It took me a while to sort out my belief system. Being heavily scientifically minded, when younger I always associated myself with Atheism because I equated materialism with science, and by default with Atheism. The world follows a series of set natural laws and rules, which can be known through science, and this ultimately will be able to explain how the universe works through material reductionism. The only limit to this is how far science can see given our technology of the time.
…so I believed. The problem with this world view was that the more I learned through science, the more my natural skepticism made me increasingly uneasy about this belief system, like I was having to run around trying to plug leaks for all these observations that just didn’t seem to be supported by that world view. In the end I had to let go of Atheism when I was faced with the question: do I want to be a scientist, or an Atheist?
Today, I would say that my belief system is Scientific Skeptic. It is actually an anti-belief system and has some common philosophies with eastern religions like Buddhism, although I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist. I don’t believe IN anything, except what can be demonstrated by observation. Beyond that, anything is POSSIBLE. It is inverse. I hike with a friend who thought it was ridiculous that I would tend to think that ESP is real since several times I have had thoughts of people pop into my head from nowhere and then instantly later the phone rings and it’s that person. In fact, it happened this afternoon. She says, “How can you believe that, you’re a scientist!”. It seems she doesn’t understand how science works and equates science with material reductionism… Science cannot disprove my observations.
In the interview Michael says that the scientific method works by scientists needing to PROVE something before it is accepted by science. I’ll cut him some slack because he was speaking off the cuff in an interview, but what he said isn’t correct. Science cannot PROVE anything. Science can only DISprove things. It is not possible to prove that a relationship that you previously observed will not be true tomorrow or somewhere else and represents eternal TRUTH. All science can do is disprove the hypothesis, and one then has to revert to the null hypothesis, which asserts that there is no relationship between those objects. Then the hypothesis has to be modified, reduced in scope, or rejected. This is how the scientific method works. One might think this limits science, but to the contrary it makes it very powerful, which I argue is why so many people are afraid of what the findings of science may implicate for their belief systems… this makes science powerful because it can also use evidence to estimate the LIKELIHOOD of a given hypothesis being disproven, and also be used to disprove alternative hypotheses.
It was asked in the interview what a belief is. My definition of a belief is that it is “a set of accepted rules and behaviors by which objects that we have created in our minds interact with each other.” It is dualistic. It uses nouns and verbs. “An atom does this”. “A population of lemmings interacts with the ecosystem in this way”. ”A car is a hunk of stuff you sit in which moves you down the road at speed”. “God created the universe”. “Genes randomly mutate to create genetic diversity” The point is that WE create the objects in our heads. There is a subject and a predicate.
Because science is about DISproving assertions or hypotheses, I like to use it to do just that – to disprove commonly held beliefs. Some people like my friends think you need to have a completely airtight and thorough alternative explanation to be able to disprove certain beliefs but you don’t. Even one observation will suffice, if it is so critical to the belief being held that the belief cannot continue given the disproving observation. “You only need one”.
Here are some of the commonly held beliefs that I have found through scientific scrutiny to be false and not supported by scientific evidence:
It is interesting that Michael mentioned Munich, since that also seems to have been a hoax. It was filmed by Richard Gutjahr who also filmed the Nice “attack” a couple weeks previous. It is not statistically possible for a “local reporter” to be standing by with his camera rolling immediately before two such terror attacks separated by hundreds of miles. This implies that it was staged. If it was staged then ISIS didn’t do it and it was a hoax. No way around that.
Recent machete attack in Germany: supposedly two people were killed by ISIS but the footage clearly shows that there was not a drop of blood on the machete lying on the ground with a chalk outline around it and the suspect lying on the ground in handcuffs only meters away. Not possible.
Nice, France truck attack: Close-up footage of the truck being towed away shows not a drop of blood on it, and it is white. Poor quality video footage of the carnage afterwards clearly shows mannequins were used. No footage is in existence showing anyone getting run over by a truck despite the thousands of onlookers that must have been present if 300 of them got run over, all wielding smart phones with video.
