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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Data Taken as a Whole
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"There is a great body of evidence which, taken as a whole, absolutely and unqualifiedly proves the case for the afterlife... This evidence would be technically admissible in the Supreme Court of the United States, the House of Lords in England, the High Court of Australia, and in every civilized legal jurisdiction around the world." Victor Zammit, retired attorney of the Supreme Court of Australia
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Editor’s note: “Taken as a whole,” facts in aggregate, a total-field perception, becomes key to determining better views of reality.
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Dr. F.C.S. Schiller: "A mind unwilling to believe, or even undesirous to be instructed, our weightiest evidence must ever fail to impress. It will insist on taking the evidence in bits and rejecting item by item. The man who announces his intention of waiting until a single absolutely conclusive bit of evidence turns up, is really a man not open to conviction... For modern logic has made it plain that single facts can never be 'proved' except by their coherence in a system. But, as all the facts come singly, anyone who dismisses them one by one is destroying the conditions under which the conviction of new truth could ever arise in his mind."
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To insist on waiting for a knock-out blow of one conclusive item of data is to declare, with sophism, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. This is tantamount to announcing, from the outset, that the new proposition shall not be accepted, and detractors work hard to ensure rejection. Painting the target around the arrow, they begin with conclusion in mind.
There can never be absolutely conclusive “extraordinary evidence”. We always know but in part. All perceptions are fragmentary, all data might be gainsaid, no matter how auspicious. It is disingenuous to assert, "it's not extraordinary enough" - it will never be enough, especially for the willfully blinded. This is not science but cultish "scientism" (see below).
Instead, the honest seeker of truth, with disinterest, will survey the data, in its totality, gathered from independent sources, weighed proportionately, empirically corroborated variously, measured against competing theories, over a period of time.
In this manner of objective research, often slowly with false starts and mirages of success, a clearer and more accurate picture of the world as it is - not as fears or vested inclinations clamor - gradually, and finally, comes into view.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, making them see the light, but rather opponents eventually die and a new generation grows... rarely, does Saul become Paul.” Max Planck, father of quantum mechanics - Editor’s note: Planck’s dictum is often paraphrased as “science progresses one funeral at a time.”
What do you [Kepler] think of the foremost philosophers of this university? … they have refused to look at the planets or moon or my telescope ... the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo
The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire, the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity, are known only to those who have themselves experienced them. Einstein
New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, but from an inspired researcher, struggling [if need be, for years] in lonely thought on one single point. Max Planck
If anyone advances anything new which contradicts, perhaps threatens to overturn, the creed which we have for years repeated, and have handed down to others, all passions are raised against him, and every effort is made to crush him. People resist with all their might; they act as if they neither heard nor could comprehend; they speak of the new view with contempt, as if it were not worth the trouble of even so much as an investigation or a regard, and thus a new truth may wait a long time before it can make its way... I venture to assert that any fair-minded person who devotes to its careful and dispassionate investigation as many days, or even hours, as some of us have given years, will find it impossible to continue sitting in the seat of the scornful. Sir William Barrett, physics professor, “On The Threshold Of The Unseen”, concerning psychic phenomena
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cumulation of probabilities
Sir William Barrett, “On The Threshold of the Unseen”: “Those who remain in doubt as to the value of the evidence adduced in [a disputed matter] should remember that it is, and probably always will be, impossible to obtain such conclusive logical demonstration of survival after death as will satisfy every agnostic. But ‘formal logical sequence’ as Cardinal Newman said in his 'Grammar of Assent,’ ‘is not, in fact, the method by which we are enabled to become certain of what is concrete... . The real and necessary method... is the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review,’ and so the truth of the spirit hypothesis, and of spirit-identity, like the truth of all disputed matters, is to be judged in this way, -- that is, by the whole evidence taken together... Kant knew nothing of the telepathy or psychical research, but even his critical mind admitted that ‘in regard to ghost stories, while I doubt any one of them, still I have a certain faith in the whole of them taken together.’ — Dreams of a Spirit Seer, p. 88."
Editor’s note: The veridical nature of Barrett’s assertion here cannot be emphasized too much. Disingenuous opposition will ever seek to dismiss evidence, one proposition at a time, thereby creating an illusion of fair treatment. But, as Barrett and others have pointed out, it’s never possible to present piece-meal evidence “as will satisfy every agnostic”; especially when they declare from the outset that they cannot be satisfied. Instead, “the real and necessary method” by which truth shall be established “is the cumulation of probabilities,” arising both from independent sources and from the nature and circumstances of a particular case. For example, on the “evolution” page, Darwinism is altogether defeated by the mathematics -- with a demonstration that “the cumulation of probabilities” would require a duration of time far longer than the entire life of the cosmos, or several of them. This is a correct and potent method by which the truth of almost any question might be judged, “that is, by the whole evidence taken together.”
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Oxford professor of philosophy, Antony Flew, 'the most famous atheist in the world,' changed his mind
Antony Flew (1923-2010)
There are many articles featuring Flew’s new understanding. Here is one of them: https://www.bethinking.org/does-god-exist/a-change-of-mind-for-antony-flew
In the professor's own words:
“I now believe there is a God...I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.”
“Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.”
“If you had an equation detailing the probability of something emerging from a vacuum, you would still have to ask why that equation applies. Hawking had, in fact, noted the need for a creative factor to breathe fire into the equations.”
Breathing fire into the equations is an extremely important point. In other words, even if Darwinism were granted as much time as desired, even a span of years exceeding the duration of the universe by trillions of times, yet, in all that immensity, no life would be produced. It takes more than time to produce life; it takes some First Cause to have breathed fire into the equations.
Editor’s note: What finally convinced the professor? His reasoning is not complicated, in that, as he suggests, nature is far too complicated, an “unbelievable complexity of the arrangements,” to have arisen by randomness; of necessity, there must have been some sort of First Cause. This assessment is but alternate verbiage concerning what many other thinkers have asserted, the need to consider “the cumulation of probabilities,” that “single facts can never be 'proved' except by their coherence in a system,” or that truth will be determined by “the whole evidence taken together.”
Editor’s note: Top computer scientist, Frederico Faggin, inventor of the world’s first computer chip in 1971, also speaks out against dogmatic materialism. In recent interviews, he has repeatedly stated, to the effect: “We have Nobel laureates saying that the universe is meaningless, that nature itself is absurd. Is this logical? The universe and nature were the forerunners, producing us. This would make humans absurd. Or is the preaching Nobel laureate absurd? Modern materialistic science places high faith in chance and randomness as causal factors leading all that we see around us. And yet these same scientists also have great regard for the intricate beauty and complexity of mathematics, and they would be the first to remind us that mathematics reveals a hidden reality, that equations outline the ontology of the material world. Fair enough, but if mathematics draws the veil from the inner workings of physicality, which, they say, is intrinsically random and chaotic, how would this be possible when mathematics itself, the roadmap to physical reality, at its core, is highly structured, highly rule-based, the very essence of order and system? What are we to make of this farce, this self-blindness, an extremely selective viewing of the data, a disingenuous assessment of the nature of things?”
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