This, from The Guardian: We are offered five “unshakeable truths” in science that can be dismissed on the basis of “unexpected findings” (= evidence, as opposed to materialist propaganda):
1 Lifestyle can change genes We have come to think that if something is “in our genes”, it is our inevitable destiny. However, this is a gross oversimplification.
Yes. Let us pause to remember all the competent biologists who have been ridiculed and harassed by Darwin’s followers for insisting on following evidence in this matter. It was never an unshakable truth. Like everything else on this list it was a materialist “need to believe,” in this case because it propped up Darwinian evolution as the sole or main source of innovation in life forms. (Yes, Darwin’s followers really do believe that.)
2 | The mind can affect the body
It is hard to believe anyone could doubt this; surely, no one should be permitted to practise medicine who does. What we feel is happening to us is a part of what is happening to us. That is simply part of what it means to be a conscious being and requires no further explanation.
Research carried out on 4,000 people over a 12-year period showed that a man whose wife has just died had a 25% higher chance of dying in those 12 years. The bereaved reported heart and circulatory problems twice as often as people in the control group.
But of course. Many old men are kept alive by their old wives. E.g. (and this is so common where I live), he would not follow a prescribed diet or take his meds or attend his physician, except that she makes him do it.
Then she dies, and afterward he just sits there until professional caregivers intervene. But, however competent, they are not by nature as devoted as she. That old fellow is not their life, just their job. And in any event, some time may have elapsed before they become involved, so some irreversible damage may be done.
Again, anyone who cannot accept such facts as part of the normal course of events in human life is perhaps not best suited to medical research. So once again, I am mystified that “science” would find any of this surprising. Maybe this stuff is part of why we need to replace materialist “science” with actual science.
3 Quantum effects exist in biology …There are also hints that smell is a quantum sense. Our noses appear to work by sensing the natural vibration frequencies of the bonds between atoms in molecules. Those frequencies determine whether a smell receptor is switched on and sends a signal to the brain. The best explanation for experimental observations involves an electron using a phenomenon known as quantum uncertainty to tunnel through a seemingly impenetrable barrier. … We don’t know what other quantum feats nature performs, but the fact that these things happen in the warm, wet world of biological material suggests that we are missing a trick.
Indeed we are.
So far, our writer was mainly demonstrating where materialism conflicts with nature. Then it starts to get a bit silly. It must get silly at this point, by the way, because few science writers today are prepared to just lose the pom poms and start asking serious questions. So next we read:
4 The universe is a computer (and we are the programmers) According to Lloyd’s calculations, a kilogram of matter can perform around a million billion billion billion billion billion operations every second. That processing power is applied to about 10 thousand billion billion billion bits of information. Since time began, Lloyd has calculated, the universe has performed around 10 to the power of 122 operations on 10 to the power of 92 binary digits. What are those operations? We see them as chemistry and physics, as the processes of life and the mechanisms of thought.
And why should we believe this?
One of the sacred laws of physics is that information can’t be destroyed. That’s a problem when you consider the information contained in things that fall into black holes – unless it remains at the event horizon, which is the spherical “point of no return” surrounding a black hole. That means all the information about what’s inside the black hole is held at its edge. If that’s true for black holes, it’s probably true for the universe as a whole. And that means we are effectively the “holographic projection” of the information held on the spherical shell of the universe.
So a problem with black holes (which is under dispute) leads to all this empty speculation about what a kilogram of matter (a brick?) can do all on its own besides just sit there.
Best of all, of course is
5 Human beings are nothing special … We have been taught to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, but that pinnacle is getting rather crowded. In many cases, crows and chimps can use tools – and sometimes abstract reasoning – better than humans. If it’s culture that makes you feel superior, visit the Tanzanian Gombe chimps, Canadian killer whale communities or Australian dolphins: they all show distinct cultural practices in the way they relate with one another, hunt or sing. Animals show personality and morality – elephants can be empathetic or insensitive, rats can be lovers of fair play, spiders can be bold or spineless, chipmunks can be extrovert or shy. Cockroaches have feelings, too, it turns out.
So where are the books these life forms have written, the spacecraft they have built?
On the face of it, the deduction drawn from these claims is so idiotic that it prompts the thought that materialism actually disables the mind. Apparently, orders of magnitude disappear in the face of the idee fixe.
Even the hard facts are letting us down: at the moment, researchers know of only a handful of genes unique to humans; it’s thought that, when the count is finished and the numbers are totted up, fewer than 20 of our 20,000 genes will be exclusively human.
Well, either those genes are pretty significant or else genetics isn’t all its cracked up to be. Again, this isn’t an especially difficult idea to grasp, unless one of the pom poms got lodged in the cranium … perhaps a more significant risk than we have supposed.
To hear some “unshakeable truths” actually getting shook, see
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (origin of life)
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution)
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