Orlando night club shooting: TV footage mistakenly broadcast which shows the “rescuers” putting the “wounded” back down on his own two feet, then stepping away and laughing, as soon as they thought they were off camera. No explanation for this.
Sandy Hook, etc etc, insert your terror attack [here]; most are fake. If they did one hoax it doesn’t take much to assume they have a whole hoax “program” going on. In fact, it would be unreasonable to assume that they ONLY did one hoax, if they could pull off one.
9/11 was done by al Qaeda. It was actually an inside job. Reams and reams of evidence supporting this, the most compelling to me is the free-fall collapse of Building 7.
Moon landings: I summarized here the evidence which disproves that Apollo 15 could have landed on the Moon, from NASA’s own mouth.
Natural selection of random mutation is the driving mechanism for evolution. This is what really pushed me into a different belief system. I set out to strengthen Atheism but in my quest for evidence I found none. Simply put, there is no evidence at the genetic level which shows that new desirable traits upon which natural selection can act can arise out of random genetic mutation. There are two problems: 1) it is not statistically possible, given the natural mutations that we see in populations, for new functional genes to be created out of this that can actually encode for a new protein and phenotypic trait – the whole “irreducible complexity” problem. Secondly, even if such mutation rates were possible, it would turn the rest of your genome into Swiss cheese by the time you got a beneficial mutation. I challenge anyone with knowledge of genetics to do a rudimentary statistical analysis and you will quickly see how utterly absurd the proposition is. It’s not that the evidence exists but isn’t very clear, or is inconsistent. It’s that THE EVIDENCE SIMPLY DOESN’T EXIST. The fundamental core of the entire Atheist belief system HAS NOT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT IT, unless something has come along in the last few years since I went searching, which I highly doubt.
When I point this out to Atheists they respond with the typical avoidance behaviors, and I then usually soon get banned form the forum. Atheists are just like everyone else… Does this mean evolution is wrong? No. Does it rule out natural selection as one of the driving forces for evolution? No. It merely shows that the emergence of new traits must be governed by additional as-yet unidentified “processes”. The theory of evolution needs to be modified, opened up to new ways of thinking. Unfortunately, scientists are the ones stifling discovery here because they think that an admission of this debunks the whole theory of evolution, which it doesn’t. It only implies that deterministic material reductionism as an over-arching philosophy for understanding how the universe works needs to be re-evaluated, which the vast majority of scientists are unwilling to do, especially biologists. They also have in instinctive gut reaction to anyone pointing these facts out as being on some religious agenda and shut off discussion. It’s really unfortunate.
What causes new traits to emerge in the genome then? I don’t know; many people would call it God, which is fine. I don’t believe in that because I don’t believe in the existence of duality. I believe in inspirational consciousness, which is what the scientific method guides in a reverse belief system. The inspiration for new hypotheses comes from our consciousness. No one knows how this works and I don’t think we ever will. These hypotheses are new proposals for understanding how the world works by piecing together all the previous scientific knowledge about how all the other objects we’ve created work, and then making that into something more than the sum of its parts – and a new hypothesis is born. I ask: why does the emergence of new consciousness (hypotheses) need to be limited to abstract thoughts in our brains? If it’s all “one” then there is no reason why inspirational changes cannot also occur at the genetic level as well, because these are small enough to not follow materialistic determinism and instead are impacted on the level of quantum mechanics, as scientific evidence shows our consciousness is. No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because it can’t be understood: it is not deterministic with cause and effect relationships between defined objects, which is how our dualistic logical brains create order out of the universe.
Here are some of the commonly held conspiracy theories which I have found to be false:
Chemtrails: no evidence whatsoever other than white lines in the sky, no whistleblower mechanics working on the planes, no technical or biological plausibility for how this is even remotely possible, let alone likely.
The assertion that global warming is not real. Won’t talk about it here, it is covered well in the interview.
Flat Earth. LOL.
