The Nature of Reality, The Universe, Prologue 1

In ninth grade I was bounced around a bit in English class. In the normal class I was soon bounced because I couldn’t understand why the teacher kept telling me to make shorted sentences. So she moved me to remedial English.

When I was put into remedial English, I asked the teacher why I was there, the teacher explained to me that I did not know how to write a proper sentence. “What do you mean?” I asked. The teacher replied, “You write run on sentences.”

I showed him my paper, and he selected the sentence. “How is that a run on sentence?” “It is too long,” he replied.

“But you told me a run-on sentence was one where two thoughts, two independent clauses were run together without a conjunction. There is only one independent clause there, it is just long. This is all one thought.” I scratched my head wondering if I missed something, buy hey, I was just a kid, what did I know?

The teacher said, “come with me” and we walked to the principal’s office. I thought I was doomed. I didn’t think I was disrespectful or belligerent, but there didn’t seem to be an appropriate transition between my previous statement and his response. Did I miss something?

We walked in and he said, “This student is in the wrong class, he needs to be moved up to a higher level.”

I felt greatly relieved! I wasn’t an idiot, nor doomed. I was moved into regular English. A week later the teacher came in with a form and handed it to me and said, we are changing your English class, you are in the wrong room.

“I’m doomed” I thought, “they found out that I escaped from the remedial English class. Was there something lower? This is really the second time in two weeks I am kicked out of regular English? I must not be even average.” But, having a low emotional quotient, I didn’t really care all that much it was merely another day at school.

Being more or less compliant with authority, and dragged my sorry tail to the next room only to find it was an advanced English class. What a relief! But the work seemed lighter than the other classes, which seemed so redundant and boring.

At the end of the year the teacher told me she was putting me into a special English class. Well, you know what “special” means. The other shoe was dropping. My dog was going to use my writing for, well, other things. . .

I’m doomed. . .

I walked in the next year to a room with one very old staid teacher in her late seventies, and three other students. “I’m doomed, surely these are the worst of the worst, and I am one of them…” And I sat there sulking for about five minutes until the old lady teacher introduced herself. I like old people, so I liked her right off.

It turns out that she was one of the most fascinating people I have ever met.

The four of us were on the outer fringe of the students, but at the top of the school, and Mrs. Squires was simply wonderful. The next year I went into Journalism and wrote for the paper. I really didn’t write much, but I did win awards for my writing.

It turns out, genius runs in my family.

Since a very young age I have been passionately interested in the way things work at all levels. How does it all fit together?

This has gotten me into what we affectionately call “Deep Kimchee” (Kimchee stinks, so this replaced the stuff dog leave on the lawn…). From time to time I was in deep Kimchee by simple things like combining words that made me sound smarter than others (no one likes that) to clearly defining word and pointing out people’s errors. Just trying to be helpful. . . No one liked that either.

If you are of Korean descent you understand the reference to Kimchee, which, like the Duran stinks but tastes so good.

Born with an I.Q. to be envied by most (top 1%), throughout school they had trouble understanding me, as explained above.

As a typical genius I have never followed any straight lines, however, herein I discuss dimensions, three of which are defined as straight lines. Go figure.

As I think of those last phrases, they reveal something high IQ people do, we think about thinking (metacognition), and, we mentally link things that are very divergent, very diverse. We tend to laugh when no one else gets the joke, or understand why something is funny to us. (If only two people in the room are laughing, pay attention to those two people.)

Suffice it to say that I am still correcting people and it drives most of them nuts, but I do understand that most people simply do not want to be all that correct and would rather just be wrong, but left alone.

So I write this series of articles on the Nature of Reality to correct the errors I have seen, first hand in the way people think about the universe in an impersonal manner.

These people include university faculty, where the errors were spotted first as a student, then as the parent of students, then as a faculty member of a very large university College of Sciences.

They also include very revered and learned religious leaders, who, despite their learning do not understand when they are mixing concepts, and combining worldviews of the church and modern naturalistic science.

Also, philosophers who chase down all too many rabbit trails trying to explain their particular idea and when they run into truth, simply pick themselves up, brush themselves off then go on as if nothing has happened at all.

