two of these things kill people, and therefore are crimes. But only one of these things is designed to do so

Just as you need to have a license to drive a car, you should need to have a license to own a gun. And for the same reason. Both can kill people if they are misused. And just as drunk drivers lose their license if they drive drunk, people who are mentally or criminally dangerous should lose their license to own a gun.

“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20).

First, lets defines two terms. The first term is materialism. Materialism is “the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications” (Oxford English Dictionary). This term has gone out of favor with many others because it also means “a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.” And this latter definition is what people usually think of when they hear the word materialism.

The second word is naturalism. Naturalism is “the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted” (Oxford English Dictionary). This has become the more common word for this belief system. Of course, they try to hide the fact that it is a belief system by adding the adjective scientific. The truth is that it is still a “philosophical belief.” Adjectives can’t change that.

I might mention another word, physicalism. Physicalism is similar to the previous two words. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical.” It really doesn’t matter much whether everything is matter, natural, or physical. They all deny the “supernatural or spiritual.”

Since naturalism holds that the natural world is all that exists, there is no God, angels, or a supernatural of any kind. How do they know this? They don’t. It is a presupposition, it is something they assume to be true before they look at the evidence. And when they look at the universe, they see what they expect to see. It is called confirmation bias.

The fatal flaw of naturalism is that it cannon explain consciousness. In truth, we can only be certain of one thing, and that is consciousness. René Descartes said, “cogito, ergo sum,” which is Latin for, “I think, therefore I am.” For even in doubting this, we prove there is a doubter. Denying this proves there is a denier. René Descartes realized that this is the one thing that cannot be doubted. Everything else is less than certain.

So the one reality we can be certain of is consciousness. But physical science has no place for consciousness. And no matter how hard they try, cognitive scientists have never come up with a good theory on how the brain produces consciousness. And there is no evidence that the mind emerges from the brain, only that they are correlated somehow.

Instead of matter producing the mind, I think that Mind produces matter. I think consciousness is fundamental. Of course, I identify this Mind with God. The universe has a beginning, therefore it had a Beginner. The universe has design, that is because it has a Designer. DNA is called the book of life, and its Author is God. But don’t take my word for it.

Scientists are beginning to question the naturalist assumption. After summarizing the implications of quantum theory, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, in their book Quantum Enigma, state, “Quantum theory thus denies the existence of a physically real world independent of its observation.” The urge to explain away consciousness will not go away. After all, they point out, “The encounter of physics with consciousness has troubled physicists since the inception of quantum theory more than eight decades ago.”

One deep insight is that cognition and consciousness are not the same things. Cognition is a computational system like a computer. A being is conscious only if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature. That is, in the words of Thomas Nagel, that there is “some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature’s mental or experiential point of view.”

In mindfulness meditation you realize that consciousness is not thinking, it is an awareness that goes much deeper. It is the only reality we can be sure of. I am conscious, therefore consciousness exists. Physical reality has no existence outside of consciousness. If you were not conscious, nothing would exist.

Naturalism, therefore, cannot be right. It eliminates the one thing we are most certain of. Therefore, something more than nature, matter, and the physical exists. It is mind, consciousness, or spirit.

But I don’t think dualism is the answer. Rather, I see the physical as the visible outside and the spiritual as the invisible inside of consciousness. One reality, with two poles. Think of the implicate order and explicate order of theoretical physicist David Bohm.

The fact is, there is no evidence that the physical universe is all there is. It is an assumption based on the lack of evidence to the contrary. But that is only because we are looking in the wrong place and for the wrong thing. Why think that the “other” would be anything like the physical?

Consciousness is the key to this whole thing. It is a hard problem because it is not physical. It is what we can call spiritual. And it is the underlying reality of all things. At least this is how I see it.

“Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Tim 6:20 KJV).

Carl Sagan once claimed that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” This is not a statement of fact but a statement of faith

First, he never tried to prove the statement. Which makes it a mere assertion. And just because a scientist says it doesn’t make it true. It is asserted without evidence, and it can be ignored without evidence.

Second, how did he know that “the Cosmos is all that is?” You would first have to know “all that is” before you could know that the Cosmos is it. The fact that physicists populated a multiverse means that many cosmos’.

Third, if Carl didn’t exist from the beginning of time, how could he know that the “Cosmos is all that… was.” This is very unscientific. He has no evidence to support it, no experiments to prove it, and no testimony to verify it. It is a mere assertion.

Fourth, unless he can predict the future, there is no way to be sure that the “Cosmos is all that… ever will be.” Again, this is pure guess work. Who knows what the future holds? Clearly this is “science falsely so called.”

The truth is that Carl Sagan bought into a belief system called materialism or naturalism. It is not science, it is philosophy. Technically, it is called a worldview. It is a set of beliefs that frame how you look at the world.

Naturalism is the belief that the natural world is all that exists. It is a statement of belief, not a statement of fact. As a belief, it is a claim that is accepted as true, which then becomes a rule of action.

It is important to make a clear distinction between a worldview and scientific theories. All scientific theories are individual hypotheses that are tested by experiments.

What experiment could you possibly run in order to prove that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be”? None. Because the statement is not a scientific hypothesis but a personal belief. It is a worldview, or more accurately, a doctoral tenant in a philosophy of life.