Hello Matt,

Yes, I understand. I think virtually everyone today, because of the schooling system in our society and a rigid materialist base in our culture, is a materialist. Even the professed Christians are materialists. Christianity is an extremely malleable religion that allows the adherent to contour it into whatever shape the person wants it to be. It's possible to be a materialist, be intolerant, destroy nature, be violent, focus on amassing wealth to the detriment of other people, have relationships full of conflict, lie in the name of the church, and have a neatly closeted relationship to God that is spiritually empty. So we have materialist Christians.

As for belief in the greater reality, it isn't a matter of believing in an unseen or unverifiable realm. It's a matter of which unseen and unverifiable realm do you believe in? Here's what I mean.

Everyone now knows that the Earth revolves around the Sun, even though the Sun seems to rise in the East and set in the West. We know the moon has no moon glow; it's rock that just reflects the Sun's light. We know that gravity holds objects to the earth even though we can't see gravity. We know matter is made of unseen atoms, and energy and matter are interchangeable but they seem very different. Only a Neanderthal can believe in the "seen" world. What we perceive through the senses isn't reality. To understand reality, we have to know intellectually and affectively what's behind it, without being able to sense what we know.

But that reality is just one reality. The reality of the quantum physicist is different from the reality of the ordinary person. The quantum physicist's reality is that atoms are made up of subatomic particles that themselves are made up of smaller particles that themselves may be made up of strings. Reality may be strings vibrating in 10 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. The expansionary cosmologist knows that the universe is not static and unchanging as it appears, but is like a loaf of poppy seed bread, expanding in size by millions of miles per hour so the galaxies, like the poppy seeds, are moving away from each other. The neuroscientist knows that simple neurons can't account for thought and memory. Mind requires sub-neuronal elements, possibly the microtubules that are ubiquitous in cells, particularly neurons.

And so these scientists are seeing a different reality from the people who just know that matter is made up of atoms and the brain has neurons. They're two different realities.

And there's another reality at the subatomic level that's strikingly similar to the reality of the mystics. At the subatomic level, particles are entangled, meaning when they're together at first, they can be separated by large distances and what you do to one changes the other immediately, faster than the speed of light. Quantum physicists are suggesting that all matter is entangled and it's impossible to talk about particles as discrete entities. You have to talk about processes and webs. That sounds a whole lot like the way those who are studying consciousness talk about minds being joined over distances. In other words, science is now supporting the fact that nonlocal effects (meaning effects between two things separated so they can't communicate with each other) are necessary for quantum physics to work—they're scientific fact.

So what that all comes down to is that only Neanderthals can believe in what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and of course they're extinct. We all believe in an unseen reality that becomes our base for viewing the universe. We don't sense it—we have to deduce it or conclude it from what we learn that is not sensed.

Now, the unseen, unsensed reality of the materialists has no more support for it than the unseen, unsensed reality of those who are convinced the greater reality exists. In fact, now there is ample experimental data and reliable testimony showing that the greater reality and afterlife exist and no convincing evidence that they don't exist—except the positions of the materialists, who assert in true Neanderthal fashion, "If I can't see it with my own eyes, it doesn't exist." Just the small amount of evidence I have on my Web site is intended to show that there is at least one white crow, meaning that white crows do exist and the assertion that "All crows are black" is untrue. All of the evidence on my Web site is sound, and accepting even one of the facts shows that something exists that materialism can't account for.

In other words, just as it's not reasonable to assert that the Sun travels across the sky even though that's the way it appears, it's not reasonable to suppose that because we can't see that people's consciousnesses are joined and we can't see those in the afterlife, that they must not exist. That's Neanderthal thinking about the greater reality and afterlife. And we're not Neanderthals.

Craig