Secondly, I write to correct the Greek philosophers, or, at least that Greek which leaked into Christianity, which is substantive. The early Greek philosophers, mostly Sophists who though they could by reason alone figure out everything, and many sprinkled us with the pungent flavor of naturalism which stench lingers today, though continually revised for 2600 years, it is now the failed philosophy of science which is ever isolating itself in its own cocoon trying to pretend better theories have not arisen when they have.

Other people who need to be corrected include nearly every one of the thousands of Christian I have every spoken to. Some simply because they had not thought it out, most because they simply didn’t know what they were talking about.

I will include all other religions into a lump category as being wrong because religions are man trying to reach gods, god, or God (see below to distinguish these categories), and that always fails. I probably will not deal with them much.

But here I intend to show you what the very nature of the universe is, how it is constructed and organized (not the physics), what the most basic things are that exist and explain rationally but simply how we can know these things, and point out some errors in thinking that nearly everyone else believes.

Of course I will not deal with every person, but the general ideas behind major belief systems, systems of thought both naturalistic science and super-naturalistic religion, specifically Christianity, and there I will stand with the Nicene Creed.

Is that title a little too gutsy? I mean, disagreeing with nearly everyone? As far as I can see the only one I am compelled to believe is God. Everyone else needs to be checked out, that is, once your apologetic is well developed, your hermeneutics in line, and theology straight.

Keep reading, I think I can prove my point, and yes, I do mean everyone from Newton to Einstein, from Christian Theology to Deepak Chopra and all the Hindu gurus, virtually all religions, everyone missed the boat. (Insert clip of the evil cat from Cats and Dogs, laughing out loud about taking over the world until the maid steps in and calls out “Mr. Tinkles!”)

Everyone likes to think they are one-up on other people, that they know something others don’t, that they can claim something to be true and perhaps show evidence that it is that is different from what others think. If this is you, then you are going to love this series and will soon be able to do just that.

If, on the other hand, you simply want to think more clearly about subjects, this series will clarify your thinking and show you why, that is give you good, rational answers for your thinking processes.

If you are a Christian struggling with your faith and wonder how some of the things you are being taught could possibly be true, then, again, for you I am going to show you what went wrong with the thinking of Christianity and how it went wrong and explain the truth behind your thinking by stripping away some faulty thinking that causes a kind of intellectual fog to drift through Christian churches and why that fog did not come from the Bible.

In fact I would encourage you to read the Bible, and, where your pastor or divinity school or theologian differs, ignore him or her or it on that point. Much of that will be in a later article, but some basics are found here.

For you science aficionados, Newton was closer than Einstein to the truth because he had a more fundamentally correct worldview, just not quite enough data.

Einstein has a worldview that produced ideas that started to fall apart in his lifetime and are now rapidly falling apart. Lorentz was right and Einstein should have listened to him, should have understudied Lorentz as opposed to Mach and that would have saves cosmologist nearly one hundred years of wasted time and billions of dollars of effort.

It may have even prevented the current string theory and confusion of Newtonian space as absolutes in domains with Einstein’s space-time which is not dimensions at all but a domain (where at least two.

You need to understand that your worldview is what determines the conclusions you draw from new information. It determines what you assume is true and false, and what exists and does not exist. If you assume God does not exist and I invoke him, then you immediately question whether I am operating from the right model.

If, on the other hand, you believe in God (95% of all people in all cultures believe in some kind of deity) and I state that I am an atheist (not), then you again, immediately question the validity of my thinking. That is a worldview filter in operation, but more on that later in the book.

Einstein’s worldview, or fundamental presuppositions (i.e. scientific bias) or normative postulates were a worldview called naturalism and naturalism is so bad it is self-defeating.

Naturalism is the presupposition that the only things that exist at all are things we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell, or in some other manner sense measure or test. We can see the effects of gravity but cannot see it directly, etc.

What do I mean when I say it is self-defeating?

Naturalism is a philosophic idea that claims the only things that are real are things we can discover, that is, sense by taste, touch, sight, smell, sound, or other perception, i.e. “nature” space-time and matter. I.e. everything to Einstein was physics and chemistry.

What went wrong with his marriage? Was there a chemical reaction that drove both he and his wife apart? How about Hitler? Was he just a random series of chemical reactions necessitated by nature (called chemical determinism) that resulted in the hate of everyone who was different from his race of people? Why are we repulsed by Hitler’s actions at all? Isn’t this just nature, that is, just naturalism acting on the physical and chemical universe? Why do we feel moral rage?

Naturalism itself was not discovered by any scientific methodology nor by man just looking for food, or even hunting for some discovery, it is a thought, theory, or presupposition and as such exists in minds, it is not space-time, and it is not matter (it does exist in time, that is there was a time when it did not exist and then the idea was developed by someone’s mind at some time in the past, but it does not take up space, so, see below, it is in a different ‘domain’). Naturalism is metaphysical thought, theory, or idea, it is not physical and Einstein’s naturalistic science left no room for metaphysics, no explanation for it. So, if his naturalism is true, that the only real things are things that can be discovered, then naturalism is false because it was not discovered, it isn’t physics or chemistry, his idea itself is outside the realm he described, ergo, it denies itself, if it is true, then the theory itself if false. If it is false, why would you believe it?

The only alternative is for the naturalist to claim it is the result of chemical determinism, that is unguided chemical processes that resulted in spontaneous generation of living things from non-living things, the random collision resulting in intelligence, and personality and acidemia and then random chemical reactions resulting in that thought. But if it is only that chemical interaction and therefore has no intentionality or purpose, why should we pay attention to it at all? It has no meaning and doesn’t help me to survive, so, what is its function?

Dewey et al taught there are no metaphysical realities. I wonder what they thought his theories were if not thoughts which are not physical things? The only answer is that the thoughts are not real, but then, why should I pay attention to them? Dewey certainly held them out to be real.

If there are no metaphysical realities such as truth, or even true and false, that these are only adjustments to thinking to pragmatically keep us alive, in other words we believe things are true because they help us to survive not because they are objective truth, and of course, this means that idea is also only useful because it helps us to survive, not objectively true, then why should I believe it? I can ignore it because it isn’t objectively true. Dewey’s pragmatism wasn’t very pragmatic.

Dostoyevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, “without God, all things are permissible.” He was right despite the permutations of people who try to explain why it isn’t so.

Scientism is similar, but claims that the only things you ought to believe are things proven by science. But scientism also is a philosophic idea, and therefore not testable by science and therefore has never been proven by science, and so, by its own standard ought not to be believed. But worse, before Newton were we to ignore gravity? That sentence is silly, but try to apply the principal to other things. Before the discovery of nutrients was it harmful to eat foods devoid of them, such as too much sugar, or was scurvy just something you caught like a bacterial infection until science discovered something in citrus (Vitamin C) prevented the disease? Of course not, the idea is absurd.

If you exclude from science the possibility that there is a possibility of supernatural events, but one occurs, you will not be able to correctly understand what happened, your philosophy excluded things that are possible. Man stripped of his humanity is Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot the evolutionary heroes because they accelerates and accentuated the supposed primary process of nature, survival of the fittest, a process that does not cause new structures to for, rather eliminates the weak. If you reduce man to an animal, why should he not be expected, or even encouraged to act like an animal?

What is the common theme with these evil people, and the Second Reich before Hitler’s Third Reich? The common theme was Social Darwinism. Man’s supposed struggle to become better, resulting in the Second Reich attacking “inferior” nations to purge them from humanity to help evolution improve mankind.

Your worldview is what informs your mind as to the filters to use in order to separate things that are likely to be true from things that are not. Einstein’s naturalism was wrong and produced false ideas about the universe. Scientism is wrong and produces false understandings of the universe and the very nature of reality. Most worldviews are wrong. The only worldview that can be completely correct is one that absolutely conforms to everything that is known and everything that can be rationally proved.

Worldviews can change, and this is an attempt to do just that, to convince you that your current model of the universe is tainted in several fundamental ways of thinking about the universe.

Mind you, I will deal here with science and with religion since the major topic is the Nature of Reality. I am likely to offend you, your mama, your science teacher, your pastor, and most other people you know.

Learn to adjust.